In 1986, Poison released their debut album, Look What the Cat Dragged In. With their big hooks and even bigger hair, they immediately carved out a place for themselves as the top party band in hair metal. Over the following decades, they cemented their position with albums that may have left serious metal fans shaking…
Tom Dowd may be the most important technician in the history of popular music. As a recording engineer, Dowd revolutionized the industry. He developed and devised techniques that have become the trade standard including the implementation of eight-track recording, popularizing the use of stereophonic sound, and establishing the design of linear channel faders. “Tom was…
In 1993, Clay Walker broke into the Top Ten of the country charts with his eponymous debut album. The album produced a slew of No. 1 singles, quickly establishing Walker as one of the brightest new talents in country music. Like any artist, his career has experienced ups and downs, but he remains one of…
There have been close to a score of American Idol winners. However, the most successful of them would be Carrie Underwood, who used her win to launch a career as an extremely successful country singer-songwriter. For proof, look no further than the fact that she has sold 70 million records around the world, which are…
Aretha Franklin began her career as a child, singing gospel at the same church in Detroit, Michigan, where her father was a minister. By the time she turned 18, she’d landed a record deal with Columbia. She wasn’t an overnight success, but after changing labels to Atlantic in 1966, her fortunes changed. The release of…
When it comes to icons of the music industry, few come close to Dionne Warwick. Since rising to fame as Burt Bacharach’s protégé in the early 1960s, she’s become one of the most charted (and beloved) female vocalists of all time, making it to the Billboard charts an astonishing 80 times between 1962 and 1998….
Even though he’s never enjoyed as much chart success as some of his contemporaries, very few artists can claim to have made quite so big an impression on the entertainment industry as Kris Kristofferson. His talents as a songwriter have led to his songs being covered by everyone from Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley to…
In 1951, Eunice Kathleen Waymon was rejected from the Curtis Institute of Music, an event that instantly put an end to her ambition of becoming the first female black concert pianist in the US. A lesser artist would have given up and taken up typing instead. But Waymon was cut from a different cloth to…
Lenny Kravitz is one of the most notable rock-and-roll superstars to emerge in recent decades. In this, he has been helped by his very distinctive music, which incorporates a wide range of influences that include but are not limited to blues, jazz, pop, R&B, and soul. Some people might remember Kravitz because of his four…