ANATOMY OF 55 MORE SONGS

Wall Street Journal arts writer Myers continues his explorations of the kind of popular music that turns from melody to earworm.

When he was 14, recounts Brian Wilson, a neighbor’s dog barked at his mom. When he asked why, she replied, “Brian, sometimes dogs pick up vibrations from people.” Fast-forward a decade, and that offhand comment became the Beach Boys classic “Good Vibrations.” Jimmy Webb, similarly brilliant, pushed the 5th Dimension to voice “Up, Up and Away” so that, in the words of vocalist Billy Davis, “the goal was to feel the song as we sang, so it sounded as if we were up in the sky at the mercy of the wind.” As he did in his previous volume, Anatomy of a Song, Myers does a fine job of getting behind the hits. Sometimes there’s only one person to reveal a story—Robbie Robertson, for instance, is the only member of The Band left to speak for how “The Weight” came into being. (The setting, Nazareth, was inspired by the inside label of his Martin D-28 guitar.) The author examines other songs from different viewpoints, as with the six interviewees for Donna Summer’s “On the Radio.” Altogether, Myers turns in a who-knew kind of book: Who knew that Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town” started off as an anti–Vietnam War song? Or that Chic, makers of the disco classic “Good Times,” thought of themselves as jazz musicians who, as Nile Rodgers tells Myers, “had set out to update Kool & the Gang”? The narrative contains plenty of joy, discontentment (Joan Jett recalls being weighed down by her best-known song: “The bad reputation thing was imposed on me”), and even newfound respect. For example, when fronting his own band, Keith Richards realized what a hard job Mick Jagger had: “being a front man is like nonstop, man.”

With snippets of business, creativity, techno-wizardry, and raw emotion, a pleasure for music fans.