
Taxi Driver
Travis Bickle escaped the picture and entered the language: Scorsese and De Niro made a lonely man's interior so exact that it stopped being about one man at all.

Travis Bickle escaped the picture and entered the language: Scorsese and De Niro made a lonely man's interior so exact that it stopped being about one man at all.

It took so long that Wonder and the band took to wearing T-shirts reading We're Almost Finished. Twenty-one songs, and no filler.

Seventeen and gliding across the floor, the rare disco record that sounds like joy and ache at once.

The two guitars at the end of the title track were worked out note for note in advance, and have to be played identically every night.

Tommy wanted a Bay City Rollers chant; the album around it cost $6,400 and took seven days.

Fourteen songs in twenty-nine minutes, recorded for about six thousand dollars. Nothing on it is longer than two and a half minutes.

Lydon picked anarchist because it rhymed with antichrist; EMI dropped the band six weeks later and punk was loose.

Written as satire in 1976 and now indistinguishable from television: Chayefsky imagined a network that would put a man's breakdown on air for ratings, and got everything right.

Every journalism film gets held up against this one: two reporters chase Watergate through phone calls and parking garages, and verifying a single fact becomes unbearably tense.

Mercury wrote it at the piano, then three voices were multitracked into something the size of a gospel choir.

Wonder cut it for his newborn daughter Aisha, harmonica and all, and refused to shorten it for a single.

Horns and drums lock into one riff and hold it for minutes before Fela sings a word, which is how he built nearly every track.
Five years in Scholz's basement, a hundred-dollar Yamaha twelve-string on the intro, and Delp stacking harmonies over the top.

An irregular heartbeat diagnosis sent Dharma writing about mortality and lasting love, and the cowbell did the rest.
Richman borrowed two chords from Sister Ray and turned Route 128 after midnight into the happiest song about driving.

Gorham and Robertson's twin leads on a track the band nearly left off Jailbreak; Kentucky radio saved it.

Jimmy Ellis over eleven minutes of Philadelphia rhythm, a flop in 1976 until Saturday Night Fever made it a hit.

In our family, Maclean writes, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. Two brothers and their minister father on the Big Blackfoot, and a love that cannot save anyone.