Deep Cuts

Music writing for the long play

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Chrysalis Records

  1. Hanging On a Heart Attack: Holly Knight's Device and the Album That Was Almost the One She Wanted

    In 1986, one of the most accomplished songwriters of the MTV era assembled a band as her own creative vehicle, recruited a Mormon ex-missionary as lead vocalist, made a record at Cherokee Studios with Mike Chapman producing, watched the lead single reach number 35 on the Hot 100, and lost the project before the second single had finished its commercial cycle. A look at Device's 22B3 — the album where Holly Knight tried to be the artist rather than the writer, and the structural reasons the attempt did not produce the second album she had assumed would follow.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 05 · · 22 min read

  2. Hit Me with Your Best Shot: Pat Benatar, Neil Giraldo, and the Twenty-Two-Year Hall of Fame Wait

    She was eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. She was inducted in 2022. The twenty-two-year delay was not, by her own subsequent account, an accident — she had been turning down individual induction since the institution first became willing to consider her, refusing to accept the honor unless her musical partner and husband of forty years was inducted alongside her. The standard rock-history vocabulary has consistently positioned her as a solo MTV pop-rock vocalist whose commercial peak ended around 1985 and whose subsequent career has been a slow nostalgia-circuit decline. The accurate version is more interesting, substantially better documented, and centers a creative partnership the broader rock-criticism vocabulary has spent four decades failing to recognize.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 05 · · 17 min read