It doesn’t matter who sings a song first — only who sings it best. “For Once in My Life” passed through more hands than a church collection plate before it finally landed with Stevie Wonder, who reluctantly but winningly made the song his own, creating an instant pop standard that remains one of Motown Records’ […]
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A bubblegum pop recording masterclass
“It’s a Sunshine Day” was originally released on 1972’s The Kids from the Brady Bunch, the third album featuring TV’s favorite children-of-remarried-parents. However, the song was most famously featured on Episode 16, Season 4 of The Brady Bunch, an unforgettable episode appropriately titled “Amateur Nite.” This classic piece of television magic, originally aired in primetime […]
How ‘Santa Monica’ put Everclear on the national map
“He yearns after normalcy with an intensity that crackles and burns through his movies,” the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote of the filmmaker Nicholas Ray, and the same could be said of the songs of Art Alexakis, Everclear’s singer and guitarist. Alexakis has been through some shit, and his gnawing hunger for stability — the […]
The Undisputed Truth’s ‘Smiling Faces Sometimes’ tells it like it is
The Undisputed Truth’s psychedelic soul opus “Smiling Faces Sometimes” vividly captures the paranoia coursing through the American bloodstream at the dawn of the 1970s as the utopian ideals of the Aquarian Age crashed and burned. KSID::502E503la26405
The Manifesto: Why we believe in deeper listening experiences
KORD is the first streaming music service curated for humans, by humans. It was created for discerning listeners of all ages and backgrounds — everyone for whom music is life. KORD is the only subscription-based service to offer access to stems, the building blocks of original recordings from the original artists. All songs in the […]
Frequently Asked Questions
If you do not find the answer to your question here, please drop us a line at [email protected]. What is KORD? KORD is the first streaming music service to give you access to “stems.” This means you can mute, isolate, or combine various parts of a song while you listen. KORD features a curated catalog […]
How Huey Lewis and the News hooked America with ‘I Want a New Drug’
No rock act better encapsulates the zeitgeist of the Reagan Era than Huey Lewis and the News, whose slickly inoffensive bar-band anthems dominated the Billboard Top 40 from 1982 to 1987. And no song better encapsulates Huey Lewis and the News than “I Want a New Drug,” which embraces the “Just Say No” fervor of […]
Here’s the story… of a TV cult classic: ‘It’s a Sunshine Day’
Close your eyes, and you can picture them with startling clarity: six impossibly wholesome American teens (three boys and three girls, the latter with hair of gold like their mother, the youngest one in curls) dancing on the checkerboard stage of a televised talent showcase, lip-synching the corniest, campiest pop song imaginable — a song […]
The KORD Guide to James Jamerson
Bassist James Jamerson was the bedrock of Motown Records’ legendary studio band the Funk Brothers, between 1959 and 1973 playing on no fewer than 23 Billboard Hot 100 number one hits as well as 56 Billboard R&B chart-toppers. Famed for his inventive, deeply melodic rhythms, Jamerson was largely unsung during his brief lifetime, but he […]
The KORD Guide: Motown Masterpieces of 1971
Motown Records scaled new heights in 1971, the label’s final year in its physical and spiritual home of Detroit, Mich. prior to relocating to Los Angeles. The year kicked off with Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” — the title track of his then-forthcoming LP, arguably the most celebrated release in the Motown canon — and […]
