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From the KORD writers:

New to KORD? Read this first.


KORD is the first streaming music service curated for humans, by humans.

KORD offers unprecedented access to stems, the building blocks of songs, empowering users to deconstruct hit records and discover how they were built, track by track.

Simply tap to isolate or remove vocals or instruments to hear music in a whole new way — your way.

Go deeper into music than ever before. 

KORD takes you behind the music to reveal the stories of how songs were written and recorded, and why they still matter today. 

Each song in the KORD Catalog is handpicked by humans, not an algorithm, and our selections span across genres and generations.

All songs are fully-licensed and sourced from original multi-track master recordings. You’ll hear the music exactly as it was recorded in the studio.

Explore credits, liner notes and expert essays.

Images and videos combine with liner notes and detailed credits to shine a spotlight on the performers and their key collaborators, including producers, songwriters, arrangers and session players. KORD also features exclusive content and context from world-class journalists.


How do you interact with songs in KORD?

This is your musical experience, so listen any way you’d like! However, here are a few recommendations:

Follow the KORD Catalog in numerical order. We’re sequencing KORD’s release schedule for your enjoyment, and promise that each entry has something special to offer. Tap the Home button to access KORD Catalog playlists like the one below.

Uncover the stories behind the music. You’ll find information about each song at the top of its song page; be sure to click on the link for the complete text. You can also browse various features via the Discover page.

Check in daily. We’re dropping new songs and exclusive content regularly!

Enable KORD’s App Notifications. To receive alerts when we launch new songs, essays and more, click KORD’s gear icon for a link to your device settings.

Master a few simple skills. KORD is intuitive enough to dive right in, but to ensure you don’t miss the good stuff:

  • Scroll down on each song page to view essays, musicians, credits, images, videos and more.
  • Tap the “stems” at the bottom of the player to mute and combine the various instruments.
  • Tap and hold on a stem to “solo” it. This will automatically mute all other instruments. Tap and hold the instrument again to bring back the complete original mix.
  • Tap the “INFO” button in the player for an even deeper dive into each stem.

You’re ready!

Marvin Gaye’s 1973 masterwork “Let’s Get It On” is the ideal place to start your KORD journey. Enjoy!

Sticky

New to KORD? Read this first.


KORD is the first streaming music service curated for humans, by humans.

KORD offers unprecedented access to stems, the building blocks of songs, empowering users to deconstruct hit records and discover how they were built, track by track.

Simply tap to isolate or remove vocals or instruments to hear music in a whole new way — your way.

Go deeper into music than ever before. 

KORD takes you behind the music to reveal the stories of how songs were written and recorded, and why they still matter today. 

Each song in the KORD Catalog is handpicked by humans, not an algorithm, and our selections span across genres and generations.

All songs are fully-licensed and sourced from original multi-track master recordings. You’ll hear the music exactly as it was recorded in the studio.

Explore credits, liner notes and expert essays.

Images and videos combine with liner notes and detailed credits to shine a spotlight on the performers and their key collaborators, including producers, songwriters, arrangers and session players. KORD also features exclusive content and context from world-class journalists.


How do you interact with songs in KORD?

This is your musical experience, so listen any way you’d like! However, here are a few recommendations:

Follow the KORD Catalog in numerical order. We’re sequencing KORD’s release schedule for your enjoyment, and promise that each entry has something special to offer. Tap the Home button to access KORD Catalog playlists like the one below.

Uncover the stories behind the music. You’ll find information about each song at the top of its song page; be sure to click on the link for the complete text. You can also browse various features via the Discover page.

Check in daily. We’re dropping new songs and exclusive content regularly!

Enable KORD’s App Notifications. To receive alerts when we launch new songs, essays and more, click KORD’s gear icon for a link to your device settings.

Master a few simple skills. KORD is intuitive enough to dive right in, but to ensure you don’t miss the good stuff:

  • Scroll down on each song page to view essays, musicians, credits, images, videos and more.
  • Tap the “stems” at the bottom of the player to mute and combine the various instruments.
  • Tap and hold on a stem to “solo” it. This will automatically mute all other instruments. Tap and hold the instrument again to bring back the complete original mix.
  • Tap the “INFO” button in the player for an even deeper dive into each stem.

You’re ready!

Check out a demo song, Marvin Gaye’s 1973 masterwork “Let’s Get It On.” Enjoy!

LMFAO’s ‘Party Rock Anthem’ gets the last laugh


“Party Rock Anthem,” the worldwide smash from electronic duo LMFAO’s sophomore album Sorry for Party Rocking, doesn’t make grand statements about American politics. It doesn’t show concern for people sleeping on the streets. It doesn’t consider our warming climate, or worry about daily commutes or paying bills. It offers neither commentary on the pains and joys of romance, nor profound statements about sex or death.

But it will make you dance.

Read More

‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ signals the beginning of the end for the Supremes


“You Can’t Hurry Love” boasts all the essential ingredients of the Supremes’ greatest Motown hits — all of them except for Florence Ballard, that is. Ballard, the talented but troubled Supremes vocalist pushed out of the spotlight by Motown brass in favor of Diana Ross, was absent for the session that produced “You Can’t Hurry Love” and surreptitiously replaced by Marlene Barrow, a member of the Andantes, the label’s longtime in-house vocal group — a substitution that did absolutely nothing to dull the 1966 single’s impact or slow its ascent to the top of the pop charts.

Read More

‘ABC’ spells success for the Jackson 5


When the Supremes’ Diana Ross introduced the world to five singing siblings from Gary, Ind., she lit the fuse on what would become one of America’s defining and most enduring musical families. Since 1969, we’ve known the Jackson 5 for a series of impeccable Motown Records singles spearheaded by an inchoate, irrepressible Michael Jackson: there’s the grandiose introduction (“I Want You Back”), the wistful ballad (“Never Can Say Goodbye”), the uptempo burner (“The Love You Save”), and then there’s “ABC” — the crown jewel among the group’s number one hits. More than any of their songs, “ABC” captures everything that made the Jackson 5 such a unique force in pop: its pace is flawless, its energy is irresistible, and its narrative hinges on a creative twist that only an 11-year-old virtuoso frontman could have pulled off.

Read More

Vampire Weekend creates a ‘Holiday’ worth celebrating


The surface of Vampire Weekend’s “Holiday” is all sun, but darkness lurks underneath its ska-punk bounce. “It’s about a member of my family who gave up meat when we invaded Iraq,” lead singer Ezra Koenig explained to British music weekly NME in 2010. “They were horrified by what was happening, and they lost their taste for meat. It wasn’t even an overt protest, it was a physical reaction.” It’s a strange origin for a single that many (including advertisers) interpreted as a non-denominational song written specifically for the end-of-year holidays, but then again, most everything about Vampire Weekend seems conjured in Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory: college students in polo shirts fusing street music from globe-spanning locales with trends from across American pop history, their career was jolted to life by the internet, a then-emerging technological force the nascent Vampire Weekend leveraged in fresh, fascinating ways. 

Read More

Johnny Cash returns to the scene of the crime to revamp ‘Folsom Prison Blues’


Johnny Cash opened the newspaper on the morning of July 18, 1986 to read that after 28 years, 57 albums and 13 number one hits, his days with Columbia Records were over. The 54-year-old Cash — the iconic Man in Black, whose cavernous baritone, plainspoken narratives and signature boom-chicka-boom rhythm revolutionized American music — was one of Columbia’s biggest stars during the 1960s and early 1970s, even headlining his own network television show. But his career cratered during the 1980s, and he hadn’t charted a Top 10 single since “The Baron” back in 1981. Cash desperately needed to move on from Columbia to rejuvenate his creative and commercial momentum, per biographer Graeme Thomson: “He needed a jolt, a change of scene, a new perspective.” And he got them — but not until 1993, when he signed to producer Rick Rubin’s American Recordings and created some of the most acclaimed and impassioned music of his career. This is the story of the period between Cash’s embarrassing exit from Columbia and his rebirth at American, when he landed at Mercury Records to cut six erratic, little-noticed LPs culminating in a collection of re-recorded versions of his best-known hits, including the career-defining “Folsom Prison Blues.” 

Read More

J. Geils Band turns the page and tops the charts with ‘Centerfold’


“Where such men love, they have no desire, and where they desire, they cannot love,” the renowned psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote in 1925 to illuminate what he famously dubbed the Madonna-whore complex — i.e., the dichotomy between the women a man finds admirable and those he finds sexually desirable, and the schism at the heart of the J. Geils Band’s lone number one hit, 1981’s “Centerfold.”

Read More

Write for KORD

Think you have what it takest to write for KORD? We need talented, passionate writers to reveal the stories behind the songs.

Send samples / links to [email protected]