Remember when there used to be numerous solo hit songwriters like Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Carly Simon, Carole King, Stevie Wonder,
Billy Joel, Sting, Paul McCartney etc.?
This singer/songwriter trend was kicked off when singers found it more profitable to write their own songs than to share rights with songwriters.
This is just a similar market-driven trend.
And remember when there usually would be no more than 2 songwriters on a hit single which would be written by such teams as Leiber and Stoller, Goffin and King, Bacharach and David, Lennon and McCartney and Jagger and Richards?
The majority of these were teamed up as musician/lyricist teams, assigned by companies to sit in a room and write songs together.
So why is this a bad trend? Well, first of all there is the old proverb: Too many cooks spoil the broth. The songwriter who first has that creative moment of comin up with a melody or lyric has had an artistic vision, and when other collaboraters try to develop that vision they often degrade what the original songwriter felt
in the moment of the song's origin.
But this has never been about artistic vision, it's been about writing songs that will be popular with the public.
This is also a bad trend for us songwriters. I don't know about you folks, but i find it lowers the value of what a songwriting credit represents when people who have not written a single note of melody and not a single word of the lyric receive a songwriting credit.
You're not going to get much disagreement about that.
This is also a bad trend because when there are many songwriters, writing the songs on an album, instead of one or two, the album loses a sense of
artistic vision.
There are
some thematic albums, but they are few and far between.
For example, Burt Bacharach and Hal David would often write all the songs on a Dionne Warwick album. This gave Dionne's albums a unified vision.
If you compared the songs on a Dionne Warwick album, you'd be hard-pressed to find a "unified vision" there.
And Dionne Warwick was an exception. Barcharach and David hired her to record demos for them, and eventually hired her to sing their songs on albums that they released. Dionne Warwick was acting on behalf of them, not the other way around.
Somehow, that Barry Manilow song, I Write The Songs would just not mean as much to people if the title had been We Write The Songs.
Well, a couple of points.
First, the song was written by Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys, not Barry Manilow.
And second, the singer in "I Write The Songs" isn't some songwriter - it's literally
music personified:
I've been alive forever
And I wrote the very first song
I put the words and the melody together
I am music, and I write the songsSimilarly, would Killing Me Softly With His Song have meant as much to people if it had been titled Killing Me Softly With Their Song?
Well, the title of the song is "Killing Me Softly", and it's not about songwriting - it's about the experience of hearing your own experience in someone else's song.
Or would Elton and Bernie Taupin's Your Song had the same poignancy if instead of the lyrics being 'My gift is my song and this one's for you', it had instead been 'Our gift is our song and this one's for you'? The personal touch is no longer communicated when you go from the one to the many.
Writers don't write about the experience of
songwriting, they write
songs.
And song that sell are still one-on-one stories, even if fourteen people are credited on the song.
I just think that this trend of having a greater number of songwriters writing each song is just one more factor in the decline in The Gentle Arte of Songwriting
and Musicke that has occurred over the course of the last half century and it devalues the significance of what a songwriter actually does.
Just like when the focus moved from singers being the
interpreters of songs, and we moved to the singer/songwriter paradigm?
And it is also a bad trend when a singer like Adele, who has collaborated on most of the songs she has sung, is referrred to as a singer-songwrier.[quote]
By that logic, and song that McCartney and Lennon collaborated with would not be written by a "songwriter"?
[quote]I have a feeling that this sort of thing was not done as much in the 60s and 70s as a result of so many solo artists writing their own songs, and even bands
writing their own songs.
In the 60's and 70's, plenty of singers never wrote any of their own music, and no one gave it a second thought.
But it looks like this sleazy practice began to become pervasive again after the end of the 90s when the music industry took a huge nose dive. Over the course of only a decade or so the American music business was only raking in around 1/3 of what it had previously taken in a decade before.
You're ignoring a vast number of other factors, such as digital music, which had a
huge impact on the music business.
And the music business has
always been sleazy and unsavory.
As a result of this, musical artists who had been making millions of dollars in artist royalties a decade before were now not selling enough records for the record companies to make a profit, and so those artists who were only selling a million or so albums were not getting a single penny in artist royalties.
What is this "record" thing you speak of? That's not how the music business works anymore.
So, that is why singers were starting to blackmail songwriters into giving up half their royalties. The singers were motivated purely by financial greed.
Besides being an overly broad statement, it ignores that it was the
managers and record companies who were doing this, not the individual artists. I recall reading Barry Manilow complaining how tightly Clive Davis controlled what songs he could and couldn't put on his own albums. I suspect that other artists had little say-so on many aspects of their albums.
It is just as much the fault of the indiscriminating public which relentlessly buys poorly written songs as long as those songs have a good singer and a good beat.
Isn't this was selling to the public has
always been?
Dansk
Deutsch - Windows
Español
Français - Windows
Italiano - Windows
Nederlands
Polski
Português
Svenskt
русский
Japanese
Simplified Chinese
Traditional Chinese
Korean