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Songwriting
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Joined: Sep 2010
Posts: 8,181
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Veteran
Joined: Sep 2010
Posts: 8,181 |
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?
-- David Cuny My virtual singer development blogVocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?BiaB 2025 | Windows 11 | Reaper | Way too many VSTis.
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Songwriting
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Joined: Oct 2009
Posts: 32
Enthusiast
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Enthusiast
Joined: Oct 2009
Posts: 32 |
Songwriting teams have created some of my very favorite songs: Rogers & Hart, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Kander & Ebb, Lerner & Loew, Bock & Harnick, Lennon & McCartney, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Jagger and Richards, Bernie Taupin and Elton John, Bacharach & David, Leiber & Stoller, Ashford & Simpson, Holland/Dozier/Holland, and hundreds more. Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim on "West Side Story" weren't too bad either.
Many of the biggest hits of today are written exactly this way. Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas, Taylor Swift and a lot of different collaborators (but usually only one on a song). Adele co-writes with a few trusted collaborators. Ed Sheeran and Lana del Rey are also pretty famous for collaborating with many artists. I don't see how Billie Eilish and her brother and Adele and her collaborators are any different from Lennon & McCartney, in terms of the technical process of songwriting. The difference is how people of different generations respond to the results.
Nowadays the majority of songs begin with a producer or producers. They create the original track, which doesn't have any lyrics. It's just a pop arrangement. Then you can bring in "topliners" who improvise over it. If the topliners don't deliver, they just bring in more topliners. The lyrics are just raw material and are edited into something that sounds like a song. Then they bring in a singer/star, who makes their contribution and possibly records it.
More common are songs written in rooms by many people at the same time. Usually at least three people--a producer with a DAW, a songwriter, and a singer/star. They work for a day and at the end of the day there's a song. There are also camps that songwriters are paid to go to and write with others. If there are three songwriters in a room with two producers, and then laterr it goes to the star, you can see how there can be a lot of credited songwriters.
This system is rooted in the Nashville Room. A lot of people gathered in a room to write a song. The result was credited to whoever was in the room, regardless of how big or small their contribution was.
I read an article about Amy Rose Allen, who co-wrote "Espresso" and other hits with Sabrina Carpenter. She also collaborated with Dua Lipa, Harry Styles, Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Halsey, Shawn Mendes, etc. And she said something like, "Okay I had this huge hit, but before that, I wrote hundreds of songs that didn't go anywhere."
This is the way the modern music business works. It's not just the US. A lot of K-pop and other world hits are written by Max Martin and other Swedes. But I am old enough to remember what the 60s was actually like, and we had song factories from the likes of Don Kershner. Yes, it was the time of the Beatles, but also The Archies and The Monkees. And The Wrecking Crew and the Motown house band played on most of the songs. And some of these "products" were amazing, just as a lot of the pop factory songs of today are equally amazing.
Personally I find Taylor Swift's "Cruel Summer" and the K-Pop Demon Hunters' "Golden" to be irresistible. Just like "Louie Louie" and "Wipe-Out," and the oeuvre of Paul Revere & the Raiders, when I played them in bands as a teenager.
But are these pop hits as meaningful to me as songs by Mitski, who writes all her songs? No, her work touches me in a deeper way. But I had to find her work and listen to it. But that's the way it was when I was a teenager too. Tim Buckley's albums never charted, but I loved them. The first Velvet Underground album went nowhere. There's a lot of good stuff out there if you are willing to look and take the time to seek it out. A ton more songs than I have time to listen to--because I have my own songs to write. : )
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You can see all the 2026 videos on our forum!
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