It’s hard to listen to a song Johnta has penned and not say, “That’s my jam!” With his ability to capture the essence of love, the good, the bad, and the ugly, J. Austin’s lyrics are perfect for setting the mood. And so we do, marveling at the sights, over and over again. Why He’s Dope: If you pick a top-10 R&B song out of a hat, chances are Sean Garrett was involved in its creation. Features 25 Of The Best Singer-Songwriter Albums. "I write almost as if I'm in conversation with somebody." "I went, 'Oh my God, a lot of people are listening to me. Best Known For: “Rock wit U (Aww Baby),” “Breakup 2 Makeup” Parton tapped her hardscrabble Tennessee-hills upbringing on songs like "Coat of Many Colors" and "The Bargain Store," and throughout the Seventies, her songs broke new ground in describing romantic heartache and marital hardship. Through it all, her songs have been consistently stamped with her own sensibility and inflected with autobiographical detail. Keith has steadfastly claimed that manager Andrew Loog Oldham locked them in a kitchen until they emerged with "As Tears Go By," while Jagger says the pressure was merely verbal: "He did mentally lock us in a room, but he didn't literally lock us in." Elle Varner They proceeded to do just that: Whether composing together ("Desperado," "One of These Nights," "Tequila Sunrise," "Lyin' Eyes") or with other band members ("Hotel California," "Life in the Fast Lane," "New Kid in Town"), Henley and Frey knew that songs — and fastidiously produced recordings of them— would be the key to their success far more so than their harmonies or lack of flashy showmanship. Even more remarkably, the singer imagined the full arrangements for these songs as he wrote them, working from the basic rhythmic elements all the way up to the smallest ornamentations. . "Blessed with a profound imagination, he used the gift to express all the various lost causes of the human soul," Dylan wrote after Cash's death in 2003. Which is a rare, inexplicable talent to have," Randy Newman once said of Nilsson's easy way with complex melodies and counterpoint. Kurt Cobain was raised on Beatles LPs, which you can hear in songs like "About a Girl" and "Something in the Way." Their work was at once primal and complex, charged by conflict, desire and anger, and unafraid to be explicit about it musically or lyrically. Let's see if they can take it. Best Known Songs: Bruno Mars’ “Grenade,” Britney Spears’ “Circus,” Pitbull's “International Love” Tim and Missy started working in earnest as a writing team in 1996, when they collaborated on most of Aaliyah's One in a Million. "I call it optimistic pessimism. The Canadian singer worked with a diverse group of songwriters and producers including The-Dream, Tricky Stewart, Pop & Oak, Chuck Harmony, Claude Kelly, Polow Da Don and The Stereotypes. When it comes to artists themselves moonlighting as auteurs, there’ve been heated debates over what constitutes “songwriting.” Only those present in the studio know how much is really contributed. Clover Hope. He was one of rock's first inheritors, and certainly its greatest, because from the start he saw rock & roll as more than music. After working as a producer at Atlantic Records, he established his own labels Bang and Shout, where he collaborated closely with Van Morrison (most famously on the singer's biggest hit, "Brown Eyed Girl") and wrote "Piece of My Heart," which was covered by Big Brother and the Holding Company. "I let all my expressions and my love and my pain and my anger come out with my melodies. "He felt everything he wanted to feel, and he would use us to 'write it down,'" says Bootsy Collins, Brown's bassist in the early Seventies. Fogerty later admitted to envying the critical adulation received by Bob Dylan and the Band, but he tapped the tenor of his times as well as anyone, whether on the class conscious Vietnam protest anthem "Fortunate Son" or "Bad Moon Rising," which channeled America's sense of impending apocalyptic into two-and-a-half choogling minutes. Bono brings the grand vision and uncanny ear for heroic hooks, and the Edge brings his sonic mastery and an eagerness to push boundaries. .so fuck you"), "Gotta Get Up," and "I Guess the Lord Must Be In New York City" he applied pop color to the darkness of a shut in, and Three Dog Night turned "One" (". From Get Lifted to Once Again to Revolver, the G.O.O.D. "Often I would have a start, two or four lines," Leiber told writer Robert Palmer in 1978. Married songwriting partnerships are hardly rare, but few husband-and-wife teams explored the dynamics of monogamy with the depth and insight of Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson. "My theory of writing is to write a song that has a complete idea and tells a story in the time allotted for a record," he told Rolling Stone in 1968. We'd ping-pong 'til we had a song," McCartney said. From musicians who were big in the 90s (and are still releasing songs) right up to the present day with the likes of Beyoncé and Lady Gaga. "I can write something that, even someone who hates me the most will have to respect and love the song," he has said. But she's already written two or three careers' worth of keepers. The Bryants' breakthrough came when the Everlys seized on a composition that had been turned down more than 30 times, "Bye Bye Love," and hit Number Two. The two future Eagles were lucky to meet up in L.A. in the early Seventies, but in their hunger for success, they were even more fortunate to have formidable competition. ", More than six decades after he died at 29 years old in a car wreck on New Year's Day 1953, Hank Williams is still the most revered country artist of all time, and his impact on the history of rock & roll is just as complete. "I write songs about my feelings. "You write down a paragraph or two describing several different subjects creating a kind of story ingredients-list, I suppose, and then cut the sentences into four or five-word sections; mix 'em up and reconnect them," he once said, describing a process that sometimes involves literally pulling phrases out of a hat. Often working with Spooner Oldham, Penn was an integral part of the Southern soul sound that flowed out of Muscle Shoals and Memphis, and their songs about the hard price lovers pay for their desires became classics: "Dark End of the Street" for James Carr, "I'm Your Puppet" for James and Bobby Purify, "Cry Like a Baby" for the Box Tops (it was Penn who produced "The Letter" for Alex Chilton's first group). We hope you like it! A collegiate creative writing student who played covers in bar bands and briefly held a job writing pop song knockoffs in the Brill Building era, Reed drew inspiration both from literature (Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch) and his own life — for example, the fellow Warhol collaborators that informed quintessential Reed character studies like "Candy Says" and "Walk on the Wild Side." Like the theme music to a good movie, they underscore a unique decade in hip-hop.Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to take a trip down memory lane and explore the best rap songs of the 2000s. She always took more pride in her writing than in her perky singing, and much of the lyrical material in her 16 country chart-toppers was drawn from her difficult marriage to Oliver "Doolittle" Lynn, whose alcoholism and infidelities inspired domestic dramedies like "Don't Come Home a-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)." .I wanted to write rock & roll that you could listen to as you got older, that wouldn't lose anything, that would be timeless, in the subject matter and the literacy of the lyrics." "I wrote them about true things." Veering away from the pop success of "Creep," the group began deconstructing and abstracting songforms. Eddie's deceptively simple lyrics — written to Brian and Lamont's completed tracks — often focused on bittersweet, tormented love ("I got a lot of ideas from what I learned talking to women," he said). That's how I feel about songs. Timbaland "I looked at the songbooks and thought that anyone could do that," she told American Songwriter, "so I just started writing." .We take longer to get to the future than anywhere else in America. "Neil doesn't turn corners," Crazy Horse guitarist Frank "Poncho" Sampedro once said. "Walter would listen to what I had and come up with some kind of narrative structure. "Had it all in his head; harmony and everything. I love Fats Domino just as much as I like Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell. song always read "Berry, Mills, Buck, Stipe." "Being a songwriter is like being a nun," Rolling Stone reported him saying in 2014. His output slowed down considerably by the mid-1980s and he's released a scant two albums in the past three decades. Frank Ocean After becoming disillusioned with commercial pop following the success of his 1967 hit "Brown Eyed Girl," he went into a brief period of down-and-out seclusion, emerging the following year with his greatest statement, Astral Weeks, singing "poetry and mythical musings channeled from my imagination" over meditative backing that wove folk, jazz, blues and soul. In actuality, being in tune with his inner emotions gives Drake a keen ear for rhythm and blues. "Bert deserves to be elevated to his rightful place in the music industry," Paul McCartney recently said. "I'm no musician but I was able to relate to Isaac, we could communicate together. Why He’s Dope: R. Les is an accomplished Harvard scholar (perfect score on the SATs), producer/vocalist/songwriter who’s well versed in creating hits. The pompadour sporter has a niche for writing songs that never seem to get out of your head, including, “I want to be a billionaire, so freaking bad.”. He was communing with the music. "[I] sit down at the piano and play chords," he told American Songwriter. "People like McCartney have it, Schubert, Elton John has it. And it doesn't pretend to be. Leiber, who grew up in Baltimore, and Stoller, who was from Long Island, met in Los Angeles in 1950. But it quickly lead to more advanced work like "Madman Across the Water," "Levon" and "Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word," along with goofy fun tunes like "Bennie and the Jets" and "Crocodile Rock." Prince's talents as a multi-instrumentalist, producer, arranger, bandleader and live powerhouse are peerless. Terius "The Dream" Nash Why He’s Dope: Schaffer Smith knows how to write from multiple perspectives and with a range of emotions. . "He had this little dance he'd do. But as important to U2's sound as Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. may be, Bono and the Edge have been the primary songwriting team in the band from day one. Buddy Holly, the other great rock & roll singer-songwriter of the Fifties, embodied it. Their songs were hits for other artists, too: Richard Carpenter of the Carpenters, who went to Number One with "Close to You," called Bacharach "one of the most gifted composers who ever drew a breath. His creative ambition never flagged: his last major project, Lulu, reimagined a late-19th century play/early 20th-century opera with Metallica, and as always, he took no prisoners. But then the folk scene exploded into the mainstream in the early 60s. On early compositions like dance-floor-filling ska tune "Simmer Down" and the lilting pop gem "Stand Alone" he displayed mastery of sweet melodies and cleverly turned hooks that showed he could've easily done time on Berry Gordy's assembly line as well. Why He’s Dope: Seemingly coming out of thin air, Bruno Mars has been playing on the airwaves long before his rise to solo stardom, penning songs for Alexandra Burke, Brandy and Adam Lovine. And so he did. We'd work on music and lyrics together, inventing characters, adding musical and verbal jokes, polishing the arrangements and smoking Turkish cigarettes." ", The greatest rapper ever balanced gangsta realness and R&B playfulness, proving that a self-described "black and ugly" corner kid from Brooklyn could blow up to become a pop superstar through sheer brilliance and charisma. Songs like "Badlands" could make a rousing anthem out of existential crisis, and as he focused his sound and narrative, his music continued to gain power and the mass audience he knew it always deserved: Born in the U.S.A. delivered seven Top 10 singles — as many as Michael Jackson's Thriller. Why He’s Dope: Justin Timberlake's solo career popped due to his singing and songwriting talents that yielded hits like "SexyBack," "My Love" and "Cry Me A River,” but little did you know, he also wrote a few of N’Sync’s most loved hits, including “Girlfriend.” In 2008, JT won ASCAP songwriting awards for "My Love" and "Until the End of Time" featuring Beyoncé. "You're married to a mystery. Yorke and Greenwood have called their process "defacatory," and Yorke suggests his lyrics are as much stream of consciousness flow, gibberish and "just sounds" as anything confessional. At Sun Records and later at Columbia — in songs like "I Walk the Line," "Folsom Prison Blues," "Big River," "Five Feet High and Rising" and "I Still Miss Someone" — he married the language of country, blues and gospel to the emerging snap of rock & roll. While he's recognized today for his unique explorations themes of loneliness and individuality in the American landscape, his most popular song remains an abiding enigma. They wrote personal manifestos with political dimensions like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "Get Off My Cloud"; they brooded on the tumult of the Sixties with "Gimme Shelter" and "Jumpin' Jack Flash"; they detailed the connections between societal evil and the individual (and made it rock) with "Brown Sugar" and "Sympathy for the Devil." Best Known For: Alicia Keys’ “Unthinkable (I’m Ready),” Melanie Fiona’s “I Been That Girl,” Jamie Foxx’s “Fall For Your Type” "The nature of my music has to do with dealing with very fundamental things by depicting my own experience," he told Rolling Stone in 1976. Justin Timberlake Mariah Carey’s Emancipation Of Mimi helped her make one of the biggest comebacks in music history. "I think the things I write about are the things I can't fight for," he told Rolling Stone in 1970. Jackson's collaborators and co-writers marvel at the way his dance-floor classics sprang full-formed from their creator's head. Even their demo recordings were so fully realized that several charted under the name the Raindrops. Best Known Songs: “Ordinary People,” “Stay” Her lyrics describe what every female has felt, including cheating boyfriends and the loss of love. Ashanti "He ricochets around them." But large-scale success as a performer eluded him. On timeless songs like "Life on Mars" or "Changes" or "Heroes," his ability to combine accessibility and idiosyncrasy makes for music that marries art and pop and transfigures culture itself. But Kristofferson did more than succeed them. embodies the best of both worlds," says Rick Nowells, who co-wrote with Madonna on 1998's Ray of Light. 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