That's how I feel about songs. A Number One pop and country hit for Jeannie C. Riley in 1968, it freed Hall to record his own work, which included songs about burying a man who owed him 40 dollars, mourning the death of the local hero who taught him how to drink and play guitar, and "Trip to Hyden," a journalistic tale of a drive to the scene of a mining disaster that was part Woody Guthrie, part Studs Turkel. It sounds like they were written a hundred years ago." A Winter's Tale. He's jumping over 15 buses! "I learned through Jackson's ceiling and my floor how to write songs," Glenn Frey recalled of a period when he lived in an apartment one floor above Browne, "elbow grease, time, thought, persistence.". But when they took a stab at disco with 1975's "Jive Talkin'," their career kicked into an even higher gear. The way he could mix the deep grooves of church music and blues with lighter pop melodies electrified his music, but there was nothing light about his greatest work, "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man." His songs weren't as political as Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway," Justin Timberlake wrote in Rolling Stone, "But if those guys were speaking to you, Al Green was speaking for you. Her "Rhiannon," "Sara" and "Gold Dust Woman" were full of post-hippie witchy imagery, but under the gossamer surface, they were deceptively tough-minded accounts of heartbreak and betrayal in the L.A. heyday of free love and hard drugs. "You know, you can chrome a turd, but it's not going to do any good. I go into something minute, then look at it, then go back into it. "I think the things I write about are the things I can't fight for," he told Rolling Stone in 1970. But with 1983's Swordfishtrombones and 1985's Rain Dogs he blossomed into what he called his "sur-rural" period, drawing on old blues, German cabaret and street-corner R&B to create songs populated by dice-throwing one-armed dwarves, men with missing fingers playing strange guitars and phantom truck-drivers named Big Joe. Not just little eight-bar loop ideas. The result was "A Change Is Gonna Come," a soaring encapsulation of the African-American struggle. Im in a very good place in my life to be releasing this record. But Gaye's greatest gift might've been at raising the bedroom come-on into an art form whether making a straightforward, playful proposition on 1973's "Let's Get It On" or admitting his desperate, almost metaphysical need on 1982's "Sexual Healing.". By chronicling every aspect of his life drug addiction, recovery, marriages and divorces, deaths of friends and family members he created the mold for confessional balladeers from Cat Stevens to Elliott Smith. "I get annoyed and I say, 'How do people not know? The quintessential New York singer-songwriter, he switches between styles effortlessly with as much attention to rhythm as melody, a rare quality among artists who came of age in the folk era. 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. "Without [Bernie] the journey would not have been possible," Elton said in 1994. and Celine Dion. How can anyone pick a list of songs out of all the amazing content available? Hynde's lyrics proved even more influential, articulating a complex female toughness that wasn't just a sexy pose, inspiring guitar-slinging women and self-directed pop stars like Madonna, who said, "It gave me courage, inspiration, to see a woman with that kind of confidence in a man's world. From his early, frisky Brill Building pop ("I'm a Believer") to the later-life love songs about his latest wife, few singers brood and contemplate life in song the way Diamond has. His signature song, "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant," is an epic seven-minute tale of suburban dreams biting the dust down at the Parkway Diner. Despite her innate sense of craft, the brash-sounding singer was actually a bit sheepish about her idiosyncratic song structures, admitting, "People talk about songwriting clinics and how to construct a song and I'm sitting there thinking, 'I didn't know that!'" Overdubbing his flawless voice, he was his own angelic choir on songs like "1941" and the Beatles medley "You Can't Do That," and he caught the ear of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, who bought a box of Nilsson records to send to friends. BRIT Certified UK record labels association the BPI administers and certifies the iconic BRIT Certified Platinum, Gold and Silver Awards Programme. ", Jerome Felder was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who'd been on crutches since he'd contracted polio at age six. But with songs like "Waterloo Sunset," "A Well Respected Man," "Sunny Afternoon," "Dedicated Follower of Fashion," and many more, Davies perfected a uniquely English songcraft, rooted in the sly wit and tunefulness of early music hall tradition but extended with fresh concerns (courting a trans woman in "Lola," for instance), a storyteller's exacting eye for realism, and a signature delight in upending British class hierarchies. In reference to his 1972 watershed "Get Up, Stand Up," he said, "I am doing something because I see the exploitation." They first hit it big in the Seventies with "Your Song," a tune that Taupin now calls "one of the most nave and childish lyrics in the entire repertoire of music." Goffin and King were pop's most prolific songwriting partnership and, even more impressively, they kept their winning streaks going even after their marriage split up. No matter what mood he was channeling, Williams wrote with an economy and concision few songwriters in any genre have touched. Starting in the early Seventies, Green, working with Hi Records producer Willie Mitchell and guitarist/co-writer Teenie Hodges, created a rich catalog of songs that mixed sacred and profane like no other soul singer of any era. And in "Running on Empty," "Boulevard" and others, he also knew, far more than most of his peers, the value in rocking out. "A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true," Dylan wrote. "If you listen to my songs, they tell stories," Missy Elliott has said. "You write a song about something that you think might be taboo, you sing it for other people and they immediately recognize themselves in it," Prine says. He spends his days working his dead-end job and figuring out his complex feelings for his girlfriend until, one day, he sees a one-eared man who could be his father and decides Yet there's a reason Frank Ocean, Vampire Weekend, Gillian Welch, Mark Ronson, Regina Spektor, Gnarls Barkley, the Punch Brothers and others cover their compositions: because the best from the acoustic ballad "Fake Plastic Trees" to the digital kaleidoscope of "Everything in Its Right Place" are indelible. Musically, his stylistic breadth seems limitless: He learned early on to lace a heavy funky jam with an unforgettable pop hook, then mastered every form of rock song from three-chord bangers ("Let's Go Crazy") to straight-up power ballads ("Purple Rain") before introducing melodic and harmonic complexities that pushed his increasingly jazzy and experimental compositions beyond ordinary pop constraints. 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. I write these little songs and go and sing them. "I try to make the songs as good as I can the way I like it, you know?" Working with pop-savvy producer Sean "Puffy" Combs, Biggie raised his game throughout his brief career from the social realism of "Things Done Changed" to the euphoric rags-to-riches celebration "Juicy" to effortlessly virtuosic performances like "Hypnotize" and "Ten Crack Commandments," both from his 1997 swan song Life After Death. As leader of the Impressions, Mayfield's low-key demeanor matched his lithe tenor and restrained, spacious guitar playing that influenced fellow chitlin' circuit veteran Jimi Hendrix' "Little Wing." His best work was charged with literary irony but unfolded with the ease of spoken language, as when the mini-skirted heroine of "Harper Valley P.T.A." "We see ourselves first and foremost as composers, writing for ourselves and other people," Robin Gibb said. "I would come up with a basic musical structure, perhaps a hook line and occasionally a story idea," Fagen once said, recalling their process. He had one foot off the ground and he'd be writing in his notebooks. The Hitman. "I let all my expressions and my love and my pain and my anger come out with my melodies. . British Independent Film Awards", "Stylus Magazine's Top 10 Zombie Films of All Time", "00's Retrospect: Bloody Disgusting's Top 20 Films of the DecadePart 4", "Tarantino Reveals His Top 20 Movies (Since Reservoir Dogs)", Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave, Night of the Living Dead 3D: Re-Animation, Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shaun_of_the_Dead&oldid=1022407802, Short description is different from Wikidata, Pages using multiple image with auto scaled images, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 10 May 2021, at 10:20. Heaven For Everyone. Westerberg has his own explanation for his unique underdog genius: "I think the opposite when I see something," he once said. Besides writing about the psychology of polymorphous sexuality and drug users, he penned some of the most beautiful love songs in history ("Pale Blue Eyes," "I'll Be Your Mirror"). "I really didn't think my songs were any different than what Willie [Nelson\ was writing.". From the disco-fizzy 1993 Debut to the bleakly magnificent 2015 Vulnicura, it hasn't failed her yet. His songs ranged from Friday night party starters like "Hey Good Lookin'" and "Settin' the Woods on Fire" to tales of romantic desolation like "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" to the redemptive anthem "I Saw the Light" to heart-wrenching depictions of dread and isolation like "Lost Highway" and "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive," the last single released during his lifetime. "Once I start to create a song, even if commerce is the motivation, I'm still going to try to write the best song and move people in a way that touches them," King has said. "It comes out of a sort of mood of melancholy, somehow," Taylor once told Rolling Stone of his songwriting process. "It was for me a prophetic utterance. . In 'This House Is Empty Now' [on Painted From Memory], I meant this house [points to his head]. Got more into writing," he said. . A Brooklynite who was equally entranced by R&B and country (claiming his favorite singer was C&W mainstay Tex Ritter), Otis Blackwell began his career with 1953's "Daddy Rollin' Stone," which has been covered repeatedly. "Politics or social commentary don't inspire me. They married and started composing songs in the Brill Building in 1962, and split up in 1965. Whether it's a fleet, planning guitar tune like "Sitting Still" or a luminous ballad like "Nightswimming" or a loopy left-field pop smash like "Stand" the songwriting credit on a golden-era R.E.M. "I'm no musician but I was able to relate to Isaac, we could communicate together. Few songwriters use repetition as skillfully as Williams: on 1988's "I Just Wanted to See You So Bad," she ramped up the song's sexual obsession by restating the title after every other line, and the title track from her 1998 masterpiece Car Wheels on a Gravel Road captures the peculiar rhythms of childhood memory by restating the song's title at the end of each stanza. Robinson's songwriting grounded the Band, influencing generations of back-to-the-land rockers. Though they rarely left the studio during the Seventies, they tour a surprising amount today, playing sets dedicated to their classic albums. "I write almost as if I'm in conversation with somebody." When Walter Becker and Donald Fagen met as students at Bard College during the late Sixties, they hit it off over a shared love of jazz, Dylan and the sardonic, post-modern humor of writers like Kurt Vonnegut and John Barth. I love Fats Domino just as much as I like Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell. . It's not a particularly generous mystery, but other people have that experience with matrimony anyway." "I knew they were pointing the direction where music had to go." It has been cited by animation director Steve Loter (of Kim Possible, Clerks: Joss Whedon discusses the scene where the good guys come through the opaque and sensor-killing "ion cloud" followed by an army of Reavers to back them up against the Alliance. 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. And I could write a song about it. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. "Bert deserves to be elevated to his rightful place in the music industry," Paul McCartney recently said. "And then a melody starts to happen, and then the lyrics start to happen, and then you've got a song. Listening to songs that sing of those Truths allows us to experience Gods presence in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. ", After scoring R&B hits like "Please Please Please" and recording the greatest live album ever, 1963's Live at the Apollo, James Brown changed the pop songwriting game forever during the Sixties and early Seventies by flipping the script on songform itself, foregrounding his music in tight, tempestuous rhythm to invent what would eventually be known as funk. West has given us the weapons-grade industrial punk of "New Slaves," the forlorn vocoder balladry of 2008's 808s & Heartbreak (which paved the way for the confessional hip-hop of J. Cole and Drake) and, this year, the haunting Paul McCartney collaboration "Only You." And it doesn't pretend to be. Kanye isn't afraid to outsource (Chicago rapper Rhymefest co-wrote the lyrics to his first game-changing hit, "Jesus Walks," and the credits to his albums can often read like veritable productions workshops). He's had 30 Top 40 singles in his career, including five Number Ones. But her most famous song is still "Landslide," her acoustic lament for children growing older, written before she'd even turned 30. I can't get rid of them. At 80, he's still our greatest living late-night poet. His ballads fly higher than anyone else's, his sex jams started evocatively naughty (1993's "Bump N' Grind") and ended up evocatively surreal (2005's "Sex in the Kitchen" and, of course, the 30-part "Trapped in the Closet"). After the Beatles split, he let his creative impulses run free on the 1970 triple-album solo debut, All Things Must Pass, and enjoyed a strong Eighties comeback with the pop success of 1987's Cloud Nine as well his stint with the Traveling Wilburys. '", Many bluesmen talked of sin and redemption. If you have a good imagination, you can go quite far. But they would never have gone anywhere if Pete Townshend hadn't developed into an endlessly innovative songwriter. I can't. "Even as a kid, I always wanted the most words to rhyme," Eminem told Rolling Stone. But that multiplatinum triumph was just the tip of the iceberg: Australian brothers Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb were massively successful songwriters for decades. All three began their careers as singers, but when they started working together behind the scenes, they made magic. ", It isn't a stretch to call Joe Strummer and Mick Jones the Lennon and McCartney of the U.K. punk explosion. "I think it's essential," Jagger once told Rolling Stone of the idea of partnership. "I'm in awe of McCartney," Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone in 2007. But large-scale success as a performer eluded him. "The melody comes second, and then the words.". With King handling melodies and Goffin the lyrics, the two former Queens College schoolmates worked a block away from the Brill Building and wrote many of professional songwriting's most evocative songs: tracks like "Up on the Roof," "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," and "One Fine Day" that were tender snapshots of the adolescent experience. He didn't start writing songs in earnest until he'd recorded a few albums, and his songwriting gifts have been overshadowed by his vocal mastery. "I wanted to write the great American novel, but I also loved rock & roll," Reed told an interviewer in 1987. "I can write something that, even someone who hates me the most will have to respect and love the song," he has said. "I couldn't write the 'Darling, you left alone and blue' or 'I'm drunk in this bar and crying' [songs] I just didn't get it," he once said. But he also penned darkly introspective masterpieces like "In My Room" and "God Only Knows," as well as groundbreaking symphonic masterpieces like 1966's Pet Sounds, which transformed the idea of rock album-making itself and inspired the Beatles' own masterpiece Sgt. (Sometimes Hayes played keyboards on songs they'd written together, or Porter sang backup.) "He had a gift for melody. Whether he's operating on a large scale summing up our shared national commitments in 1973's "American Tune," or writing a finely wrought personal reflection on lost love like 1986's "Graceland," the same wit and literary detail come through. "He would sing us an entire string arrangement, every part," engineer Rob Hoffman recalls. "When Paul and I first got together, we wanted to be the British Goffin and King," John Lennon once said. Forget it. Bono brings the grand vision and uncanny ear for heroic hooks, and the Edge brings his sonic mastery and an eagerness to push boundaries. Unafraid of risk, Springsteen followed it with a long period of redefinition, making his sound and his stories ever more intimate on 1987's Tunnel of Love and later 1996's The Ghost of Tom Joad. Paul Westerberg wasn't precious about his craft ("I hate music/It's got too many notes," he sang on the first Replacements album in 1981). For them, there's nothing crass, and everything earnest, about the art of the pop song. Elton John has called them "a huge influence on me as a songwriter"; Bono has said their catalog makes him "ill with envy." "I don't think anyone's got his wit or insight or originality or obsession or overall dedication." ", The most influential folk singer in American history once described his creative process thusly: "When I'm writing a song and I get the words, I look around for some tune that has proved its popularity with the people." Listen to him, and he always brings you to your senses. He began writing as a childhood hobby authoring, as he later recalled, "100,000 songs before I had as record deal." Berry was a Muddy Waters fan who quickly learned the power of his own boundary-crossing "songs of novelties and feelings of fun and frolic" when he transformed a country song, "Ida Red," into his first single, "Maybellene," a Top Five pop hit. "It's not effortless," he told Rolling Stone in 2004. "He's the backbone of postwar blues writing," Keith Richards has said, "the absolute.". But it's his ability to nail emotion that makes simple love songs like "Days" incandescent, and elevates a lonely meditation like "Waterloo Sunset" into what some consider the most beautiful song in the English language. Singer/pianist Antoine "Fats" Domino and producer/bandleader Dave Bartholomew started working together in 1949. He was already writing his own songs as a childhood prodigy at Motown during the Sixties (including the 1966 smash "Uptight (It's Alright).". Though Bob Dylan's famous quote calling Smokey "the greatest living poet" might actually be apocryphal, everyone believed it for decades because the songs backed it up perfectly. "It can sometimes be stupidly literal." I Was Born To Love You. In 1966 alone, Holland-Dozier-Holland wrote and produced 13 Top 10 R&B singles, from the Supremes' "You Keep Me Hangin' On" to the Four Tops' "I'll Be There." "I don't think it's a very good song," he said of "MacArthur Park," the much-covered 1968 hit he penned for singer Richard Harris. Mitchell's run of albums from 1970's Ladies of the Canyon to 1974's Court and Spark, on which she perfected a jazz-bent studio pop, rival any streak of record-making in pop history, and her lyrical depictions of the ecstasy and heartbreak that came with being a strong woman availing herself of the sexual independence of the Sixties and Seventies offer a unique emotional travelogue of the era. "There's nothing that isn't pretty fundamental." "It has to be something that really means something, not just a bunch of words on music.". Let Me Live. Hynde had one of the best runs of the New Wave era: winning over a wide pop audience with sharp tunes like "Brass in Pocket (I'm Special)," "Middle of the Road," and "Back on the Chain Gang" as well as the buoyant "Don't Get Me Wrong" and ballads like "2000 Miles." The Show Must Go On. "If a song can't be written in 20 minutes, it ain't worth writing," he once said, summing up the no-frills eloquence that makes his songs so fun to sing and easy to cover. Yet, despite the heights his music scaled, Wilson's songwriting methodology was deceptively simple. Recent highpoints like the Kanye West collaboration "Otis" and 2013's "Picasso Baby" show that no number of lunches with Warren Buffet or late-night diaper-duty emergency calls can slow down his de Vinci flow and Sinatra roll. If Paul Simon's career had ended with the breakup of Simon & Garfunkel in 1970, he would still have produced some of the most beloved songs ever including "The Sound of Silence," "Mrs. Robinson," "Bridge Over Troubled Water." ("It's like you're getting beamed it," Yorke has said, "like with a ouija board"). That was followed by Missy's 1997 breakthrough Supa Dupa Fly a set of cool, witty, deceptively minimal tracks that flipped between hip-hop, R&B and electronica with finger-snapping ease and a string of genre-melting records like "Get Ur Freak On" and "Work It" that lasted until the early 2000s. Harrison described songwriting as a means to "get rid of some subconscious burden," comparing the process to "going to confession." "When you think about it, when you're writing a song, you're always trying to write something that you love and the people will love.". . Berns, who suffered from chronic health problems since childhood, died of a heart attack in 1967 at 38. "There is no filler in a three-and-a-half-minute song.") The Bee Gees' earliest hits ("New York Mining Disaster 1941," "To Love Somebody") were melancholy psychedelia, and their first U.S. As the band's charismatic frontman, Bono may soak up a lot of the credit, but he's the first to admit how important the Edge is to their songwriting. ", "When you're going 80 miles an hour down the freeway you're not necessarily going to notice irony," Randy Newman has said. They scored their first big hit with the Soul Survivors' "Expressway to Your Heart" in 1967, but by then the team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff had already been working together for five years, and over the following 15, they'd define the sound of Philadelphia soul and help invent disco. Over the years, his recording-booth ability to conjure intricate verses out of thin air has become legend, but he's a also master of fitting the right lyric to the right musical mood: "I try to feel the emotion of the track and try to feel what the track is talking about, let that dictate the subject matter," he has said. But no songwriter has explored sex so ingeniously from the frisky flirtations of "Little Red Corvette" and "U Got the Look" to more ambitious therapy sessions like "When Doves Cry" and "If I Was Your Girlfriend." "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. ", Nilsson was a pioneer of the Los Angeles studio sound, a crucial bridge between the baroque psychedelic pop of the late Sixties and the more personal singer-songwriter era of the Seventies. Or softer, depending on how you look at it." He's written some of rock's most finely observed songs not just about his journey through life (from the prematurely wise "These Days," penned when he was 16 years old, through more recent songs like "The Night Inside Me"), but has also ventured into social critiques ("Lawyers in Love") and political protest ("Lives in the Balance"). Yet, he was content to play a kind of behind-the-scenes role, passing out songs for the Band's three distinct vocalists Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel in an act of generosity that enhanced the Band's theme of communal progress and spirit. Gamble and Huff launched Philadelphia International Records in 1971, assembling a crew of musicians and engineers around them, and throughout the Seventies, they were near-permanent fixtures on the R&B charts, working with singers including the O'Jays, Lou Rawls and Teddy Pendergrass. "If I hear something that sounds watery I'll write 'I'll Take the Rain'," Stipe once said. Their work was at once primal and complex, charged by conflict, desire and anger, and unafraid to be explicit about it musically or lyrically. But it's what I do. "He's the only artist who was able to, basically, feed babies the most elaborate of foods that you would never give a child and know exactly how to break down the portions so they could digest it." . "I'm a country guy because of my raisin', but I'm a Chuck Berry man. On "Travelin' Man," from her 1971 masterpiece Coat of Many Colors, Parton's mom runs off with her man, and on the gut-wrenching "If I Lose My Mind," also on that album, Parton watches while her boyfriend has sex with another woman. "It was like that [with Kanye].". 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." qqmv ", "Hag, you're the guy people think I am," said Johnny Cash to Merle Haggard, whose life and lyrics intertwined magnificently. ", "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine," went the opening line of Smith's 1975 debut, Horses, proclaiming her belief in music as provocation and redemption. As he hit his artistic stride on albums like 1972's Talking Book and 1973's Innervisions, he used the recording studio as his palette to create groundbreaking works of soulful self-discovery.
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