The30GreatestLivingAmericanSongwriters
More than 250 music insiders and six New York Times critics weighed in on who defines the new American songbook. Here, in an unranked list, are the artists they chose.
NileRodgers
The titles tell the story. “Good Times.” “I Want Your Love.” “Lost in Music.” “Everybody Dance.” “My Feet Keep Dancing.” “Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah).” The songs of Nile Rodgers distill the spirit of disco’s heyday: long nights, bright lights, romance, sex and, above all, the communal rapture of bodies moving in unison, following inexorable grooves to a distant plane where the laws of physics seem no longer to apply — at least until the cops show up.
Together with his songwriting partner, the bassist Bernard Edwards (who died in 1996), Rodgers co-founded Chic, the de facto house band of New York’s late-70s disco boom. A legendary hard partyer, Rodgers was both a habitué of Manhattan’s club scene and its shrewdest chronicler. In the songs he and Edwards composed for Chic and other artists, the gritty glamour of the local demimonde — Black and white and Latino, gay and straight and in between — became a global ideal, immortalized in anthems of freedom and transgression that rippled across the planet.
Those songs traveled so well because they were one-size-fits-all: The only people not invited to Rodgers and Edwards’s bash were wallflowers who refused to hit the dance floor. Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out” was unmistakably a queer rallying cry, but its mantra — “I want the world to know / I got to let it show” — made room for just about everyone. Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” (1979) was likewise taken up by the gay and Black communities as a statement of solidarity; but it was also a sibling song, performed by real-life sisters Debbie, Joni, Kim and Kathy Sledge, and embraced as a theme song by countless families, biological and chosen. The songs carried sneakier messages as well. The lyrics were packed with historical references — to 1920s catchphrases and Depression-era hits like “Happy Days Are Here Again” — which linked the stagflation-era disco craze to an earlier age when Americans coped with hard times by dancing the night away.
Of course, what seals the deal is the groove, grounded in Rodgers’s radiant rhythm guitar. His tight chord stabs, jazzy voicings and glinting tone are an indelible sonic signature, up there with Louis Armstrong’s trumpet blasts and Aretha Franklin’s rolling, tolling gospel piano. It’s a sound that has reverberated through the decades: in the huge hits that Rodgers produced for ’80s stars (David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”), and in the hundreds of hip-hop tracks that sample Rodgers’s work, including, foundationally, the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (1979), which rode a wholesale interpolation of Chic’s “Good Times” into the Top 40, the first rap record to reach that landmark. Then, in 2013, Rodgers himself was back on the charts, joining Daft Punk and Pharrell Williams on the worldwide smash “Get Lucky.” The song is propelled by Rodgers’s silvery guitar chatter; the lyrics swerve between party-hearty slogans and spiritual woo-woo. “What keeps the planet spinning / The force from the beginning,” Pharrell coos. Is he singing about the mysterious movements of the Great Ineffable, or the down-and-dirty action in the dance club? Nile Rodgers songs have a way of erasing distinctions between the two. — Jody Rosen
People think of his guitar playing, this distinctive style — which, by the way, is a historic thing, along the lines of Bo Diddley or Wes Montgomery or Django Reinhart. When the man or woman in the street knows what your style is on the guitar, that’s kind of a big deal. But as a songwriter, what they’re not thinking about is what he does on his other hand, which are these chord changes and voicings that are completely romantic and symphonic and uplifting. You hear Nile’s heart in his right hand and his soul in the left.
He makes the term “pop” mean something limitless. It’s not just about getting you off your feet and wanting to dance. There’s an idealism in it. A lot of dance music makes you feel good in the moment, but something like “Lost in Music” or “I Want Your Love” has that feeling of what the word “romantic” really means — romance between a person and their own soul, really, and life.
I was around 14, 15, and I was playing in early bands, learning to write songs. It was right after punk in the U.K. But my sister was really into disco, and I got really lucky that she got the first Chic LP. Nile was a bit of a hero to me and my pals when I was learning to play. The very first Smiths single, “Hand in Glove,” started off as me trying to play like Nile. “This Night Has Opened My Eyes,” that’s me being inspired by Nile chord changes. “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side,” another one that I was trying to ape Nile — by then, I was a little braver, so I left the Nile Rodgers guitar in from the second verse onward. I have a number of influences, but his thing really has stuck with me.
And then, of course, when I had a child, I called him Nile. So what can you do? My son’s fine with it. He’s really proud of it. He’s a good guitar player, luckily. He’s got a lot to live up to with that name. — Johnny Marr was the guitarist for the Smiths. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
LucindaWilliams
Whatever anybody means about a song’s texture turns tactile with Lucinda Williams. Sweat salt. Ice crunch. Oyster grit. Matches. Grease (bacon, engine, hair). She must know this. She titled one masterpiece album “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.” Her half-century of music-making began on a kind of texture tour. She passed through some country and, as many a singer-songwriter has, through Black music, discovering what distinguishes affect from affinity. Williams, who hails from Lake Charles, La., started as a blues stencilist, covering Robert Johnson and Melvin “Lil’ Son” Jackson. So nothing is counterfeit about, say, the zydeco that dusts her first recording of an original jewel like “I Lost It.”
Williams evolved into the kind of synthesizing stylist and major storyteller whose genre becomes herself. She is a musician’s songwriter and a critic’s ideal: wry, deceptively complex, confident, confident-sounding.
By the time she was in her mid-30s, she was coming up with the sundress-and-Stetson floor-stomper “I Just Wanted to See You So Bad” and the chug-a-lug peace-out of “Changed the Locks.” Who’s got a better sad-and-horny song than “Unsuffer Me,” wherein Williams wonders whether a man can be her Lexapro, or a more concrete boy-loses-girl tune than “Six Blocks Away,” or a love song as vampirically abject as “Essence”? She can write great hellos and superb goodbyes. She can practice observant empathy. Like the finest blues and country folks, she’s also a comedian, a comic actor — hear Williams as a stalker on the heavily grooved lust-at-first-sight track “Hot Blood,” horny-whispering and hiding in the bushes: “I saw you in the laundromat / Washin’ your clothes / Gettin’ all the. Dirt. Out.”
Williams’s comedy is rooted in a pithy, earthbound philosophy. On “Fancy Funeral,” she’s counseling against having one: “’Cause no amount of riches / Can bring back what you’ve lost / To satisfy your wishes / You’ll never justify the cost.” It’s one of those smile-through-tears tunes. The truths in her writing are as off-kilter as her singing. Since the beginning, Williams has been performing with a voice that’s like a door with honey in the hinges. It matches (or inspires) the drunken wisdom in her words.
Williams worries, notices, intuits, chides and calls out. She remembers. This is songwriting whose strength arises, partially, from an ability to texturize all the modes of life — having and losing, looking and longing, comfort and disorientation — and the many moods those modes inspire. That’s how you get the ardent abandon of “Passionate Kisses” or a tear-jerker like “Sweet Old World.” Obviously, Williams composed those two. But everybody thinks of “Passionate Kisses” as being all but copyrighted by Mary Chapin Carpenter, who Ferris-wheels her way through that chorus. And Emmylou Harris has so thoroughly repossessed “Sweet Old World” that even Williams herself has said she, too, envisions stars when she hears it. But Williams drew the roadway that Harris used to get up there, which is her big contribution to American music. It’s not just the locks that she changed; it’s the contours of the map. — Wesley Morris
I was touring in the early ’90s with Lucinda and Rosanne Cash in Australia, and we would play together every night. It was like a guitar pull, just swapping songs, and she would play “Passionate Kisses” every night. I don’t think I’m exaggerating too much when I tell you we’d walk offstage and I would just tackle her and slobber all over her face and say, “Oh, I love ‘Passionate Kisses’ so much!” I think by the end of that tour she was like, I can’t take this anymore — she finally said, “Oh, for God’s sake, just record that song.” So we cut it. All these years later, every night that I get to sing that song for three and a half minutes, I feel as if I’m inhabiting this perfect vessel of songcraft. It’s a beautiful, simple, declarative song that is both the most raise-your-fist anthem and such a deeply personal declaration of what we all deserve. I’ve always pretty much recorded my own songs — but that song, I just wanted to sing it every night.
“Side of the Road” is another perfect song, in terms of the simplicity or economy of its language. How do you love fully while also keeping yourself whole? It’s a question for the universe. In the verse at the end, she goes, “I just wanted to go to a place where I used to always go” — as if looking back on your life, and maybe the person you were, who used to go to those places, has changed or is gone now.
She works very hard on lyrics and precision and rewrites. It’s not tossed off. She invests every part of herself; she really works. A couple of years ago, I read a profile of Lucinda. She took exception to something the interviewer was trying to suggest — that as one grows older, one’s powers of songwriting may be diminishing. She was so brilliant, saying, No, no, no, I’m just hitting my stride! I think about it a lot. Great painters or writers or poets, no one suggests to them that they should wrap it up. The songs that Lucinda writes now, you wouldn’t have written them in your 20s. It’s a lifetime of craftsmanship and learning and being human. When you get to this point in life, it’s almost euphoric to be able to keep doing what you do, because you are at the height of your powers. — Mary Chapin Carpenter is a singer and songwriter. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
StevieWonder
No sane person begins a tribute to the greatest living bard of the human heart with the song “Part-Time Lover.” Not when he’s the composer of some of the most harmonically and chromatically complex music ever composed, music you probably can’t fully grasp without a math degree. You can’t start with “Part-Time Lover” because “Part-Time Lover” isn’t “If You Really Love Me” or “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.” It isn’t “Happy Birthday” or “That Girl.” Nor is it “Until You Come Back to Me” or “Tell Me Something Good” or “I Can’t Help It” (songs he wrote that Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan and Michael Jackson made theirs). Nor will you find it on the five-year spree of magnum opus albums that made Stevie Wonder immortal by the time he turned a flabbergasting 26 years old.
You can’t, because this song isn’t holy or wholesome, because it doesn’t sound holy — and this is a man who started, as a boy, with dreams of being a preacher. You can’t, because “Part-Time Lover” is about cheating spouses. That, of course, is the whole reason to start an encomium to Wonder with “Part-Time Lover,” because it’s probably not even the 75th best song he has ever written, and yet — Lord, and yet — it is such a melodic powerhouse that to hear it once is to hear it for all time.
The song tells a story of two people, midaffair. The tone is especially bright, unspooling at a clip more aerobic, more roller skating, than anything he had ever made. The bass line side-twists, the drumming comes with some sort of guitar-oriented plink redolent of his Motown youth, and the scatting of Luther Vandross jogs in place with some cooing just beneath him in the mix. Then: Here comes Wonder, who uses the verses to explain the rules of the affair. He makes this wonderful move in the lyrics where he redacts the name of his mistress — “Don’t want nothing to be wrong with part-time lover” — as an expression of decorum.
Wonder devised “Part-Time Lover” so that it’s a naughty joy to sing. One section seems as if it would be the chorus — two couplets about the thrill and guilt of it all. The rising action resettles, resolving nothing, but he is having a ball. Only in the final verse does the protagonist learn the turnabout: “I guess two can play the game / Of part. Time. Lovers.” With that: a rest, before Vandross and the backup singers re-emerge to take us home, tsking, while Wonder takes his place in the doghouse.
So maybe the tribute to this visionary, this oracle who has helped reroute music from acoustic to electronic, who has changed lives, expanded thinking, dispensed truth, inspired joy, argued for real possibility, who has broadcast hope and practiced compassion and intoxicating ardor but who has always retained his capacity for outrage, exasperation, disappointment and pique — maybe a love letter to that man should start with a bigger, more soul-gripping song. But if “Part-Time Lover” doesn’t get you even partway up Stevie Wonder’s Genius Mountain, what the hell does that tell you about the 74 other songs standing in its way? — Wesley Morris
I grew up in South Dallas, Texas, in a household where there was always music being played. For the most part, it was my mom and her brothers. The common denominator between the three of them was Stevie Wonder. We could share a car ride to school, and it was Stevie Wonder. When I got dressed in the morning, it was Stevie Wonder. Sundays after church, Stevie Wonder. So it was almost as if I thought Stevie Wonder was my dad.
Stevie Wonder’s music is a language; there’s a chord language that he speaks. By the time I started writing songs, he was in me. My soul was kind of imprinted with that. I’m one of those millions of people who recognize the billions of memories of atoms of all the notes, words, phrases, thoughts, sentiments that Stevie Wonder shared. I belong to him, and he belongs to me. I never have to meet him in person.
What stood out for me was not just the vocals, not just the songwriting — it was the ad-libs. The ad-libs could determine whether you were soulful or not. It’s where you hit the mmm-mmm-mmm in between the words, or the ooh-ooh-ooh. It’s in the tradition of gospel music. Ad-libs determine how far you are entranced into what you are doing. And it doesn’t get any better than Stevie Wonder.
There’s a song called “Seems So Long.” There’s a particular part that he gets to: “Seems so long / Since I’ve touched a wanting hand / Oh, it seems so long.” I found myself rewinding that one run. That moment I am rewinding, that one run over and over again, feels like slowly unfolding my childhood, and getting to the nucleus of a wound and feeling the relief of bursting it and watching it explode into glitter and love.
Stevie Wonder just makes me cry randomly. He gets on a drum kit and connects with the metronome of the universe. He gets on a harmonica and gives it a life and a voice. The harmonica has a family, a past, a favorite food and everything else — he gives the harmonica a life, and sometimes it sounds like a life that was fulfilled.
I don’t know if, at the time, in the studio, he and the players knew exactly what they were creating. But it would be the soundtrack to a lot of our lives. That music, it’s part of the homeostasis of who a lot of us are. As I was growing — I get to be a college student, and I get to be a young woman, and I’m writing “Baduizm” — there’s no way that these things can’t be a part of me. All of the music I was singing — we never talked about this, but it’s always trying to get his attention. Like: I know you. You made me. — Erykah Badu is a singer and songwriter. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
Jay-Z
Even as a rookie, Jay-Z spoke with the voice of experience. He was 24 when he released his first single, in the summer of 1994; he sounded far older, wiser and worldlier. The song’s title, “In My Lifetime,” had a valedictory ring, and though the chorus looked forward, not back (“In my lifetime, I need to see a whole lotta dough”), it was clear the rapper wasn’t wishing or hoping — he was laying out a plan. He says as much in the opening line: While others “are shootin’ stupid, I’m carefully plottin.’” This was the credo of a tactician, a weigher of costs and benefits, who had no patience for child’s play.
What was truly precocious was Jay-Z’s writing. “Reasonable Doubt” (1996) is one of the greatest debut albums in any genre, a testament to dazzling skills as a stylist and storyteller. Jay-Z’s verses stacked up rhymes in intricate configurations — end rhymes, internal rhymes, half-rhymes, even nonrhymes that he twisted into rhymes through tricks of inflection. The language was dense, full of puns and double and triple entendres, but Jay’s delivery was easeful, conversational; he rapped slightly behind the beat, giving the songs a subtle swing, a feeling of relaxed authority that lent credibility to tales of street hustling and forecasts of glory. His gifts were audible on “Brooklyn’s Finest” (1996), a duet with the Notorious B.I.G., which offered a study in contrasts: Biggie landing his punchlines at steady intervals, with the brute force of a heavyweight champion; Jay reciting rhymes offhandedly, as if engaged in casual chitchat. He sounded like he’d never broken a sweat, in a recording booth or anywhere else.
That combination of sangfroid and swagger established a new way for rappers to self-present, maintaining street credibility while pursuing both pop success and a more audacious kind of crossover, from performer to executive to tycoon. It was all predicated on chops that were second to none. Jay-Z wowed studio collaborators by writing quickly to new beats and instantly committing those bars to memory. More than any previous rapper, he foregrounded the music of M.C.-ing, determined not to repeat himself as he sought fresh flows and odd points of entry to the rhythmic pocket. At times he did it through ventriloquism. He ghostwrote one of rap’s most illustrious singles, “Still D.R.E.,” channeling the voices of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg; he ghostwrote for Bugs Bunny too, in a witty soundtrack song for “Space Jam,” the 1996 movie starring Michael Jordan.
Much has been made of Jay-Z’s rise from Brooklyn drug dealer to billionaire mogul. It’s his most oft-told tale, the inspiration behind dozens of songs and hundreds of boasts, including his most famous ones. (“I’m not a businessman / I’m a business, man.”) But the rags-to-riches story that Jay-Z narrates is no Horatio Alger fable; it’s a complex drama of race, class, moral compromise, mental sovereignty and triumphs that have come despite, not because of, the powers that be. “This shit weird / We ain’t even ’posed to be here,” he exults in “Ni**as in Paris” (2011). As Jay-Z has aged, yet more notes of complexity have crept in. His 2017 album, “4:44,” a reckoning with marriage, parenthood and personal failure, was far blunter and more bruised than anything he had ever recorded. More than two decades after the world first encountered the preternaturally worldly young rapper, here was Jay-Z expressing a new kind of wisdom: Even the indomitable can be vulnerable. — Jody Rosen
There haven’t been many people who can speak for a generation, and speak to the mentality of what Black youth was going through, for everyone who indulged in the allure of street culture. He gave us such a tutorial, his whole career — about street life, drug culture, luxury, the pitfalls as well as the floss. And then he took “Allure,” from “The Black Album,” and basically admitted, Man, I fell victim to the game. It is just the best representation of a rap artist speaking to his demographic, which was a lot of the kids exposed to the crack era from every angle. Everybody who was playing in that world, you know, we all had moments of clarity. Regardless of whether it was an opportunity in music, a near-death experience of a friend or yourself, a run-in with the law — everybody had this feeling and told themselves, That’s it. And the game called them right back. That chorus and bridge really captured the feelings of anyone living that life. And the hook spoke to a level of admission of, like, I know I’m doing wrong. I see clearly. I’m over it. I’m done. But everybody, you know, folded and ran back, like an addict.
He’s talking about a real experience, and his mission is to articulate, in the best possible way, his feelings at the time. When you draw from real experience, there’s a level of passion that comes across — I’ve always felt like that was something he did very well. Even his more commercial records, they always still carried a heavy weight of lyricism. “Ni**as in Paris,” “Hard Knock Life,” “Otis” — these are all hit singles, and his verses carry the weight of mixtape verses.
One of his best performances, to me, is “Hovi Baby.” Lyrically it is by far one of the best [expletive]-talking, acrobatic, philosophizing — I mean, come on. Listen: At that point I was scared of Jay-Z. This is another stride of lyricism, philosophy, I’m-the-best braggadocio, bravado. And he’s, like, tap-dancing all over this beat. Later on in the song, he starts talking about how he’s chasing the snare around — and he’s actually doing it. To me, that was a Super Saiyan moment. “Hovi Baby” scared the hell out of me. — Pusha T is one half of the rap duo Clipse. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
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PaulSimon
They call him Rhymin’ Simon. Or rather, that’s the moniker he gave himself in the title of a 1973 album, winking at both the nicknames of old-time sports heroes and at his own reputation as a pointy head — a New York intellectual with an acoustic guitar, a reedy tenor voice and catalog of brainy, indelible songs.
It’s true that Paul Simon is a wordsmith. That was clear from the start, on Simon & Garfunkel’s 1964 debut single, which announced the poet’s arrival with a lapel-grabbing opening line: “Hello darkness, my old friend.” In its way, “The Sound of Silence” was as forceful as two other landmark songs much played that same year: “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Its stark sound registered generational disaffection; its lyrics picked up tremors of the coming ’60s youthquake: “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls / And tenement halls.”
“The Sound of Silence” was audibly the work of a 22-year-old, an ambitious tyro taking a big swing. But Simon matured quickly. His music is, in the best sense, grown-up, proof that a gifted songwriter can tackle the headiest, heaviest topics, compressing a novel’s worth of ideas, intelligence, irony, urbanity, humor and ambivalence into four minutes.
He recorded two of the greatest divorce songs, “Hearts and Bones” and “Graceland”; the latter may also be the best road-trip song, not to mention one of pop music’s most stirring secular hymns. He can sketch in miniature and paint on vast canvases. He’s written wry vignettes about midlife ennui (“Still Crazy After All These Years”) and delivered epic visions, like “American Tune,” which begins as a confession (“Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken / And many times confused”), before swooping upward to take in a panoramic view from high above New York Harbor: “I dreamed I was flying / And high up above my eyes could clearly see / The Statue of Liberty / Sailing away to sea.” Those lines are mystical, but he sings them conversationally, a patented Simon trick for taking the edge off his most literary lyrics. He also performs the opposite feat, filling his songs with breezy, chatty turns of phrase — “Now you may call that a bogus, bullshit, New Age point of view” — that you hear all the time in real life but almost never in songs.
But Simon is not defined by the rhymin’. He is musically voracious, an almost obscenely gifted crafter of melodies and chord progressions and — surprisingly, perhaps — a beatmaster supreme, forever seeking new ways to syncopate his songs. His quest for novel rhythms, textures and time signatures has reached around the world: from the doo-wop and Latin music of his native Queens to Bach oratorios, Black gospel, South African mbaqanga and Brazilian batucada, among many other sources.
In fact, music, the majesty and mystery thereof, is a theme to which Simon has returned time and again. Listen to the bustling “Late in the Evening” (1980), an ode to the bliss of “music seeping through” bedroom walls and other permeable membranes — minds, bodies, spiritual spheres. Or listen to the “Seven Psalms” album (2023), a remarkable lion-in-winter reckoning, in which Simon, now in his 80s, stares down death, armed with musical metaphors. “The Lord is my engineer / The Lord is my record producer,” he sings. “The Lord is the music I hear / Deep in the valley, elusive.” — Jody Rosen
One of the things that’s incredible about him and makes him utterly unique is the rhythm of his language and how that defines his melodic choices — and vice versa, the rhythm of his melody and how that defines his language. When he hits gold, it pours out of him like water. Of course, he works like a [expletive] on the rest of it. But he’s a master at it. He’s the archetypal short-story writer in song, right? One of the best that we’ve ever had.
The song “Hearts and Bones” is something I’ve discovered more recently. It’s like the precursor to “Graceland” — you hear “Hearts and Bones” and you hear someone making their way toward something. Every line in it is beautiful. You can hear how much he enjoys the melodies, how much he enjoys hitting the notes, and yet the words mean something every step of the way. I always hear the arc of a love affair, flying round and round. He’ll just stop midsong and do some other melody that will suddenly appear to him, and he goes with it. This is one of the greats, who’s still trying and exploring, and doing it very publicly.
He spawned singer-songwriters. There’s not a songwriter out there who won’t have inadvertently, unconsciously, consciously pulled from his work. They’re classics that you take for granted, and then you sit down, and you’re like, My god, how the hell did he do that? — Beth Orton is a singer and musician. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
TaylorSwift
First album, first song, first verse: “He said the way my blue eyes shined / Put those Georgia stars to shame that night / I said, ‘That’s a lie.’”
It was all there at the very beginning for Taylor Swift: romance, nostalgia and the occasional popping of shiny bubbles of emotion, all within the pristine economical package of a pop-country song. She was 16.
She has never stopped chasing that initial Nashville impulse — a four-ish-minute distillation of the biggest feelings imaginable, threaded through a melody that won’t leave you alone. Sometimes she brings country phrasings to electro-pop, or pop rigor to indie rock; she might let her rhymes and verses go shaggy or bring a bridge back like a chorus. Such are the perks of having mastered the form early, while amassing the cultural capital to remake pop in her image.
Pop stars are not supposed to last this long or create this much. The Beatles’ entire creative output happened, essentially, in eight years. But Swift’s durability — 12 studio albums and hundreds of songs over two decades — has given us an unprecedented combination of musical auteurism and commercial success.
Her later work often explores the tension between the two. She has a campy kiss-off register for tart bon mots — “Lights, camera, bitch, smile / Even when you wanna die,” she chirps on the fake-bubbly “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” But on the dream-pop opus “Mirrorball,” it’s all earnest reflection from the top of the mountain: “I can change everything about me to fit in.”
Swift’s latest run of dominance, the stretch that has given her two more Grammys for album of the year (and four in total, a record), began with that surprise pandemic one-two flutter of “Folklore” and its sister album “Evermore.” Simultaneously, Swift was painstakingly recreating four of her earlier albums to own them outright. Collective fervor around the “Taylor’s Version” albums sent a 10-minute director’s cut rendition of a nearly decade-old breakup ballad, “All Too Well,” to No. 1 on the Billboard chart in 2021, simply because so many listeners wanted to hear even more of a track that made them feel bruised, abandoned and devastated.
Swift has done as much as anyone in modern popular music history to advance the idea of the song — its construction and impact, its tensions and limitations — as an important art form. But she has also done it while foregrounding the agency and emotional lives of young women, and as a result has become probably the most pored-over writer — or at least up there with J.K. Rowling and the pope — of the 21st century in any medium. — Joe Coscarelli
You ask about her brilliance
I can only say ~
If only I had — written it …
For me, this song will always live ~
In my heart
“You’re on your own kid —
You always have been … ”
I feel that her song is generational. I think it’s all of her relationships written into one song — a little bit of this, a little bit of that — and dropped into my lap. Over time, I have dropped in my own great loves to stand in her story, and it makes me cry for both of us — what we lost, what we learned and how we survived. That is how a great songwriter reaches into people’s hearts and connects with them. All that beauty and tragedy and life’s lessons have led her down this path of unstoppable creativity; she just doesn’t stop, and that is what has turned her into this beautiful young woman who makes magic with everything she touches.
P.S. Yes, this is the song that reconnected Taylor and I. The title of the song is something Christine would have said to me after she passed away — and I felt it came through Taylor. It helped me a lot to let her go ~
And brought me a new friend. … — Stevie Nicks is a singer and songwriter. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
Brian&EddieHolland
What was love before Holland-Dozier-Holland? Well, there were the American songbook chestnuts: classic, classy, dreamy; notes so long they needed maids of honor to carry them; singing that was oh-so-proper, consummate and clear. The brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, along with Lamont Dozier, who died in 2022, made a crucial innovation to the songbook’s tremors. They invited us to feel those feelings — like, in our bodies, on dozens and dozens of hits.
You could be here all day just naming titles. But let’s take a moment to try. There are most of the Supremes’ mellifluous chart-toppers (“Where Did Our Love Go,” “Baby Love,” “Come See About Me,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “I Hear a Symphony,” “You Keep Me Hangin’ On”) and the Four Tops’ biggest bangers (“Reach Out I’ll Be There,” “Bernadette,” “7 Rooms of Gloom”). They made two apex Martha and the Vandellas records, Kim Weston’s “Take Me in Your Arms,” Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold” and Marvin Gaye’s “You’re a Wonderful One.” Tip of the iceberg, but enough for now.
You can hear the bodies building these songs — hands spanking tambourines, breath blasting into horns, fingers snapping and maybe some feet stomping. So many of their masterpieces open with pitter-patter percussion or a kick drum. A beat wasn’t notional for H-D-H. It was a physical manifestation of lust, misery, remorse, joy, ardor, determination. A pulse, a heartbeat, for a people in pursuit of respect for their personhood. The civil rights movement granted H-D-H’s artistry deluxe significance. The music strategically headed toward something. Love was on the march.
A chief H-D-H innovation, one that differs from many a lovey-dovey hit of the pre-Motown era, was that their style didn’t need note-perfect singers to “nail” the songs. These are egalitarian arrangements that can reach liftoff whether a multitracked Diana Ross is having the time of her life or Levi Stubbs is suffering one of his stratospheric meltdowns. This is not to say that we could do what Ross or especially Stubbs could; it’s that generosity is part of their production’s formula. The songs’ very singability constitutes a politics of empathy, a plea to disarm, discover and relate. Come on, boy. Come see about me.
In so many of their compositions, some element sounds as if it has gone rogue: the baritone saxophone that cries Diana Ross’s tears in “Where Did Our Love Go,” the vibraphone that makes “This Old Heart of Mine” glow like a firefly, the blaring of what sounds like an old-timey news flash in “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” Aberration is an illusion in these songs. Every one of their fillips knows it still belongs to a hand.
That flourishing control is why Motown is chronically compared to a motor plant. There’s a real industrial approach to the sound — hard, percussive rhythms beneath the plush interior of melody, and lyrics that are just about the most fun a listener can have pretending he, too, is this glamorously besotted or gloriously bereft. H-D-H were crucial to the ingenuity of that formula. What came off the assembly line were more than vehicles. They were gemstones. — Wesley Morris
One of the things that stands out is obviously just how prolific they were. There are a lot of people who wrote a handful of great songs. But they and Smokey Robinson and the Beatles and very few other people — you can sit there and name dozens and dozens and dozens of songs, and you’ve heard most of them: all these hits by the Supremes, Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, everybody.
They were the ones who really started creating this Motown sound. There would be a chord, a triad, then a bass note that wasn’t necessarily in that chord and then a melody that also wasn’t necessarily in the chord. And when you put them together — it’s not quite jazzy, but it’s very arranged, very sophisticated. They tend to have these verses and choruses and bridges that are almost meandering. They don’t tend to be symmetrical: There are extra bars and extra beats, and they don’t go where you think. If you took the choruses out of those tunes, it’s almost like avant-garde jazz. They’re very, very innovative writers.
It’s obvious, but this was the architecture of so much music. All of pop and soul was changed by Motown, by these songs. Motown became basically its own genre; it doesn’t sound like anything else. They talk about Motown like a factory, but it was more like a university, and you had these guys who were almost like professors — the engineers, the musicians, the songwriters, the producers. There were a lot of people at Motown doing things at very high levels. To be honest, I just think people aren’t working that hard anymore. — Gabriel Roth is a founder of Daptone Records. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
MissyElliott
If you want to come to terms with the songwriting greatness of Missy (Misdemeanor) Elliott, there may be no better place to start than these nine, um, words: Ti esrever dna ti pilf, nwod gniht ym tup. It’s a lyric, or the mirror-image inversion of one: the big hook of Elliott’s 2002 hit “Work It” — “Put my thing down, flip it and reverse it” — which Elliott and the producer Timbaland literally flipped and reversed, running the audio backward to create a cascade of chirps, slurps and phonemes. The trick transforms Elliott’s rapping into demented scat-singing. It sounds like spirit possession, or like extraterrestrial Esperanto. Or maybe Elliott is just cracking a raunchy joke? The flipping and reversing may refer to switching up sexual positions; the backward vocal sample winks at the gibberish that lovers yelp in the throes of passion. As Elliott also puts it in “Work It”: “Sex me so good, I say blah-blah-blah.”
There’s another way to hear that line, though. It’s a statement of purpose and of principle. Elliott’s music is an elaborate exercise in flipping and reversing: upending expectations about how songs can and should sound; discombobulating the English language; subverting clichés around gender, sexuality and power; calling into question what’s silly, what’s serious and whether there’s a meaningful distinction between the two.
She arrived with a bold debut single, “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” (1997), which found her slurring and hissing rhymes over a humid, spartan beat. From there it was off to the races. Elliott and Timbaland formed arguably the greatest rapper-producer tandem in history, churning out a string of classic singles and albums, each more inventive and exciting than the last. It was a perfect partnership: Timbaland’s eerie, minimalist production — stuttering beat patterns, yawning silences between drum hits, synth riffs that bray and heave — was the ideal vehicle for Elliott’s slaloming, heavily syncopated raps. Her lyrics were as interested in the sound of language as the meaning, stretching words like taffy and ping-ponging syllables around. The songs were bangers, dance jams for the ages, but there was much more going on. Her sloganeering choruses — exhortations to get ur freak on, to let it bump, to lose control — were expressions of impunity, declarations of personal and artistic freedom whose feminist and Black pride subtexts were unmistakable.
Elliott’s gifts extend far beyond rapping. She is an excellent singer (she began her career in R&B groups). Well before she was a star rapper, she was a songwriter, with a gift for off-kilter melodies and surprising hooks. Her work in the late ’90s and early 2000s — co-writing credits for Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston and Mary J. Blige, as well as the songs she and Timbaland composed for the R&B innovator Aaliyah — show that she could have had an illustrious career as a studio writer had she chosen that path.
Of course, it’s hard to picture a performer as irrepressible as Elliott sitting quietly behind the scenes. And it’s impossible to imagine 21st-century music without her. She hasn’t released an album since 2005. But she has continued writing and producing remarkable songs with artists like Jazmine Sullivan. And her influence is audible in successive waves of rappers who have pushed hip-hop further into the realm of avant-garde singsong: Lil Wayne, Young Thug, SoundCloud mumblers, trap-rap AutoTune yodelers. To the extent that the M.C.’s art has become less about “bars” and more about tone and timbre, melodic eruption and surreal vocalese, we live on Planet Missy. — Jody Rosen
For me, it’s her pocket. She just has a crazy pocket. She’s so rhythmic. I grew up listening to her, and I was dancing a lot. Her music was like the holy grail; you couldn’t take a hip-hop class and have it not be to Missy Elliott. I feel like probably her pocket has inspired my physical movement, inadvertently.
She was able to be so tender and so sensual — and also had this chic vulgarity to some of her lyrics. But she always had this silky delivery. I really like hooky rhythms, like the intro to “Get Ur Freak On” — you know that intro straight away — or that bit on “Work It,” the “ra-ta-ta-ta.” There’s always these signature drumlike rhythms that feel really embodied and completely addictive. Her lyrics, as well, would really twist the way she would speak: “Don’t I look like a Halle Berry post-ahhh.” But it just seemed natural, the way she would use her mouth and use vowels and consonants to create the beat. You’d still understand what she was saying — you’d think that to say “post-ahhh” is normal; that’s the way you should say it.
She took these rhythms — rhythms that felt very Afrocentric — and somehow made every single person feel like they could get involved. She took these rhythms into pop culture. It’s playful. Her lyrics were cheeky, naughty, quite confrontational sometimes, but she delivered it so you wanted to eat it, like it’s digestible, without diluting herself at all. She completely changed the culture by being herself. — FKA twigs is a singer and songwriter. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
LionelRichie
In the late 1970s through the mid-80s, there was a certain kind of hit song that sauntered up on you quietly but not sneakily. It put its hands on your shoulders, brought its forehead down into the nape of your neck. Gently swayed you to and fro as its warmth oozed through you like lava.
Each and every time, it seemed, Lionel Richie had written that song. His litany of urgently treacly smashes was the soundtrack of that era, both a master class in minimal form that updated the mercenary structures of the Brill Building and Frank Sinatra, and also a cool and controlled reimagining of the sensual soul music of the late ’60s through the mid-70s. Richie proposed R&B could do even more while sweating far less.
His hot streak began with “Three Times a Lady” (1978), a startling Commodores ballad that established the Richie mode: uncomplicated feelings, unhurried words, unbothered delivery. This was love song as testimonial, as TED Talk. What followed was pop-soul to soundtrack a million nuptials: the smoldering “Lady,” by Kenny Rogers, which treats the declaration of love as an act of heroism; “Endless Love,” a duet between Richie and Diana Ross that’s as spare and bracing as a Rothko; the deeply patient “Truly” (1982), a gem from Richie’s debut solo album. These songs are almost comically declarative: “I see no one else but you,” “I need to have you near me,” “I’ll be a fool for you, I’m sure.” Even on “Hello,” perhaps Richie’s signature ballad, when he asks, “Is it me you’re looking for?” it’s not even remotely a question.
Outside Richie’s bubble, disco was dying, and the glossy, often carnal stadium pop of the ’80s hadn’t quite arrived. His songs were a balmy way station. Unique in their stillness, complete in their caress, they were, in a period of global tumult, something like shelter. Sure, he had up-tempo numbers (“Dancing on the Ceiling”) and heartbreak explorations (“Sail On”) and “We Are the World.” But those are, in the rearview, mere filigree adorning the few tender years in which Richie retained absolute authorship of love’s true rapture. — Jon Caramanica
Lionel has so many tricks as a songwriter. But one thing that was such a part of his writing is those choruses — instantly sing-alongable, instantly recognizable. He writes these verses that are so intelligent and smart, and then you get to the chorus and it all comes together.
“Stuck on You” is one of my favorites. We’re in the studio, and we’re doing it pretty much live, and we get to the bridge. I will never forget — it was like every cell in my body just woke up. The choruses always seem like a big band thing, but that bridge seems like it’s just two voices, just isolated in the world. It’s so Lionel, and so pure pop. He came up with these great moments, like the beginning of “Easy” — something that instantly makes you recognize it as a song crafted by Lionel Richie.
We’re talking about Lionel Richie, but we could be talking about Paul McCartney or Stevie Wonder, we could be talking about Al Green, any of these people. He wrote these songs that became a part of the lexicon, part of the everyday fiber of America. He’s one of those guys who can write a song that can be done in almost any genre. Look at a song like “Lady,” which he wrote for Kenny Rogers: undeniably country, but also undeniably Lionel Richie. It seems so effortless, because the great ones make it look effortless.
With my songwriting, a song like “Let Her Cry” — there’s so much influence from growing up with Lionel Richie and the Commodores. When I sit down and write songs, I’m always trying to be Lionel Richie. — Darius Rucker is a solo artist and the singer for Hootie and the Blowfish. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
DollyParton
Every so often, a seemingly miraculous legend about Dolly Parton goes viral: The enormously prolific songwriter and cross-generational cultural icon supposedly wrote two of her greatest songs, “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You,” on the very same night. That feat would certainly be impressive, but to anyone with a true understanding of Parton’s songwriting — or perhaps of the miracle of songwriting itself — not particularly surprising. As is true for so many of the greats, songwriting is, for Parton, a kind of spiritual practice (“That’s my time with God,” she has said), an entrance into a flow state where time and possibility expand infinitely. Parton has cultivated a reputation for being down-to-earth while also seeming connected to some kind of higher power. “I’ve watched Dolly writing one song while she’s singing another,” Emmylou Harris, Parton’s collaborator in the supergroup Trio, once marveled. “I’ve never seen anyone so spontaneously creative.”
For too long, Parton’s beloved star persona distracted from the quiet craft of her songwriting. But the two have long been entwined: Consider the famous story that finds Parton on the set of the 1980 comedy “9 to 5,” idly tapping her long acrylic nails as the crew moves between camera setups and — eureka! — realizing she has just created the clackity-clack rhythm, like secretaries at a typewriter, of one of her greatest hits.
Even at its glitziest, though, there is always an earnest purity about Parton’s work and worldview. The sorrowful tonalities of Appalachia are alive in some of her most autobiographical music: The smell of honeysuckle wafts through the vivid “My Tennessee Mountain Home”; her classic country ballad “Coat of Many Colors” alchemizes a remembered moment of childhood shame into a sparkling badge of honor. Artifice and authenticity, Parton reminds us in her own down-home, high-femme way, are not mutually exclusive.
Through country hits and pop crossovers, bluegrass revivals and even a 2019 cameo on an E.D.M. banger, Parton has remained stylistically fluid throughout her seven-decade career. Her 2023 double album “Rockstar” — a headfirst dive into the sounds of rock ’n’ roll, released when she was 77 — is further proof that the bounds of genre don’t limit her. But perhaps the rich emotional range of her vast body of work is best expressed in those two songs she supposedly wrote in a single night. “Jolene” crackles with nervous envy, anxiety and desperation. “I Will Always Love You,” her huge-hearted farewell to her mentor Porter Wagoner, is sung with the omniscient benevolence of a guardian angel. The human and the divine: Dolly Parton is a little bit of both. — Lindsay Zoladz
I can’t help it: The first song that comes to mind is “I Will Always Love You.” Can you imagine the world without this song? I can’t. It’s a heartbroken breakup song, and yet I’m filled with love and compassion for both the “I” and the “you” every time I hear it. I think her remarkable ability to convey human frailty and human nobility is one of the most masterful aspects of her writing.
When I return to her early songs now, I’m struck by their bravery. There’s some dark subject matter, and some hard-luck people on the fringes. Yet whatever the circumstances, the characters who populate her songs have an abiding and unshakable likability. I feel like I have more respect for the human spirit after listening to a Dolly record. — Gillian Welch is a singer and songwriter. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
YoungThug
Should hip-hop be melodic? Should hip-hop be structured? In its early years, the genre wasn’t really sure. This uncertainty began as a tug of war between rapped verses and sung, often sampled hooks; then those things found common ground; and then eventually, in the form of Drake and his acolytes, they became effectively one and the same. By the 2010s, rap music — which for years fended off allegations that it was not, in fact, music at all — had become the flame keeper for pop melody, its tools spilling over into country, reggaeton, K-pop and everywhere else.
That ubiquity created ample opportunity for a poststructural dissenter to come along. In stepped the Atlanta surrealist Young Thug, whose main gift to songwriting has been his ease with dismantling its norms. Rap music had become accepted and palatable. Young Thug made it wild again.
This is in part attributable to his fully improvisational approach to song construction, writing nothing down. He wasn’t alone in that approach, but he became the rapper whose off-the-dome exhortations were impressive not for how close they could come to tightly stitched written verses — like those of his idol, Lil Wayne — but rather for how they appeared to defy composition altogether.
During his titanic mixtape run in the early to mid-2010s, he became the genre’s signature eccentric, rapping in free-associative howls and chirps. If his music bends to any tradition at all, it’s to the great soul yelpers of the 1950s and ’60s — Little Richard is all over Thug’s music, as are the ecstatic breakdown segments of old James Brown numbers — or maybe the bluegrass yodelers of decades prior.
Thug has an easy way with melody when he chooses, but he’s just as interested — maybe more so — in the nonsensical interjections and emphatic ad-libs that for most rappers are a side dish. Here’s Young Thug on “Harambe,” a representatively bizarre number: “My diamonds yellow like a corn,” he squawks. “Double R at the prom.” Lines start and stop somewhere before the natural meter of a rap verse would seem to demand. Then, at the chorus, he sounds as if he’s vomiting a whole barrel of crude, disgusted.
There is that sense that great songwriting must revert to the mean, that it is a celebration of form and propriety. But Young Thug’s dazzling dyspepsia is an argument for the opposite — a contention that some styles have reached their natural end, and that only an alien can see a way beyond. It’s as if Young Thug dissolved a fully formed genre with acid — leaving behind not the armature, but more an assemblage of scraps barely tethered together.
In so doing, he set in motion the remaking of rap music into a sound that’s practically posthistorical. The many generations of SoundCloud rap, the multiple-personality experimentation of Playboi Carti, even the vocal shards in the hyperpop of artists like 100 gecs — all attributable to Young Thug, who never met a song he wanted to write. — Jon Caramanica
Atlanta, we always come with new styles, new lingo. I was with the young wave — I was working with the artists bringing the new stuff. And then I remember when Thug started coming on the scene. He was somebody who made me feel like: Hold on, what? What is he saying? Nobody sounds like this. He was one of the first artists from Atlanta to make me feel, like, disconnected from the city. I told Thug, too, one of the first times we were working with each other — like, Man, you’re next. And I’m not even talking about time; I’m talking about how you put your songs together.
He doesn’t put himself in any type of box. He always evolves and always continues to grow and push himself. The uniqueness is his metaphors. The animation of the voice and vocal control. He’ll go from the deep-voice flow to the high-pitch flow. He comes with those melodies that make you want to sing along, but then he comes with those punchlines and metaphors that might have went over your head. He comes with different cadences, different flows. Staccato right here, melodic right here. He changes his flow every four bars; you don’t even realize that he’s rapping three 16s. It’s not just street rap music — it’s art, like, crazy culture clash and genre bend. I love working with him, because I know I can pull up a challenging beat, and he’s up for the challenge. If he respects you as an artist, he’ll get on whatever song you want.
When we thought nobody could be more out of the box than André 3000 and CeeLo Green, it’s like, now we get him. I honestly don’t know what’s going through his head, but it’s never the same, and it’s always unique. — Mike WiLL Made-It is a producer from Georgia. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
Listen to the playlist:
DianeWarren
Do yourself a favor. Take out your pocket jukebox, locate a Diane Warren playlist. (You’ll have your pick. The one for Apple Music’s Songwriters series has 62 songs. Spotify’s “Written by Diane Warren”? Population: 581.) Now, without looking at the whole queue, just take yourself outside or simply close your eyes and allow one of the most prolific, popular and trusted tunesmiths this country has ever produced to astonish you. For one thing, there’s the breadth of her clientele: Taylor Dayne and Taylor Swift, Patti LaBelle and Heart, Chicago but also Shanice. Then there’s the power of her hooks (those could snag a shark). What you’ll discover as the playlist unspools is that she wrote that song and that song and — OMG — that one? She wrote the song you couldn’t get enough of and the song you couldn’t escape. She has written or co-written upward of a dozen major songs in a single year. So there’s a zero percent chance you did not hear one of her hits on a radio — from, say, 1985, when DeBarge’s “Rhythm of the Night” made its way to No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100, to, let’s say, 2001, when Faith Hill took “There You’ll Be” to No. 10. Warren’s songs made it to the Top 10 33 times. Nine of those hit No. 1.
The stats simply argue that she’s undeniable. But what makes her great?
Warren practices a kind of off-the-rack designer extremism: I want you, I need you, you saved me, you left me, you found me, be gone, come back, you got me, you got this, I got me. She downplays anything much more specific because her music trusts its interpreters. The songs are silhouettes for a vocalist to customize, invest in and, in some of the best outcomes, eventually immolate. They’re statements of often perverse confidence: Consider the nerve required to perform as desperately as Warren’s protagonists do. They can be fabulously bereft. The songs’ spines are elastic, accommodating the acoustic, the electronic, the Caribbean, the bombastically orchestral, in arrangements that always seem fun for performers to brand with their likeness. Sometimes, her songs rebrand their performers (à la Chicago and Aerosmith). They’re fun for everybody else to sing, too — even the little things, as when the second verse of Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” jumps right on the heels of the end of the chorus, creating this sensation of urgency, of a diva tap-tap-tapping her watch.
Her songs beg for the impossible (“Un-Break My Heart,” Toni Braxton). They insist on pleasure and on an all-out, on-the-floor, make-no-mistake big finish (LaBelle and Celine Dion on rival versions of “If You Asked Me To”; wherever Steven Tyler finds himself at the end of “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”). That so many of Warren’s songs are for soundtracks speaks to the cinematic nature of her emotional approach. This woman is writing for 80-foot screens, where truly anything could happen: Black karate, the end of the world, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, dangerous men. But Warren’s gift has been that her songs don’t simply thrive for a summer or until the closing of the theatrical window; they live on, just like the feelings in her music: forever and ever. — Wesley Morris
Just a couple of years ago, I was listening to Ace of Base. For some reason, I decided to look up the credits on “Don’t Turn Around” and of course saw “Diane Warren.” The number of times this has happened to me in my lifetime, when I look up the credits to a classic only to see Diane’s name — you would think I’d stop being surprised at this point.
“I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” by Aerosmith is one of the most perfectly written ballads of all time. Her soaring, triumphant melodies — “If I Could Turn Back Time” by Cher and “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” by Starship are classic examples. Honest yet clever lyrics, which, for the nonsongwriters reading this, is a surprisingly hard needle to thread. Saying something heartfelt in a way that makes people feel as if they’ve never heard that sentiment before is almost impossible, and Diane has done that time and time again. It continues to blow my mind because of the number of genres she was writing for: bouncing between Meat Loaf, Mariah Carey, TLC, Aerosmith, Toni Braxton, Heart. She has a deep understanding of all these genres, but at the heart of it she just has the ability to tap into the human experience in such a clear, sincere way. I think that’s why she’s truly one of the best songwriters this world will ever know. — Amy Allen is a songwriter and producer. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
JoshOsborne,BrandyClark,ShaneMcAnally
For some, songwriting is a waiting game. Inspiration comes when it comes; the task is to remain vigilant, scanning the skies for a flash of lightning or an incoming squadron of muses. But on Nashville’s Music Row, the mecca of the country music business, they have a different theory. There, songwriting is a discipline and a day job, a gig you show up for, often several times a week, pushing out as many songs as possible in sessions with fellow writers. The practice rests on a hardheaded mathematical calculation — the more songs you write, the greater the odds you’ll come up with a decent one — and on a particular ideal of creation: a belief that the best songs are team efforts, in which skilled professionals, working quickly and collaboratively, make magic by pooling their talents.
Brandy Clark, Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne are Music Row pros par excellence, brilliant practitioners of the time-honored tradecraft: crisp hooks, witty wordplay, brisk storytelling, songs that click and whir like little machines. They are also disrupters of tradition. For the past 15 years or so, they have been part of a loose collective — including star performers like Kacey Musgraves and Sam Hunt, and a number of other behind-the-scenes writers and producers — whose work has jolted country, pulling the genre in new directions stylistically, sonically, even politically.
Musgraves’s “Follow Your Arrow” (2013), written with McAnally and Clark, is a jaunty ode to nonconformity — in matters of sexual orientation, church attendance, weed intake — that lobbed a cherry bomb at country’s conservative mainstream. Hunt’s sexy 2014 smash “Take Your Time,” written with McAnally and Osborne, reupholstered the country boudoir, bringing lush, woozy production and R&B-style vocals to the top of the charts. In an era when the genre was dominated by bro-country clichés — add equal parts beer, truck and dirt road, stir and serve — Clark, McAnally and Osborne brought varied subject matter, richer emotional shadings and more cosmopolitan leanings. McAnally and Clark’s catchy, clever songs turned out to be a perfect fit for Broadway: They wrote the score for the musical “Shucked,” which earned nine Tony nominations in 2023.
All three writers grew up in modest circumstances far from big cities, and their songs display sharp class consciousness. “Broke,” a Clark-McAnally-Osborne co-write from Clark’s 2016 album “Big Day in a Small Town,” has tight, funny rhymes (“The white left the picket, the fleas left the hound, yeah / And even the crickets have moved into town”) that speak more eloquently to the economic anxieties of the white rural underclass than countless Op-Ed disquisitions on the topic. That song’s twangful snarl — wonderfully sung by Clark, a star recording artist in her own right — is a reminder that these insurgents are also preservationists, capable of delivering old-fashioned pleasures to please the purists. — Jody Rosen
Country people, they really like to hang out — and there’s something implicit in that spirit that transfers into the music. We were having our first session together, and we sat around a table sort of affably chatting. And finally I said, “You’ve got to sing an anthem about corn!”
Well, the two of them went outside to the swimming pool with a guitar and left us alone inside. I kept watching them through the window. They were very quiet. It was like watching very good friends have a conversation. And eventually — I think 20 minutes? — they came in with this divine number. It changed and evolved as we needed it to, but there it is, opening the show now.
I felt like I was watching two magpies looking for something shiny and brilliant that they could pick up and turn into gold, which is what they did. It’s what they do. They find fragments of creativity that speak to them, and then they go into their little cocoon and out comes something unbelievable. This is true of almost anything of theirs I’ve known: They write basically an overview of what is funny or what hurts or what aches or what makes you love, and they seem to have an inexhaustible supply of information and perspective. — Jack O’Brien directed the musical “Shucked,” featuring songs by McAnally and Clark. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
FionaApple
It’s true that in 30 years, Fiona Apple has released only 56 original songs, on five albums, but she packs in more interpersonal danger, impassioned candor and radical tenderness than artists with triple her catalog. Whatever’s lacking in quantity is exceeded in payload. “You fondle my trigger,” she sings on “Limp,” “then you blame my gun.”
So many musicians have trod the roads of love that we’re probably desensitized to the experience of the journey. Or: Not enough songwriters have the facility, dexterity, observational sagacity — no, no, the courage — to ensure that “in love” means something. Apple’s songs invite us back to the euphoria of attraction and the nausea of repulsion. The heart in her music seems like a place one resides. She’s on one side; he — whoever he is — occupies the other. Is there a wall? Does the wall have a door? Who’ll unlock it? Who’ll smash it down?
What she has been offering these 30 years are commanding confessions, admissions, pledges to grow and change. (“Here it comes: a better version of me” is how she put it.) Apple’s always emerging — from a depressive fog, from some volcanic fugue, from recalcitrance, from fear, from disappointment, from being too inside herself.
During the first spring of the pandemic, she once again emerged, this time from an eight-year absence, with “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” which is also the name of the album’s third song, an epiphany about shedding dead weight in middle age. This isn’t a scream from some hound of love (though dogs do bark on the recording). The song sounded new for her — tender, budding. She steadies herself to urge the titular command. And what emerges is a crated cat making its tentative yet resolved exit, and “whatever happens, whatever happens.”
Apple was a teenager when she made her debut in 1996. She spoke her mind in a way that tends to turn women’s new fame into notoriety. Three years later, she returned with songs that drew on a mighty musical intelligence and writerly imagination to make something visceral of her bruised pride and reputation. Apple works at this vertiginous juncture where Emily Dickinson goes rumbling into Etta James and, lately, Beyoncé; where Nico solves puzzles with Randy Newman, Kurt Weill, Nina Simone and the Beatles.
She subsequently pushed her music into new realms full of surprising incongruities: hip-hop clacks (“Fast as You Can,” “Tymps (The Sick in the Head Song)”), rain-dance heaves (“Every Single Night,” “Heavy Balloon”), a gnat-buzz guitar chord (“The Way Things Are”), ’70s suspense cinema (“Valentine”), a bird giving everything it’s got to flight (“Daredevil”), plus all those music box chimes. And the older she gets, the bigger, braver and more wounded her singing has become.
What makes Apple a tremendous songwriter is her tenacity. The songs are about guts. Spilling them, trusting them, checking them. These are songs of utter persistence, of utter utterness. For all else Apple loses (her temper, her stability, her way), she won’t let go of her pen or piano, of the outrageously free, devastatingly beautiful noise she can make of all that loss. — Wesley Morris
There’s an album that I really, really connected with when it came out: “The Idler Wheel.” What struck me was how direct she is. Yes, she’s a poet, and yes, she uses images. But it didn’t feel esoteric and cloying. It felt as if it was just a punch straight to the gut. It never feels sentimental — it feels strong and beautiful and violent.
I don’t know how old she was when she made it. Not that it necessarily matters. But it almost felt, for me, as if it mattered. Her first record, she came out of the gate blazing. It felt as if, OK, we got this thing of being an “it” girl out of the way. What’s next? What art can we make now that we’re really digging in? In a world where everything feels very ageist and as if your best work is your first work, it’s nice to feel her get better and better with the years. I liken it to Stevie Wonder’s golden period — and then he did “Secret Life of Plants,” and you’re like, What?!
“Every Single Night” — I love how driving the words are. It’s hard to separate the lyrics and the melody and the production and the arrangement: The entirety of it is very driving. You can’t say it’s just a beautiful lyric or a beautiful sound. It’s all one, in a way that not every singer-songwriter does. I was also attached to those lyrics because I feel that way. “Every single night’s a fight with my brain,” and then she hits you with “I just want to feel everything.” It’s so vulnerable and so unashamed to be real about these complicated feelings. She’s very generous to have given us that.
Or “Hot Knife.” She is a hot knife, you know? She’s a hot knife and we’re butter. — Cécile McLorin Salvant is a jazz vocalist. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
Babyface
History, as they say, does not repeat — but it rhymes. The career of Kenneth Edmonds, better known as Babyface, offers one of the clearest expressions of that truism: a body of work that echoes the past even as it reshapes the present.
The lineage begins well before him. In 1955, Otis Blackwell, a Black songwriter working in an industry that often obscured Black people’s contributions, wrote “Don’t Be Cruel.” Recorded by Elvis Presley and paired with “Hound Dog,” the single spent 11 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard pop chart, setting a benchmark that would stand for decades.
Edmonds emerged from a longer Midwestern tradition than is usually noted. Cole Porter left Peru, Ind., for Yale, Paris and Broadway. Hoagy Carmichael left Bloomington, Ind., for Hollywood. Both men turned plain-spoken origins into a studied sartorial and lyrical elegance. Edmonds, born in Indianapolis, followed a similar arc and shared with them a gift for collapsing big feelings into diamond lines. Porter’s “Night and Day” (1932) makes time itself an act of longing. Edmond’s first band, the Deele, and their hit “Two Occasions” (1987) arrive at a near-twin distillation 55 years later: “I only think of you / On two occasions / That’s day and night.” Psychic baton: passed.
In 1988, Edmonds co-wrote and co-produced “Don’t Be Cruel” for Bobby Brown — a different song entirely from Blackwell’s, but one that echoes its place in pop culture. It became a defining hit for Brown and signaled Edmonds’s growing command of the mainstream. That command soon became dominance.
Edmonds co-wrote and co-produced “End of the Road” (1992) for Boyz II Men, and the ballad spent 13 consecutive weeks at No. 1. It surpassed Presley’s longstanding achievement and announced a new center of gravity in American pop — one rooted in emotional clarity, vocal precision, Black male interiority and wisdom about women’s desires. Just two years later, he surpassed himself. Released on July 26, 1994, “I’ll Make Love to You” reached No. 1 and remained there for 14 consecutive weeks.
But Babyface’s impact extends even further than two of the biggest songs of the last 30-plus years. In the way of Blackwell and Porter — and one of Edmonds’s own favorites, Smokey Robinson — Edmonds’s songs are expansive enough for most any singer to find themselves in. He has written and produced for artists including TLC, Madonna, Mary J. Blige, Usher, Gladys Knight, the Whispers, Whitney Houston, Tevin Campbell, Toni Braxton, Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Aretha Franklin and Ariana Grande.
What Edmonds ultimately achieved is a redefinition — of the charts, but more lastingly of what a modern love song could be. He diagrams the vertigo of first love like a compound sentence: clause flowing into clause, cause burning into effect. How imagination works, how influence unfolds, how history rhymes — these remain riddles. But Edmonds’s career, a quest to master the tender languages of music, delight and heartbreak, stands as one of the most eloquent answers we have for love’s enduring questions. — Danyel Smith
In the country music scene, a lot of us grew up on R&B. I love me a Babyface love song. One of my favorites was “Take a Bow.” He wrote it with Madonna, and what I love is that he didn’t change the way he wrote songs to write for Madonna: He brought his songwriting style to her. I could tell it was a Babyface song, but Madonna also had her stamp on it. He’s brilliant at not taking away from the artist, but also influencing the artist. That’s a magic thing — it’s not easily done.
There’s one part — “There’s no one here,” and then, “There’s no one here, there’s no one in the crowd” — that chord change right there is just lovely, where it’s placed. That’s so Babyface, that strange little jump. It has tension in it. He has such interesting chord changes and melodies. They’re not big and broad, they’re so smart and concise — and that’s the school I went to, the Babyface School.
The way he writes from a woman’s perspective is really interesting. Most men who try to do that, it feels like mansplaining a woman. The way Mary J. Blige sang “Not Gon’ Cry,” you would have thought she herself had written a song about her ex-husband. Even just that line, “I should have left your ass a thousand times” — that sounds like a woman who’s about to get divorced. You can even go back to Karyn White, “Superwoman”: “I’m not the kind of girl that you can let down and think that everything’s OK.” And one more example: that Pebbles song “Girlfriend,” a woman saying to her friend, “How could you let him treat you so bad?” He has an uncanny ability to tap into a woman’s frustrations and also her sensuality. When I was growing up, I thought, These women write these amazing songs — and I look and it’s like Babyface, Babyface, Babyface.
His lyrics are very simple, but I swear to God, they’re like conversations. They’re very sensual love songs, but they’re not graphic. Your grandma and your cousin would love these songs. They’re intimate and tender. I really attribute to him, you know, the population boom in the ’90s — because we were all listening to Babyface back then. — Natalie Hemby is a songwriter and singer. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
StephinMerritt
Stephin Merritt likes a writing prompt. In 2014, with his 50th birthday approaching, the singer-songwriter-bandleader behind the New York pop ensemble the Magnetic Fields and other indie groups conceived an autobiographical song cycle, with one song for each year of his life. “50 Song Memoir” (2017) was followed three years later by “Quickies,” a collection of ultrashort songs, whose running times ranged from 13 seconds to a sprawling two minutes 35 seconds.
Since the early 1990s, Merritt has based his songwriting on the kinds of formal constraints we associate with conceptual artists more than pop singers. He recorded an album whose song titles all begin with the letter “I,” sequenced alphabetically from “I Die” to “It’s Only Time.” “Distortion” (2008) submerged Merritt’s sly, tuneful ditties in a tsunami of feedbacking guitars, cellos and accordions; “Realism” (2010) stripped back the production and restricted the accompaniment almost entirely to acoustic instruments. Merritt’s most celebrated stunt was the epic “69 Love Songs” (1999), which wowed critics and fans with its singular sound and mix of reference points, blending lo-fi pop and queer-downtown sensibility with tunes and lyrics worthy of Rodgers and Hart. His songwriting brief for “69 Love Songs” captures its flavor: He envisioned a “theatrical revue with four drag queens.”
Merritt is a classicist and a mischief maker. You might say he makes mischief about classicism: that his art investigates, celebrates and lampoons the traditional pop song. He’s an expert craftsman who writes tight little songs with shapely melodies. His music pulls together Tin Pan Alley and 1960s Wall of Sound pop, ticky-tacky drum machines and synths; his storytelling brings a bohemian world into focus through arch aphorisms, dirty jokes and rhymes that scan impeccably. “Somebody’s Fetish” (2017) ponders the wide world of kink in couplets Cole Porter would have admired: “Nothing’s too strange for somebody’s palate / Some spank the maid and some wank the valet.” “Andrew in Drag” (2012) laments the one who got away: “There is no hope of love for me, from here on I go stag / The only girl I’ll ever love is Andrew in drag.”
Merritt sings in a glum, flat baritone. Even at his most ecstatic, he sounds bummed out, like Dracula brooding at a corner table in the world’s loneliest saloon. That voice is a secret weapon that lets Merritt have it both ways, staking claim to the shadowland between parody and sincerity. “69 Love Songs,” he once said, is not an album of love songs; it’s “an album about love songs, which are very far away from anything to do with love.” Are they really, though? Merritt draws listeners’ attention to songwriting form, winking at its conventions and timeworn tropes. But the songs’ power lies in ambiguity — how easily, almost imperceptibly, they slip between tongue in cheek and heart on sleeve.
The most famous example is “The Book of Love,” from “69 Love Songs,” which has become a standard, hallowed in cover versions by Peter Gabriel and Olivia Rodrigo, among others. Listen to Rodrigo’s reverential treatment and you’ll hear the essence of Merritt’s magic: the way the stately, dreamy melody glides and crests before arriving at a key moment, a lyric that does triple duty as ironic wisecrack, die-hard romantic slogan and theory of popular song: “The book of love has music in it / In fact, that’s where music comes from.” — Jody Rosen
There’s something about the tone of his lyrics, a meta quality. Hyper-self-aware, but also simultaneously sincere. He has a sense of humor about it. On “I Don’t Want to Get Over You,” he sounds self-aware of how maudlin and melodramatic his tone is, but there’s a realness to it. There’s this sick joy in being really miserable, leaning into the misery that accompanies loss. He exaggerates things and incorporates details that feel both like a commentary on how human beings can be willfully self-destructive and how there’s something romantic and funny about that. “Smoke clove cigarettes” and “read Camus” — in high school, that’s what you were doing.
He has a real knack for finding details that you wouldn’t think of being in a love song — that take you out of it for a moment and remind you who is at the helm. “Strange Powers” is so great lyrically. Only Stephin Merritt would write a line like “On a Ferris wheel, looking out on Coney Island / Under more stars than there are prostitutes in Thailand.” I wonder if there’s this balance of, like, if you take out that line, maybe he gets a little uncomfortable with how sweet and romantic that song is?
He’s an ill-fated romantic. Such a New York writer, too — it feels like one of his major themes is New York, and also queer culture, romance, gothic longing, indulging in misery. In the documentary about him, he talks about going to gay bars during the daytime and writing his songs on a napkin. That’s so romantic. — Michelle Zauner is a musician and writer. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
RomeoSantos
The first true hit for Aventura, the Dominican American bachata group — boy band, if you will — was called “Obsesión,” a gingerly paced 2002 ballad about desperate longing, the feverish flirtations of a panting young man. It appeared on the group’s second album, “We Broke the Rules” — a declaration of war on the strictures of bachata.
Before the rise of Aventura, bachata — Dominican folk music of the working class, which traces its roots to the 1960s — was largely a cloistered concern. But Aventura’s frontman and primary songwriter, Romeo Santos, was raised in the Bronx on hip-hop, R&B and pop. And his vision of bachata brought the genre boldly into the present, and also set an unwitting template for how Spanish-language music could firm-footedly interface with pop’s other streams, arguably laying the groundwork for Latin megastars like Bad Bunny.
It didn’t take long for “Obsesión” to become a defining song of Latin pop. (An English-language version, by the Mexican American singer Frankie J, helped, too.) But Santos used that currency to pivot once more. To lead off the group’s next album, Aventura released a song that sounded similar but functioned very differently: “Hermanita,” about domestic violence, deploying machismo in service of dismantling patriarchy.
In the two decades since, with Aventura and as a wildly successful solo artist, the sweet-voiced Santos has almost single-handedly reshaped bachata in his own image. His songs are smooth and lusty, his writing conversational and to the point. He somehow channels the romantic ambition of great ’70s and ’90s R&B into compositions that come off as almost humble, emphasizing Dominican instruments like the requinto and the güira, to make clear he hasn’t abandoned the idea of bachata as common-cause folk music.
With a rigorous and limited set of parts, Santos has kept a whole genre vital. It remains somewhat cloistered — still not reaching the same global absorption as its cousins reggaeton, Latin trap or corridos tumbados — but with a far higher ceiling than the one he inherited.
Most crucially, having perfected his formula, Santos invited others into his world — Usher on “Promise,” Drake on “Odio” — putting his grammar in the mouths of some of pop’s best-known figures. These weren’t moments of concession for bachata; rather, they were opportunities for outsiders to pay homage on Santos’s terms. His genre, his rules. — Jon Caramanica
My earliest encounter with Romeo songs was probably with Aventura albums. A lot of those songs had great melodies, catchy choruses with romanticism, yet cool musical rhythms within bachata. “Hermanita” talks about a protective brother who makes sure his sister doesn’t get hurt. When I started hearing this type of writing, I realized that not every song had to be about falling in love or breaking up; they could be about social problems, or telling a story in third person.
Romeo really tries to push himself. His songs are not written in a traditional way. He doesn’t just do verse, prechorus and chorus. He has constant changes in melodies, changes in chord progression or the key of the song. He adds a random bridge or outro in places you wouldn’t traditionally go. He always pushes lyrics to have some sort of different storytelling, and even words that just aren’t common vocabulary. For Romeo, there is always a new and different way to write a story. — Prince Royce is a singer from the Bronx. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
CaroleKing
To stratify the 400-song catalog of Carole King, let alone choose her shiniest song, is an exercise in foolishness. It’s impossible, yet there is that pull for one tune to be the fullest, most heartbreaking, most illustrative of her totality. And the finest song of King’s career may just be “Way Over Yonder.” It has been described as expressing a desire for peace and homecoming, but is more truly the soundtrack to a home-going — one of the most rhapsodic descriptions of heaven’s terrain in the history of American pop.
There’s the “shelter from a hunger and cold.” There’s the easy embodiment of, and escape from, trouble and worry. There is the glory of knowing exactly where you are bound. The through line in King’s work is the way she isolates near-unnameable feelings and then charts them plainly.
In the early 1960s, King and her first husband, Gerry Goffin, were among the writers whittling songs to perfection as part of the Brill Building era. The United States was still segregated by law and custom, but the Brill scene often operated by a different logic — one where some Black and white artists, men and women, made music that crossed lines imposed by the prevailing social order.
So many of the songs that King wrote in this period — the Shirelles’ 1960 hit “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (the first song by a Black girl group to reach No. 1 on the pop chart) and the Drifters’ 1962 “Up on the Roof” — sit at the intersection of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, nascent rock ’n’ roll and the Black musical traditions from which it sprang. These songs are steeped in the optimism of integration at its most aspirational.
King emerged from that period with a deeply nuanced command of her craft, which she channeled into her seminal solo album, “Tapestry” (1971), a blueprint for the singer-songwriter form. It won four Grammy Awards, including song of the year — a first for a woman — and remained on the Billboard 200 for more than six years. “Way Over Yonder” is in company with the wet-eyed “So Far Away,” which along with “It’s Too Late” came to define melancholy for a generation of women for whom waiting had become a choice. “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” — written with Goffin and first recorded by Aretha Franklin in 1967, then performed by King on “Tapestry” — expresses a vulnerable gratefulness for love that never comes off as powerlessness: “When my soul was in the lost and found / You came along to claim it.” King writes from the place just before and just beyond safety, where the longing is.
Yet even with all the accolades, King still does not receive enough credit for influencing the best male songwriters of her era. It is no coincidence that in the wake of “Way Over Yonder” came Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and Barry Manilow’s “Sweet Life” (both from 1973) and the Ohio Players’ “Heaven Must Be Like This” (1974).
Her voice continues to echo in Norah Jones’s breathy understatement, Tracy Chapman’s acoustic urgency and the way Alicia Keys attaches grandeur to a single piano chord. Taylor Swift, who inducted King into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2021, owes a direct debt to King’s conversational style. What she gave pop was permission: to be unguarded, to be specific — and, to quote the singer-songwriter Cheryl Lynn, to be real. — Danyel Smith
“So Far Away.” It’s been around for as long as I’ve had ears. My grandma had that record; I feel like everybody had that record. King is famous for her first lines — as a songwriter, you’re looking at that first line to really sink its teeth in, so you get people listening. “So far away / Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” Even as a little girl, it was so simple to understand. As a touring musician, it’s so relatable: You’re so far away from your friends and your family and your animals and your garden. Some nights it just creeps in, and you’re reminded what’s out there for you, and what you left behind. The melody has always stuck with me. It’s kind of this melancholic melody. It sits in this weird, unique place. It’s matter-of-fact, but it’s also kind of sad, but also: Isn’t it nice to have someone you love?
One thing I’m always striving to do as a writer is just to say things as simply as possible. That’s where the magic dust lies. There are certain things King comes back to over and over again — like love, which we all experience; nature, which we all experience; seasons; colors. That’s just the human condition, right? That’s what we’re working with. As a vocalist, she’s not showy. She’s straight to the point. It’s almost like hearing your friend, almost like you know her. “This is what I sound like. I’m not going for it. I’m just being honest.” She doesn’t have huge lines in her songs that are like, Listen to this poetry. Everyone understands what she’s talking about. Her melodies are simple, but they feel as if they’ve always existed. You hear it and it’s instantly recognizable — even when you’re hearing the song for the first time. She’s a magician at that. She’s got to be one of the best to ever do it. — Brittany Howard is a solo artist and a member of Alabama Shakes. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
Outkast
A world-warping career started with an assignment so undignified that it could have been sabotage: Write a Christmas song. The premise that Outkast — the duo André Benjamin (later André 3000) and Antwan Patton (Big Boi), then barely out of high school — landed on was simple enough. “Ain’t no Christmas in the ghetto,” as the producer Rico Wade put it.
The result was “Player’s Ball” (1993), which became a No. 1 hip-hop hit by cracking open the motel door to show the world a Southern hustler culture of pimps, dealers and customers against a Yuletide backdrop. “I’m wide open on the freeway, my pager broke my vibe,” Big Boi raps, “’cause a junkie is a junkie three sixty-five.”
The track’s outro emphasizes what makes Outkast’s songwriting special: By naming the local neighborhoods — “from East Point, College Park, Decatur, the ’Briar” — Dré and Big began to undo the timidity of the mainstream Southern rappers before them, who never wanted to appear too deep-fried, lest they be written off as uncivilized against hip-hop’s New York-Los Angeles stronghold. “The South,” as André later put it to industry boos, “got something to say!”
Beginning with their 1994 album, “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik,” Outkast traversed the local — intersections, clubs, police units, serial killers (human and chemical) and skating rinks, but chased the universal, providing a blueprint for decades of outré Atlanta street rap to come. Musically, the group nodded to the Afrofuturist funk of George Clinton and Sly Stone. But Outkast also unabashedly grabbed for other limbs of the Black music family tree, like the G-funk of Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” (1992) — Parliament-Funkadelic’s West Coast rap descendants — and Atlanta’s own strains, in part because live instrumentation was cheaper than the disco and Motown sampling that drove rap up North.
Every gloriously indulgent swerve somehow made Outkast more popular. One of their most enduring numbers, “SpottieOttieDopaliscious,” from “Aquemini” (1998), is seven minutes of horn hook and what the group called smokin’ word. “B.O.B.,” for “Bombs Over Baghdad,” from “Stankonia” (2000, prewar), is 155-beats-per-minute drum ’n’ bass with assaultive tongue-twisting that turns to spiritual chant: “Power music, electric revival!” “Ms. Jackson,” from that same album, forever-ever warps “Here Comes the Bride” into the lament of an inveterate dog trying to settle into a custody compromise. The M.C.s produced all those, by the way.
André 3000, largely thanks to experiments in dress, is often considered the weirdo wild card, and Big Boi the straight man. But each could be abstruse or crowd-pleasing — whatever they made was pop if they so willed it. When the pair split, first for the double solo album experiment “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” in 2003, each immediately delivered a No. 1 smash in a new mode: Big Boi’s “The Way You Move” is, counterintuitively, the obvious wedding dance-floor standard, and “Hey Ya!” is “Hey Ya!” — but stranger than you might remember. Outkast made their eccentricities feel normal, setting the bar for rap-song experimentation in the stratosphere. — Joe Coscarelli
“ATLiens” is one of my favorites. Big Boi wrote the hook: “Now throw your hands in the air / And wave ’em like you just don’t care / And if you like fish and grits and all that pimp shit / Everybody let me hear you say ‘Oh yeah-yer.’” That is so hip-hop and so Southern at the same time. That was just a perfect marriage of everything I loved about UGK and A Tribe Called Quest in one human being; I don’t know if any other person or any M.C. could have put that together. Big Boi’s verse: “Well it’s the M-I, crooked letter, ain’t no one better / And when I’m on the microphone you best to wear your sweater.” And here’s one of the coldest lines ever said: “’Cause I’m cooler than a polar bear’s toenails.” His patterns, his slick talk, his mixing of hip-hop-isms with the call and response, the Southernism of fish and grits, just amazing. And when Dré comes in, he’s going to rap about, and to, girls. That’s one of the masterful things he does: He gets the girls’ attention. He doesn’t talk about marriage, a perfect house, a perfect car — he talks about him and a woman creating a life together and raising a child. That’s beautiful.
Outkast were spiritually determined to be themselves, and I thought that was absolutely amazing. So “ATLiens,” when Big Boi played that for me, I realized: They’re different, and I’m going to have to really sharpen my skills if I intend to be in this for real. Because these two guys that were just as regular as I was are now some of the most phenomenal artists I’ve ever heard. I’ve learned from Outkast: Stay as creative as possible. Don’t stay the same. — Killer Mike is a rapper from Atlanta. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
MariahCarey
Pop, in the American sense, is democracy in melody, consensus in chorus. And Mariah Carey, having written or co-written 18 of her 19 No. 1 singles, stands at its summit, right up there with the Beatles (with 20 No. 1s), translating feeling into something lushly intimate and vast.
In 1990, she steps into a crowded field — Janet Jackson, Madonna, En Vogue, Taylor Dayne — with “Vision of Love,” threading gospel sinew through R&B muscle. By the time she reaches the effervescence of “Dreamlover” (1993) and “Always Be My Baby” (1995), she’s refining a lexicon of longing: the phrasing, the internal rhymes, the way sleek aria deftly delivers desire.
Then comes the stroke of authorship as cultural force. With the 1995 “Fantasy” remix featuring Wu-Tang Clan’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Carey institutionalizes hip-hop’s marriage to pop soul. Without that instinct and that push through the closed-mindedness of the era, there is no modern hybrid of rap and pop as we know it today. “Honey,” “Heartbreaker” and the sublime “We Belong Together” — they all carry that hybrid DNA from a songwriter thinking in moods and collisions: “Bobby Womack’s on the radio / Saying to me, ‘If you think you’re lonely now’ / Wait a minute this is too deep (too deep) / I gotta change the station / So I turn the dial trying to catch a break / And then I hear Babyface: / I only think of you.” Carey claims everything. Her pen moves with the same agility as her voice.
And yet, the messy mythology of the “diva” has done its damage. The word — so often a diabolical four-letter dismissal — recasts precision as excess, ambition as ego, obsession as spectacle. But the truth about Carey is that beyond songwriting, she functions as architect of her vocal universe, constructing chords, layering note upon note for a precise emotional result. This gives her work irresistible momentum. That rich compositional energy emerges even now in beloved memes of goofy, ecstatic love and in the work of songwriters like Olivia Dean, Muni Long and Victoria Monét.
If a man had created and curated culture from the center of nearly every cool 1990s party, every all-night session and every aesthetic shift — fashion, club sound, radio, film, tabloid — he’d be canonized as a visionary. Carey already is one. — Danyel Smith
“If you should return to me / We truly were meant to be.” It’s such a simple idea. But the way she frames it, inside the story of the song, makes it feel personal and empowering instead of clichéd. The way the chorus opens up, emotionally and melodically, when she sings “Spread your wings and prepare to fly” — it feels as if the music itself is taking flight. The metaphor of the butterfly runs through the song so gracefully; it’s about growth, freedom and self-realization, but it’s also about a type of love that isn’t possessive. What makes Mariah so brilliant is that she can write something poetic without losing clarity.
Her songs often live in that space between vulnerability and strength. She writes melodies that move in unexpected ways but still feel natural to sing. As I became a songwriter, I started appreciating even more how intentional her work is: Every run, chord change and lyric feels like it’s serving the story of the song. She mastered stacking harmonies and creating moments where the vocals almost become part of the production. And she’s never afraid of using sophisticated language in pop music — words like “emancipation,” “inevitably” and “rapture” still feel conversational.
Growing up, what resonated with me was how feminine and powerful her writing felt. She could be soft, romantic, vulnerable — but also confident and self-possessed. Mariah really showed so many of us that songwriting could be both technically masterful and emotionally fearless. — Victoria Monét is a songwriter and singer. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
WillieNelson
What kind of songwriter is Willie Nelson? He’s a country tunesmith, of course, the crafter of some of the most beloved entries in the genre’s golden songbook. He wrote Patsy Cline’s signature song, “Crazy,” sometime around 1959. According to legend, he wrote two more standards that same week: the barfly anthem “Night Life” and the sneaky “Funny How Time Slips Away,” a breakup song that hides a switchblade in its cowboy boot.
Nelson might have secured immortality merely on the strength of that early stuff. Of course, he didn’t stop there. He became a country superstar: the genre’s definitive “outlaw” and a revered singer-composer, with a catalog of hundreds of songs in a career spanning 69 years and counting.
But listen closer and things get complicated. Take “Crazy.” Is it really a country song? Its melody unfolds in legato phrases that drift across the bar line; its harmonic language leans toward George Gershwin’s chromaticism more than Hank Williams’s honky-tonk. “Night Life” and “Funny How Time Slips Away” are similarly slippery, forsaking simple country structures and tilting toward blues and jazz, with tunes that glide and hover, giving singers space to bend notes and stretch time. If you survey the Nelson corpus, you find more of the same: down-home weepers jazzed up with passing chords; blues numbers that burble into funk; stark gospel testimonials that double as hippie protests.
What kind of songwriter isn’t Willie Nelson? That might be the pertinent question. For decades, he has occupied a place beyond genre and outside time, serving as something like an American musical unconscious. It’s a role that rests on Nelson’s genius as both a singer and a guitarist, and on his voracious musical appetite, his apparent desire to leave no song unsung — his originals, age-old folk ballads, Muppet movie songs, you name it.
One thing Nelson took from country is plain talk, a gift for speaking volumes in few words. His economical expression gives his songs power and punch, whether he’s pledging love, telling jokes or laying out personal credos, as in “On the Road Again”: “The life I love is making music with my friends.” He has a philosophical streak, and his interest in cosmic riddles seemed to deepen in the early 1970s, around the time he moved to Austin, Texas, grew out his hair and took up an acres-per-week weed-smoking habit. Nelson’s stoner wisdom wafts through songs like “Still Is Still Moving to Me,” a sort of Zen koan set to spaghetti-western guitar.
As he reached his 80s — and now his 90s — he turned to the obvious topic, mortality, in songs that are alternately numinous and droll. He has imagined an afterlife in which he transmigrates into a star in the night sky; in “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die” (2012), he pictured his corpse being twisted in rolling paper and set ablaze, funeral-pyre style. A few weeks ago, he dropped a new single, the title track from his forthcoming studio album (his 104th, give or take, but who’s counting?). “Dream Chaser” is a gently loping ballad in which a ruminative Nelson ponders long life, old age and another, perhaps more mysterious matter: how songs materialize. “Last night a new song came to me / Faster than I could write it down,” he sings. “Sometimes I wonder if there’ll be another / Then another comes around.” — Jody Rosen
You dream, as a young songwriter, that you’re gonna have songs that outlive you. Willie has a whole body of work that will outlive him.
The living that Willie has done has informed all of his word choices, all of his chords. He writes songs from the actual moment of experience; he was able to put music to his everyday thinking. I’m always struck by his inner monologue. He writes beautifully, but he always puts in things that make you go, Oh, gosh, I say that every day. It sounds so conversational. He builds in real-life dialogue, the kind of dialogue you hear yourself saying to whoever it is that you love or that you’ve disappointed.
How in the world did he write intricate chord changes — and what sound like beautifully simple melodies, yet they’re like classic jazz lines — and then sing about, you know, how time’s slipping away and we don’t even realize it? It’s, like, subliminal. Anyone who’s ever had an emotion has experienced the loneliness of staring at your walls or your ceiling, wondering: What’s next? How did I get here? But the fact that he could sit down and write a song like “Hello Walls” is so novel, so Willie Nelson.
The only way you have the body of work that he has — or the body of work of the greatest painters or greatest writers — is because they were able to access something that was authentic to their experience. My dad always used to sing “Night Life.” When you listen to that, you feel like you’re hearing a guy who lives in late-night clubs, and he’s a writer like Steinbeck. But then you go listen to Marvin Gaye’s version, and it’s Marvin Gaye’s song. You listen to Elvis’s version, and it’s Elvis’s song. He writes songs that people are able to literally make sound like their own.
As you get older, you start realizing: I want to be great. How do you get to be great? And a large part of being great is living and being unselfish. That’s what Willie is. — Sheryl Crow is a Grammy-winning musician. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
KendrickLamar
Kendrick Lamar’s songs hunger to mean more than everybody else’s. They’re X-rays of his behavior and also yours. They’re vivifications of Compton, Calif., his psychic epicenter. They do passion, sex, recrimination, uplift, letdown, guilt, pride, money’s elemental contagion — with vulgarity, ruthlessness and heart. He’s rapacious and voracious. The songs often have eyes bigger than their stomachs. But Lamar’s velocity reflects his ambition. The rhymes hurtle out at double and triple time. The rapping matches the writing: pure spandex, sometimes with absurd leaps into anxiously higher vocal registers (try “FEEL.” from “DAMN.”).
The music driving these songs often combines pop, rock, soul, funk, crunk, street-corner church, bounce and quiet storm; on something like “i,” it’s most of those at once. Lamar recombines himself, too, from different points of view: his parents, his women, his subconscious, his people, his enemies. There’s what they call conscious rap — music determined to stroll sidewalks rather than thrive in the streets. Then there’s what Lamar is up to: subconscious rap. He’s our great out-of-body rapper. The songs are these one-man shows of self-reckoning (Lamar’s writing loves a mirror) and wreaking havoc. Occasionally, they reckon with havoc, or they’re brutal re-enactments of it, the way he and the actress Taylour Paige do with stunning vulgarity on “We Cry Together.”
Lamar might also be our most ideological practicing rapper, condemning those he has judged as inauthentic, opportunistic, insufficiently modest — as peers, as men, as Black men. Two springs ago, he and Drake found themselves doing battle in what was essentially a songwriting contest that took … a turn. The expediency of their exchanges (back and forth over a couple of weeks) electrified the planet, especially the mounting viciousness of Lamar’s attack (ad hominem all the way). Some of what riveted us was that we didn’t know Lamar quite had this in him: short-order anthems full of murderous overreaction, dogged spite, the profound and the petty.
He’d tasked himself with the job of laying waste to the biggest, most elastic hip-hop artist on Earth, exorcising him from the culture on charges of fraud. The sense that this whole affair somehow felt beneath Lamar speaks to the loftiness of his artistry: the hill of Grammys, a career upon the summit of critics’ lists and polls, a Pulitzer Prize in 2018. Why would he be here, at the gallows, doing headsman work? Because he could, as in because he was able, capable. He emerged from that war not only more popular but more aware of his power as a writer, newly thrilled by it.
It has always been clear that Lamar could write personally and therefore politically. But over the last decade, that intelligence has only sharpened. The songs don’t feel thought out so much as they seem to be thinking right there on the spot. The great rappers tend to work with that kind of immediacy. Lamar, though, stuffs his songs with more ideas, more evolution, than you’d find on a single album by another musician. You can hear someone on a journey of discovery, looking at the person he is and sometimes at the people we are. He’s evolving at warp speed. So, yeah, sometimes the wheels come off and the chassis is gone. But there’s Lamar, still going, like one of those cartoons, where a character’s driving nothing but himself and a steering wheel, exposed yet also free, daring to go too far to someplace new. — Wesley Morris
I’ll put it like this: He, along with Motown, Sly Stone, the Beatles — that kind of institution is going to last. There are a lot of slick writers out here nowadays with lyrics and things, but he writes with soul. He’s a young kid, but when I met him, he sounded my age. He’s like a psychiatrist on record — he talks about [expletive] that most people are afraid to talk about. He’s at that point where he can move the conversation. Nobody will talk about these topics, and he talks about them so matter-of-factly that you don’t even think, You can’t say that.
Making it commercial is another thing. It’s one thing to be hard-core gangster rapping so you can say things. But when you’re talking about life in general and make it sound so hard, so cool — then watch the kids say, No, he ain’t all that, then turn around the next year and change their minds? Kids today, they want their new artist; they don’t want their older brother or sister’s artist or their mother and father’s. Kids don’t like you after a few years. When you can go past that and have the next generation after that still talking about you, you’re doing something.
That whole “To Pimp a Butterfly” album, it was like one song to me. It was like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” And he’s starting all over each time he puts an album out — he’s like a brand-new kid. — George Clinton is the leader of Parliament-Funkadelic. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
ValerieSimpson
To trace Valerie Simpson and Nickolas Ashford’s influence is to map the genetic code of American popular songwriting. Take the lyrics and lilt of a song like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (1967), just one of the duo’s dozens of hits: “Ain’t no valley low / Ain’t no river wide enough, baby / If you need me / Call me / No matter where you are / No matter how far.” Their language — marked by rich, tactile detail and a colloquial urgency — has quietly shaped how generations of songwriters articulate devotion.
Simpson grew up in the Bronx, and her musical life took shape when she joined the choir at Harlem’s White Rock Baptist Church and met Ashford in 1964. They became songwriting and singing partners — and a decade later, husband and wife. A trained pianist with gospel roots, Simpson anchored the harmonic and musical structure, while Ashford, who died in 2011, often generated lyrical ideas and thematic affect — though their roles invariably overlapped. The pair recorded together, but it was when they shifted their focus from performing to songwriting that they began to blow up.
Their 1966 No. 1 R&B hit for Ray Charles, “Let’s Go Get Stoned,” propelled them toward Motown — and toward the creation of the epochal 1967-68 Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell triad: “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” and “You’re All I Need to Get By.” These songs function as templates: modular, emotionally forthright and infinitely transmutable, as proved by Mary J. Blige and Method Man’s “I’ll Be There for You/You’re All I Need to Get By” (1995). Simpson’s voice — both literal and compositional — helped turn the modern duet, with a nod to the jazz duets of the 1940s and ’50s, into a dramatic form all its own.
That gift for elevating the intimate continued to evolve. Simpson also co-wrote and produced “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand)” (1970) for Diana Ross, kicking off her solo career with pop poetry and social uplift. And post-Motown songs like “I’m Every Woman,” made monumental by Chaka Khan (1978) and Whitney Houston (1992), reveal Simpson’s gift for premonition: girl-power aria embedded in boogie-down euphoria, decades before such fusion became common currency. The emotional transparency of artists like Alicia Keys, Jazmine Sullivan, Adele, Sade and Beyoncé flows from a well that Simpson helped dig.
Simpson and her husband’s catalog continues to be sampled, covered and reinterpreted, because it was never merely a collection of songs. It is a solar system — verses and melodies, with their own gravity, stretching from Ronnie Milsap’s “Never Had It So Good” to Diana Ross’s “The Boss” to their own hit “Solid” (1984). Few songwriters ever generate that kind of pull. Fewer still create a universe that expands the longer you listen. — Danyel Smith
I remember when Nick and Val came to one of our legendary quality-control meetings. They had a new song that we had to vote on, and they were up against a couple of the heavyweights. They were nervous. We played it, and all I could say was, “We’re not going to vote on this one — we’re just going to send it out.” It was that good. The song was “You’re All I Need to Get By,” a hit for Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell and, later, Aretha Franklin.
They were so good with words — the way they wove the lyrics, the phrases and the imagery in their songs. “I’ve got your picture hanging on the wall / But it can’t see or come to me when I call your name.” Classic! “Reach out and touch / Somebody’s hand / Make this world a better place / If you can.” Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson did just that. — Berry Gordy is the founder of the Motown record label. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
BobDylan
If you were to claim — as many have, and many more undoubtedly will — that Bob Dylan is the greatest songwriter of them all, a question arises: Which Bob Dylan? Is it the Greenwich Village greenhorn, wrangling folk song tropes and visionary protest poetry into generational anthems? Or the rock ’n’ roll hero, armed with a Stratocaster and a sneer, howling, “How does it feel?” Is it the crooning back-to-the-lander of the Woodstock years, the raging minstrel of “Blood on the Tracks” or the born-again Dylan, handing down homilies from a crooked pulpit? Is it the 1980s Dylan, making peace with synthesizers and chorus-effect pedals, or the Dylan of the 21st century, a trickster in his twilight years, scavenging the archives of the American unconscious to mash-up the Titanic disaster and the Kennedy assassination, “Moby-Dick” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street”?
Even if we reject the silly label “greatest songwriter,” there’s no denying that Bob Dylan pushed back the horizons of popular music, expanding the limits of what a song could say and how it could say it. In his songs, the English language turned woolier and more expressionistic; musical space-time distended and stretched. (Before “Like a Rolling Stone,” a six-minute hit single was unthinkable.) He’s written blues and torch ballads; he’s thundered prophesies and told absurdist tall tales. His diss tracks are more vicious than any battle rapper’s, his love songs as heart-wrenching as any you’ve heard. He’s treated historical catastrophes as slapstick. He depicted his marital breakup as a climatological event, capable of shooting a hurricane-force “idiot wind” across the American continent, “from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.”
Perhaps his favorite and most fruitful subject is “Bob Dylan.” Today’s stars go to war with haters, but Dylan takes aim at venerators, seeking to jam the gears of a hagiography machine that’s been clanking and wheezing since 1962. That mission has grown more pressing since 2016, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. There are those of us who view that honor as a category error, which misconstrues the nature of Dylan’s art — treating him as the author of texts when he’s a composer of songs, whose meaning snaps into focus only when they are performed. Dylan’s songwriting brilliance is inseparable from the magic of his singing. As a vocal stylist, a phraser, he’s up there with history’s very greatest.
But no matter. The Swedish Academy has simply added a new twist to a decades-long game of peekaboo, where Dylan, né Robert Zimmerman, peels back one mask to reveal another, an infinity of disguises. (“You may call me Terry, you may call me Timmy / You may call me Bobby, you may call me Zimmy,” he sang in 1979.) He has always tackled big questions with jokes, the existential-ontological kind and the setup-punchline kind. In the latter category is a couplet from “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight” (1983), in which Dylan cracks wise about the burden of his legend. “It’s like I’m stuck inside a painting that’s hanging in the Louvre,” he sings. And then, the deadpan kicker: “My throat starts to tickle and my nose itches, but I know that I can’t move.” — Jody Rosen
I first heard “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” when I was extremely young. The whole atmosphere of that time was very complicated for a young person. He played Town Hall in Philadelphia. I remember this song because I didn’t know it, he hadn’t recorded it yet. He did it slower; it seemed very mournful, a little dirge-like. What I remember most was the line “I got nothing, Ma, to live up to,” which made me very sad. But the line that made me feel understood, and that I have held onto my whole life, was “If my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” A person like me, who had many conflicting thoughts about everything, a lot that I kept to myself: I felt like he understood.
“Bringing It All Back Home” came out in ’65, and it was like a revelation because he declared on this album — just with his appearance, just with the cover — a kind of independence from everything. The recording of “It’s Alright, Ma” is a little more upbeat, and it just magnified his restlessness, his self-assurance, even a very subtle arrogance. As he was singing “I got nothing, Ma, to live up to,” I felt like he was giving us something to live up to — a whole atmosphere that spoke for how we were also feeling.
On one side, there’s that desolation: “I got nothing, Ma, to live up to.” But on the other side of the mirror, with “if my thought-dreams could be seen”: the sort of unstoppable or infinite imagination, or infinite thoughts, or the evolution into creating something yourself to live up to. To me, it was just the other side of things — people seeing you as nothing, and your mind going all over the universe.
That song is filled with lines that people have quoted. President Carter quoted that song. I’ve heard Dylan do the song in many different decades, and when that line comes up — “Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked” — during the Nixon administration, people got up and cheered. It’s apropos to the times, constantly, because it’s a little piece of truth. The president of the United States is not above the law; he must be transparent.
It speaks to the brilliance of the song that people have found words that they couldn’t find for themselves, that he could supply people with the right words. He’s done it over and over with many, many songs, and he’s given us enough words for a lifetime, when we can’t find our own. But it’s not just the words; it’s a certain freedom, a certain attitude. He gives us intent. Energy. A sense of youthful righteousness. — Patti Smith is a musician and writer. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
LanaDelRey
Here in the second quarter of the 21st century, it is easy to feel crushed under the weight of history, as though every song worth singing has already been written. The diaphanous music of Lana Del Rey, though, never sounds bogged down by the anxiety of influence. Del Rey is deeply interested in received American mythology and mass popular culture (“Tell me I’m your national anthem,” she cooed like Marilyn on her 2012 major-label debut; her 2019 masterpiece is titled, superbly, “Norman Fucking Rockwell!”), but in her songs the past feels light enough to float. There it goes, downstream in an atemporal swirl, our trickling national stream of consciousness: a ripped out page of Sylvia Plath, a half-forgotten Dennis Wilson record, a vintage Sublime T-shirt, a used vape cartridge and maybe — with her characteristic flair for self-mythology — a ticket stub from a Lana Del Rey concert.
Out of such found detritus, and with the ingenuity of her own peculiar imagination, Del Rey makes her musical poetry, and in doing so has become one of the most influential female singer-songwriters of her lifetime. Everybody wants to sound like her, but no one else can quite replicate the particular sonic grammar of her writing, which unfurls like an intimate dispatch from the blurry edge of sleep and wakefulness.
Since her sudden arrival in 2011 with an exquisitely sad, out-of-the-past torch song called “Video Games,” Del Rey has evolved past the shock of her early fatalism (her breakthrough album was called “Born to Die”) without straying from her initial fixations: sex, death and romantic love, all of the particularly American variety. At a time when the most successful female pop stars were advocating cheery empowerment, she offered a welcome aesthetic of refined resignation. Nine albums in, Del Rey still delights in the transgression of singing things that a 21st-century woman isn’t supposed to say (see: her 2023 epic “A&W,” which reportedly stands for “American Whore”), slouching toward passivity, submission and self-abnegation. But what her detractors often miss is the fact that “writing” is an action verb, and Del Rey amply demonstrates her inherent agency with each brilliantly strange lyric she pens. Knowing that she is not for everybody has only made her more herself. “I’m a princess, I’m divisive,” she sings on “A&W,” before offering up, with a shrug, the closest she has come to a statement of purpose: “I don’t know, maybe I’m just like this.” — Lindsay Zoladz
I love pop radio. If you want to talk about Sun Ra and all that, I can do that too. But when I heard “Shades of Cool,” I was just so drawn into the imagery and the feel of the song. “Ultraviolence” was like the soundtrack to my life for eight months. The first line of the album — I wrote a note to myself: “Share my body and my mind with you / That’s all over now.” That cuts to the core for me. I felt she was this old soul, an old soul that really spoke to me.
I think she’s brilliant. I need another word for “master” — she was the mistress of the double entendre. She made audible cinema: It sounded like it felt, and it felt like it sounded. She has that thing where the melodies are just as compelling as the lyrics; they fit together in your mouth. She really spins a tale, yet there’s satisfying distance as well, which makes it art. She has a cool writer’s distance. She’s like the Brill Building, or Carole King, or Lou Reed. It’s a craft she is building. — Meshell Ndegeocello is a singer-songwriter and bassist. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
The-Dream
The job of a pop topliner — the term of art for a behind-the-scenes songwriter sketching lyrics and melody over an instrumental track — is something like an assassin who specializes in disguise: Embody another, hit your mark and then disappear. Yet Terius Gesteelde-Diamant, better known as The-Dream (and formerly Terius Nash), has pulled it off so many times that the syllabic bounce, falsetto slides and repetitive vowel work that we associate with some of this century’s defining pop stars — ella-ella, ay, ay, ay — are actually his.
Name a post-aughts R&B smash, and his imprint is probably on it: Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” Ciara’s gyrating “Ride,” Justin Bieber’s prepubescent arrival “Baby” and Mariah Carey’s plinky “Touch My Body” and “Obsessed.” And then there’s Beyoncé, who essentially claimed The-Dream as her secret bazooka after he helped craft the hits that turned her untouchable, like “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” “Run the World (Girls),” “Flawless,” “1+1” and “XO.”
And while The-Dream, usually alongside his production partner, Tricky Stewart, typically shares writing credit with stars, there are, if you know where to look, gems — rough sketches in drag in the form of his demo recordings — floating around the internet.
Those tracks alone — nevermind the more recent Beyoncé run of “Break My Soul,” “Levii’s Jeans,” “Ya Ya” and others, for more than 30 in all by the pair — would stamp The-Dream as a modern master. But as a Prince and R. Kelly hybrid on his lustful solo music, The-Dream is also responsible for some of the most ambitious, damp and outrageous R&B albums of the 21st century, including “Love/Hate” (2007) — with the deeply purple cuts “Fast Car” and “Nikki” (not to mention “Purple Kisses”) — and “Love vs. Money” (2009), featuring an opening line so absurd on the single “Sweat It Out” that he had to repeat it twice: “Girl, call Latisha, your beautician.”
Like all the soul singers he alludes to constantly, The-Dream takes pleasure in cramming together the sacred and the profane. A product of the 1990s Atlanta rap universe, where a hook man was always appreciated, The-Dream brought the church choir and the H.B.C.U. marching band to the doorstep of the dope houses and the strip clubs where the scene’s best music played.
On “Single Ladies,” probably his most indelible creation, the layers are implicit beneath a chirping, syncopated lurch that would seem nearly impossible to sing over. “You’re hearing this thing that sounds from outer space — ‘I don’t understand where the melody’s going to come from,’” The-Dream recalled of writing it all in one go. But “someplace in Hawkinsville, Ga., that’s where I am in my head. All I see is big hats, fans in the summertime, hot sweat, gnats — all that stuff you don’t want to be a part of in the South in the middle of June at some church homecoming.” That’s the hidden core. But the initial grab, the sell of most pop songwriting, requires a mercenary’s mind, too. “Broad is the topic,” he said: “a woman who says, ‘You didn’t catch me when I was down, and now I’m up.’” It’s the combination that makes it work anew, 1,000 times on. — Joe Coscarelli
“Nikki” is a standout for me. The storytelling, the production, the melodies, cadences — it all feels really intentional. How conversational his writing is. Hearing him basically gave me the permission to write the way I actually speak as a person. It was hella poetic. Life is already poetic as it is. He makes good hit songs, but they are also relatable songs. It’s really hard to be vulnerable and honest. He’s vulnerable and honest in the music that he makes.
“Umbrella” for Rihanna: It’s so glittery. It has real tension, structure, repetition and a universal concept — you can apply it to anything. And at the same time, you can still hear his signature all over it, even though it was like Rihanna owned it. You hear him in it. It’s not something that’s easy to do when you’re writing for somebody else, to put a piece of yourself in it. You hear his cadences, his tone. It’s a very glittery tone that catches your ear. He feels the space in between bars. He moves in between the production. To me, that gives it away that it’s him.
“1+1” for Beyoncé: That one is so fire — “If I ain’t got nothing, I got you / If I ain’t got something, I don’t give a damn, because I got it with you.”
Everybody sounds like The-Dream, whether they know it or not. Everybody’s inspired by him in this day and age, in this era of music. — Starrah is a co-writer of multiple No. 1 singles. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
JimmyJam&TerryLewis
To understand the chameleonic, cosmopolitan gifts of the songwriting and production duo Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, look no further than the creative arc of their most prominent muse, Janet Jackson.
In 1986, she was casting aside her husband, her family connections and her old, limp sound. On “Control,” Jam and Lewis gave her a style that was bold, sharp and unexpected, a futuristic take on rock and funk that was light-years ahead of the genteel styles of her past and opened up new possibilities for R&B. They also cranked up the thermostat with lyrics about heaving chests, flushed cheeks and nasty boys who haven’t done much for Jackson lately. Two years later, Jackson was on top of pop, and the industrial-tough “Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814” showed off her versatility, from acidic observations on the news to sunny anticipations of love around the corner. Four years later, on “janet.,” she had a stripped-down, deeply sensual rebirth, with Jam and Lewis helping to paint her as a woman focused inward, rather than one commanding an army.
Three different albums, three different ideologies. Many pop stars would go songwriter-producer shopping for such rebrands, but it’s a testament to the flexibility of Jam and Lewis that she could invent so many new selves in their care. Stylistic swings came easily to the producing pair. They began their careers as members of the Minneapolis glam-funk band the Time (part of Prince’s extended universe) and were schooled in soul and rock, pop and funk, tradition and experimentation, rigor and humor.
At the time, R&B was struggling to adapt to new technologies and sounds. While new jack swing was absorbing hip-hop’s attitude, Jam and Lewis built their own forward-looking soul templates that swapped out rap’s brashness for grown folks’ sass. They were path breakers with traditionalist skill sets, making them ideal collaborators for the most dynamic soul artists of the 1980s and ’90s: They penned the sparkling dance-floor whisper “Saturday Love,” by Cherrelle and Alexander O’Neal, and also the seduction-as-boxing-match anthem “Rub You the Right Way,” by Johnny Gill. They delivered two of the great neo-doo-wop ballads of the 1980s: New Edition’s “Can You Stand the Rain” and “Tender Love,” by Force M.D.s. And they made career-shaping work with Boyz II Men, Mariah Carey, Sounds of Blackness, Mary J. Blige and Usher — even Michael Jackson, for whom they delivered the scabrous “Scream,” a duet with his sister Janet.
It’s hard to overstate the genre-defiant influence of Prince here: Thanks to him, Jam and Lewis had a deep tool kit but no aesthetic loyalties. They tinkered until something novel emerged — mature hedonism, hand-played club music, secular gospel — making for an era of soul music that left formality in the past and gave permission to the future. — Jon Caramanica
“Optimistic” has this sort of prayerlike quality to it; it’s a gospel song. But it’s obviously doing it in the context of modern music, R&B, with a great groove and a tough beat. There’s an almost paradoxical tension between the lushness of the melody and the hardness of the drums, between something very raw and something very sophisticated. Optimism is something that people are struggling to feel at the moment, or that people have always struggled to feel. There has always been a need for songs like this. It’s very difficult to motivate people in this way lyrically without a big cliché. A writer has to be quite free to be able to pull that off.
I don’t think it was a big hit — and they’ve made tons and tons of really big hits. They’ve worked with a lot of huge stars; everyone knows how brilliant they are. They made these big hit songs that have tremendous depth, kind of Trojan-horsing musical depth into the pop landscape. But the star power of a lot of the people they work with is a big part of those records as well. Maybe one of the reasons “Optimistic” illustrates how much I love Jam and Lewis is that it’s kind of a communal project; it’s not really presenting a star. It feels like, maybe, a particularly personal record for them.
That Jam and Lewis thing: The drums are always amazing. Those first records we listened to all had 808 drums. “Change of Heart,” Thelma Houston’s “You Used to Hold Me So Tight,” Cherelle and Alexander O’Neal, all 808-based. They were the forefront, the cutting edge. The intense musicality, the great songwriting, this really deep understanding of the 808 — that was the cutting-edge sound. But by the time you get to “Optimistic,” it’s more like a break beat. They changed their style a lot. They became known for a signature sound, and then they changed it and got beyond it, which is a very, very hard thing to do.
I’m a big fan of a lot of producers who are like sonic revolutionaries, people who’ve done things which have changed a lot of rules and made huge leaps — from, like, Lee (Scratch) Perry to Aphex Twin, these are the people I’m deeply interested in. Jam and Lewis have sort of been like that in the middle of pop music. Who else has made music, in the full glare of the pop spotlight, that has been incredibly experimental and cutting edge and pushing everything forward? Prince. Sly Stone. The Beatles. It’s a lineage that they’re part of, 100 percent. They established something there that the Neptunes and Pharrell and Timbaland then did their version of — which was to change the sound of everything, but to do it in the mainstream. — Richard Russell is a producer and the owner of XL Records. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
BadBunny
If Bad Bunny had been just a great reggaetonero, that would be quite something. If he were simply one of the most gifted and creative Spanish-language rappers working, that would be plenty. And if he were merely an experimentalist who could fit himself seamlessly into pop-punk or corridos tumbados, that would have been ample achievement, too.
Over his decade-long career, the Puerto Rican superstar has been all of those things, boldly and inventively reshaping Latin music with his signature melancholic flow and nimble lyrics. He has become, almost certainly, the most visible American star of the moment, and also the most emblematic — a malleable sensualist who remade the terms of engagement between English-language and Spanish-language pop, creating a center of gravity so forceful it reached the Super Bowl halftime show.
That was on the strength of “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” last year’s album about historical memory, personal regret and cultural pride. Here’s how Bad Bunny links those ideas on the title track: “Debí darte más beso’ y abrazo’ las vece’ que pude / Ey, ojalá que los mío’ nunca se muden” — “I should’ve given you more kisses and hugs whenever I could / I hope my people never move away.”
“Debí Tirar Más Fotos” won the Grammy for album of the year, the first Spanish-language album ever so honored. But, more crucially, it was a deeply personal album about profoundly universal concerns: making peace with your past, and whether the things that you sacrifice when you leave home are worth it after all. And he unveiled a neat sleight of sound to communicate the tale, making songs that were indelibly Bad Bunny while also in direct dialogue with his island’s musical heritage: the sterling salsa on “Baile Inolvidable,” or the plena of “Café con Ron,” made with a young outfit from the island, Los Pleneros de la Cresta, who have been keeping the traditional sound alive. It’s a bold statement of political and familial pride, an argument that there’s a direct line between self-understanding and history.
It’s the sort of gesture an artist typically makes three or four decades into a career, when fresh ideas have dried up. But Bad Bunny doing so at his peak — in fact, building his peak atop these choices — also reframes what stardom can look like. He’s been a party starter par excellence, a thirsty romantic who woos with artfully smeared syllables and, now, also a sophisticated advocate. For decades, Latin stars were often measured — wrongly, it should be said — by how thoroughly they were able to be heard in the English-language pop world. But Bad Bunny is beckoning the world to come to him, and it has. — Jon Caramanica
“Estamos Bien” is a special song for us. Hurricane Maria had already happened, and it was really tough on the island. And he kind of disappeared — nobody knew what he was up to. Where’s the music, what’s going on? Maybe it was him self-reflecting and analyzing what he wanted to do. To see somebody at his position — the next guy up, the hottest thing out there, you can just make bangers and have a good time — and your next track is something that is for the people of Puerto Rico at that moment? To feel like, you know, we can get through this? It just made me understand that there’s something special there.
The dembow movement in Dominican Republic, it’s upbeat; people can vibe to that. But to see him do his first one with “Tití Me Preguntó” was kind of mind-blowing. My mom is Dominican, and I have vivid memories of going to some of my aunts’ or my uncles’ houses, and every time, the question is: “How many girlfriends do you have?” For him to have that thing that connects to most of us as kids, hearing that in a dembow track — you weren’t expecting to have a memory connection triggered, a concept throughout the song of that little question you always get asked at every birthday party. There are so many details that he keeps putting that make it feel human, even though he’s this huge mega-artist.
“Debí Tirar Más Fotos.” I’m getting to that point where you’re older now, your parents are older, you start to lose people, that kind of thing. So it really struck a chord, that little thought of “I should have taken more pictures.” It was not just a cool track within the album. It became the biggest one. People really appreciated the thought. You see how people adapted it to their lives. You see that with huge rock bands, or ballads, or pop stars that create those iconic songs — I know that’s going to be one of them. And to use a really cultural sound like bomba and plena from Puerto Rico, to have it be the main sound along with what he’s singing, and have it be commercially the biggest thing — there’s genius in that.
You get to know him and his life through his music. That moment in the song where he says, “Bernie tiene el nene” — his brother has the boy — and “Jan, la nena” — John, his best friend, has the girl. You get to see the important stuff in life. Our kids, our fathers. Family is the important part. It tells you about him, his life, his people, his surroundings — but also that mentality of a grown-up. — Tainy is a producer and songwriter. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
BruceSpringsteen
One of the most powerful moments in the vast expanse of Bruce Springsteen’s songwriting is actually an expertly deployed silence. It comes right in the middle of that tattered anthem “Born in the U.S.A.,” which until then has established a predictable structure — a simple repeated chorus and four taut, punchy lines per verse. But then the down-and-out narrator mentions his brother who died in the siege at Khe Sanh: “Fightin’ off them Viet Cong / They’re still there, he’s all gone.” We expect the resolution of one more rhyme, but instead Springsteen leaves the space blank, like an empty chair set at the dinner table for someone who is never coming home.
Maybe the narrator is getting choked up and is too masculinely proud to let us hear his voice crack. Maybe he’s just at a loss for words. Songwriting isn’t always about resolution; it’s also about knowing when to let irresolution linger. Says a 30-something Springsteen in 1984: What could you possibly rhyme with wasted life, senseless death, incurable grief?
An earlier and more exuberant version of the same songwriter would have had a whole list of suggestions; on his first few records, he wrote like a young man who had memorized the entire dictionary and wanted you to know it. That approach was appropriate for grand epics of brazen youth and sea-sprayed swagger like “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” and “Thunder Road.” But Springsteen shifted into another gear when he learned how to use negative space, whether it was the haunted void he howled into on his 1982 incantation “Nebraska” or the terse, sturdy couplets he whittled into the many perfect pop songs he released in the 1980s: “Hungry Heart,” “I’m on Fire,” “Dancing in the Dark,” “Tougher Than the Rest.”
Over time, his writing became economical in another sense. It also made him rich and famous enough that it grew all too easy to criticize him for being woefully out of touch with the working-class folks he kept insisting on writing about — it can get complicated, idolizing a Boss. But even from his perch of comfort and influence, in times when it would have been easier for him to look away — when four New York City police officers killed Amadou Diallo, when the planes hit the towers, when ICE agents stormed into Minneapolis — Springsteen continued to believe in songwriting as a tool to hold his bruised, beloved country accountable. He takes seriously his self-appointed role as America’s conscience, its cultural ambassador and its chief firefighter, and he knows that these jobs are never done. More than half a century into his imposingly prolific, restlessly searching career as a songwriter, Springsteen has fulfilled the prophecy he was born into as a young tramp. He’s still running. — Lindsay Zoladz
Often people don’t try to write an anthem because it can be really embarrassing if you do it and it doesn’t change the world. It involves a kind of a naïveté or innocence — you have to really believe that your song can make an impact, and that is kind of crazy. But that is what I’ve always been drawn to about Bruce. He is best when he’s going for the stars. Then he lands it, and it does affect something. To believe in the power of song that much — to not be beaten by the world and think, Well, songs don’t mean anything — he still believes that a song could impact the world and change the way it’s functioning.
His choruses are so good that people try to co-opt them for [expletive] he doesn’t even believe in, that go against the song. It’s like Bob Marley — these songs become commodified, but they’re so radical, and so heartbreaking, when you shield yourself from that commodification. When I hear “Born in the U.S.A.,” I always get choked up. He’s so masculine in this very archetypal way, but he’s also very feminine when he’s writing, because he becomes a vessel. He’s not a Vietnam vet, but he’s using his body as a vessel for this story of all these other people. I was raised by a Vietnam vet. It’s heavy to hear somebody take on this story.
“Tramps, like us, baby, we were born to run” is a crazy lyric that can become the mantra of someone’s life. If you’re a teenager and you hear that song, you’re just like, That’s my arrow. “I got debts that no honest man can pay” — he uses that in “Atlantic City” and in “Johnny 99,” and that’s another lyric that is very Bruce, telling the story of somebody who has done something terrible, but he’s trying to explain how somebody gets there. My favorite lyrics from him are either anthemic or leading you out of nothing, out of a stuck place.
It’s so obvious that Bruce is rooted in folk music. It comes through in that belief: I have a responsibility, and I’m part of a lineage. There are people who are not getting represented, or their stories are getting erased, and I need to help keep their stories alive. — Alynda Segarra founded the band Hurray for the Riff Raff. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
SmokeyRobinson
Motown Records redirected American pop away from its white-centric rock ’n’ roll course, and Smokey Robinson was central to that era-defining mission. The Miracles, his group, were among the label’s first signees — their 1960 hit “Shop Around” became Motown’s first million-seller. The infectious chorus, “My mama told me / You better shop around” (carefully, for a bride), lands like a tossed-off but absolute autobiographical truth.
In fact, Robinson was 10 years old when his mother died. He was raised in a working-class Detroit household by his oldest sister. He would grow up to conjure a layered, magical world, and we have been following him there for over 65 years.
Robinson, who also served as a Motown vice president, built a language as much as a business. By the end of 1964 he had written “My Guy” for Mary Wells and co-written “My Girl” for the Temptations — songs that became foundational to those artists’ identities, and to postwar soul and pop.
From that diptych emerged another. “The Tracks of My Tears” (1965) functions simultaneously as pop hook and indelible image — its economy of language doing work that decoration would ruin. Two years later, “The Tears of a Clown” featured an operatic reference as load-bearing beam — and used it to build one of soul music’s most devastating refrains: “Just like Pagliacci did / I try to keep my sadness hid / Smiling in the public eye / But in my lonely room I cry / The tears of a clown / When there’s no one around.” Robinson’s “Cruisin’” (1979) proved something rarer still: He could write contentment. D’Angelo’s 1995 interpretation spotlighted what had always been latent — the song’s vibrant eroticism.
Robinson has inspired the most successful and emotionally textured songwriters who rose in his wake. Babyface names Robinson as one of his greatest influences, and Anderson .Paak’s collaboration with him, “Make It Better” (2019), plays less like homage than like continuity. Stevie Wonder may be the greater innovator. Lionel Richie may have mastered global pop. Neither matches Robinson’s sustained lyrical precision.
“I Second That Emotion,” which would later be covered by the Temptations and Diana Ross and the Supremes, transforms parliamentary language into an expression of romantic assent; it’s playful, tender and faintly formal in a way that heightens its sincerity. This pattern — importing one register to illuminate another — winds its way through Robinson’s catalog. Whether performed by Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, the Rolling Stones, Linda Ronstadt, Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, the English Beat or the Grateful Dead, Robinson’s songs reveal new levels of nuance on even the 100th listen. This is because he is still doing the literal labor of love: telling truths about everyday yearning, infatuation, sorrow and joy. — Danyel Smith
Whenever somebody says to me, “What was your favorite song?” I always say “The Tracks of My Tears.” I had an almost mystical experience with that song. It came out when I was 12 years old, and when it would come on the radio, I would just stop, wherever I was, and feel something that I couldn’t really understand. I never heard the lyrics of songs — people are surprised to hear me say that even to this day, it’s not the first thing I hear. It was the feeling of that record.
A lot of it is in the arrangement. I didn’t know what instruments they were, but they were almost like these spirits. And then on top of that was this voice of his that could go places that other people’s voices don’t necessarily go.
I listened to some interviews that he did about his songwriting. In one he talks about growing up in a household where there were lots of different kinds of music being played. I feel almost as if he’s got that bank of music inside himself: It all comes out when he goes to write. He did one interview just last year, and he referred to it as a blessing when a song comes — he was talking about how, you know, they just kind of show up. I could relate to that. I’ve had pretty much a lifetime of writing myself. When something is right, you know it — it’s like, there it is. That’s why I loved when he described it as a blessing. You’re working with your craft, trying to explore and find something. And when it’s there, you know it’s there. He must have had that feeling when he did that record. — Terre Roche is a founding member of the Roches. Interview by Jenn Pelly. Text has been edited and condensed.
Cast Your Vote
The Critics
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic for The Times. He is a co-host of ‘‘Popcast,’’ The Times’s pop-culture podcast, and frequently writes about the intersection of style and music.
Joe Coscarelli is a culture reporter for The Times. He is a co-host of “Popcast,” a producer of the “Song of the Week” video series and the author of “Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story.”
Wesley Morris is a critic at large for The Times and a staff writer for the magazine. He writes about art and popular culture and hosts the culture podcast “Cannonball.”
Jody Rosen is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of “Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle.”
Danyel Smith is a contributing writer for the magazine. She is the author of “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop” and the creator and host of the podcast “Black Girl Songbook.”
Lindsay Zoladz is a pop-music critic for The Times. She writes the music newsletter The Amplifier.
Contributors
Joshua Charow is a documentary filmmaker and photographer in New York. His work includes documenting the last original artist lofts in the city, the nightly pool cleaning at the Sept. 11 Memorial and the Black cowboys in Queens.
Carina del Valle Schorske is a contributing writer for the magazine in Brooklyn who often writes about Latin music and Caribbean culture.
Jenn Pelly is a music journalist and critic. She is a longtime contributor for Pitchfork and the author of “The Raincoats.”
Stefan Ruiz is a photographer in New York. He taught art at San Quentin State Prison in California and was the creative director for Colors magazine.
Lara Sorokanich is an associate editor for the magazine.
Videos:
NILE RODGERS
Director: Joshua Charow
Interviewed by: Jody Rosen
Camera Operator: Sam Clegg
Sound Mixer: Bill Vella
Gaffer: Brian Sachson
Lighting PA: Joseph Del Valle
Archival: GG’s Barnum Room: Bill Bernstein; Diana Ross: Richard Corkery/NY Daily News Archive, via Getty Images; Chic: Gus Stewart/Redferns, via Getty Images; Videos: YouTube
LUCINDA WILLIAMS
Director: Joshua Charow
Interviewed by: Carina del Valle Schorske
Camera Operator: Preston Nair
Sound Mixer: Jeremy Mazza
Gaffer: Suzanne Carter
Archival: Videos: YouTube
JAY-Z
Director: Joshua Charow
Interviewed by: Jody Rosen
Camera Operator: Daniel Hollis Diamond
Sound Mixer: Tessa Murphy
Gaffer: Michael Tellup
Archival: Jay-Z (1988): Timothy White; Jay-Z (2008): Michael Falco for The New York Times; Videos: YouTube
TAYLOR SWIFT
Director: Joshua Charow
Interviewed by: Joe Coscarelli
Camera Operator: Jackson Montemayor
Sound Mixer: Tessa Murphy
Gaffer: Michael Tellup
Archival: Videos: YouTube
BRANDY CLARK, SHANE MCANALLY, JOSH OSBORNE
Director: Joshua Charow
Interviewed by: Jody Rosen
Camera Operator: David Poag
Sound Mixer: Jeremy Mazza
Gaffer: Suzanne Carter
Archival: Videos: “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”: Columbia Pictures; YouTube
BABYFACE
Director: Joshua Charow
Interviewed by: Danyel Smith
Camera Operator: David Acampora
Sound Mixer: Rado Stefanov
Gaffer: Mike Silverberg
Archival: Videos: YouTube
MARIAH CAREY
Director: Joshua Charow
Interviewed by: Danyel Smith
Camera Operator: Mike Dalton
Sound Mixer: Tessa Murphy
Gaffer: Michael Tellup
Archival: Mariah and Patricia Carey: from Mariah Carey; Carey and Dupri: Scott Gries/Getty Images; Videos: YouTube
POST PRODUCTION:
Editor: Abraham Howard
Colorist: Stephen Derluguian
Sound Mixer: Bobb Barito
Photo Illustration credits
Source images for photo illustrations: Apple: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images; Bad Bunny: Kevin Winter/Getty Images; Del Rey: Andy Sheppard/Getty Images; Dylan: Bettmann/Getty Images; Elliot: J. Vespa/Getty Images; King: John Atashian/Getty Images; Nelson: Pamela Springsteen/Sony Music; Outkast: Gregory Bojorquez/Getty Images; Parton: Richard E. Aaron/Getty Images; Simon: George Rose/Getty Images; Springsteen: Larry Hulst/Getty Images; Wonder: Goedefroit Music/Getty Images