Our goal is to find the king fairly and we guarantee that all your votes will be included. Reed was also a sound scientist who, with the Velvet Underground and after, advanced what was possible with simple chords and electric guitars. It's not for everybody. Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody (Freddie Mercury). "Being a songwriter is like being a nun," Rolling Stone reported him saying in 2014. "It was like that [with Kanye].". "Songs aren't necessarily verbatim chronicles or necessarily journal entries, they're like smoke. Like his character in the 2002 biopic 8 Mile, Eminem honed his formidable skills in Detroit rap battles, then polished his rhymes in the studio over springy Dr. Dre tracks that gave him room to freak out as agilely and aggressively as he liked. "Once I start to create a song, even if commerce is the motivation, I'm still going to try to write the best song and move people in a way that touches them," King has said. ", Taylor was one of the most successful and influential artists to emerge from the "singer-songwriter" scene of the early Seventies. I have always trusted its purity, and I always will. That, Michael said, was the only way he could write: "If I sat down at a piano, if I sat here and played some chords. The duo has also penned hits for other artists including SWV's "Can We," Total's "Trippin'" and Tweet's "Call Me." IT IS INTERESTING: How Do You Post Songs On Spotify. The Kings. ("I get bored when I'm not writing about love," Ashford once said. Roger Viollet Collection/Getty Images. For the first time in 17 years, we've completely remade our list of the best songs ever. Besides their own hits (including a string of six consecutive Number Ones), the brothers wrote the title song for Grease, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton's "Islands in the Stream," Barbra Streisand's "Guilty," and Destiny's Child's "Emotion." His early period produced gems like "The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)" and "Jersey Girl," made most famous by Bruce Springsteen. 6. The song, which was released in . Cooke's determination to win over mainstream white audiences led him to expand his range as a writer, and he proved equally adept with the starry-eyed pop romance of "Cupid," the urbane dance floor workout "Twistin' the Night Away" even the subtle social commentary of "Chain Gang." Or softer, depending on how you look at it." Harrison wrote one of the Beatles' earliest openly political songs in 1966's "Taxman" and one of their prettiest late-period tunes in "Here Comes the Sun." That was followed by Missy's 1997 breakthrough Supa Dupa Fly a set of cool, witty, deceptively minimal tracks that flipped between hip-hop, R&B and electronica with finger-snapping ease and a string of genre-melting records like "Get Ur Freak On" and "Work It" that lasted until the early 2000s. Whether immersing himself in social commentary ("Higher Ground," "Living for the City"), unabashed sentimentality ("You Are the Sunshine of My Life," "I Just Called to Say I Love You"), jubilant love ("Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours") or gritty disses ("You Haven't Done Nothin'"), Wonder has consistently tapped into the sum of human emotions and happenings. Married songwriting partnerships are hardly rare, but few husband-and-wife teams explored the dynamics of monogamy with the depth and insight of Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson. Despite his enormous reputation among other songwriters, he remains a relatively obscure figure in pop history. "I'm interested in something that means something for everyone," he told Rolling Stone in 1970, "not just for a few kids listening to wallpaper.". At a time when many rock songwriters were interested in psychedelic escapism, the Band's Robbie Robertson looked for inspiration in America its history, its myths and its music. And in "Running on Empty," "Boulevard" and others, he also knew, far more than most of his peers, the value in rocking out. Lyrically, songs like "Rape Me" and "Stay Away" (with its memorable "God is gay" declaration) brought deep gender studies provocations to a mass audience one of the most astonishing subversive achievements in rock history. Happy 50th anniversary, Brenda and Eddie. "When Paul and I first got together, we wanted to be the British Goffin and King," John Lennon once said. "Let there be songs to fill the air," insists the singer on "Ripple," one of the duo's most indelible numbers. For a six-year stretch beginning with 1967's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," he and composer/producer Norman Whitfield were a mighty songwriting team at Motown. "They were doing things nobody was doing," Bob Dylan once remembered of a drive through Colorado when the Beatles ruled the radio. song always read "Berry, Mills, Buck, Stipe." "They wanted surf music, surf music, surf music," he said in 2011. "The songs were somewhat channeled works," he said when he performed Astral Weeks live in 2008. "Smart people know what [the Edge] does, and he doesn't care about the rest of the world," Bono told Rolling Stone in 2005. He's jumping over 15 buses! "She is a wonderful confessional songwriter, as well as being a superb hit chorus pop writer. Fogerty's songwriting process reflected the blue-collar worldview of a guy who wrote his first Top 10 hit (1969's "Proud Mary") just two days after being discharged from the Army Reserves: "Just sitting very late at night," he said. When describing popular music artists, honorific nicknames are used, most often in the media or by fans, to indicate the significance of an artist, and are often religious, familial, or most frequently royal and aristocratic titles, used metaphorically.Honorific nicknames were used in classical music in Europe even in the early 19th century, with figures such as Mozart being called "The father . I had discovered that my strength was not in the horns, it was in the rhythm." That technique has helped him develop an unrivaled gift for matching a lyric and a mood with a particular singer, especially a particular female singer. But he's applied his old-school craft to a host of rock styles, scoring hits as a blue-collar balladeer ("She's Always a Woman") or a doo-wop soul man ("The Longest Time"), trying out jazzy Scorcese-like streetlife serenades ("Zanzibar," "Stiletto"). You admit everything that's wrong and you talk about it in the sharpest terms, in the keenest way you can.". Initially, though, it took him years before he was allowed to explore his sacred vision. Songs like "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," "Up on Cripple Creek," "The Weight" and "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)" were, as Greil Marcus wrote in Mystery Train, "committed to the very idea of America: complicated, dangerous and alive." "I wanted to release music that let people know he was more than just a gangsta rapper," Combs said later. "Aretha and Otis and Wilson Pickett were out there and getting big. Even if it didn't make sense, that's the kind of drill I would do to practice.". It sounds like they were written a hundred years ago." His songwriting, like his guitar playing, was at once vivid and phantasmagorical psychedelic some 30 years before the Acid Tests and helped set a course for Bob Dylan (who can be seen holding King of the Delta Blues on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home), the Rolling Stones (who covered "Love in Vain" and "Stop Breaking Down) and Eric Clapton (who covered "Ramblin' on My Mind" and "Cross Road Blues" and then chased Johnson's hell hounds for decades). The greatest frontman of all time, also just so happened to possess the greatest male voice of all time. Menu. Since the Band ended its run, Robinson has only released albums sporadically; his most recent, 2013's How to Become Clairvoyant, delivered vintage American idioms with a 21st Century feel. ", Nirvana's skull-crushing noise assault would have meant little if not for the deceptively brilliant pop craft underpinning it. ", John Lennon's command of songwriting was both absolute and radically original: that was clear from his earliest collaborations with Paul McCartney, which revolutionized not just music, but the world. News & gossip column: Scottish Premiership 2023/24 fixture release LIVE! "I call it optimistic pessimism. As he told American Songwriter in 2010, "Sometimes the songs got to coming too fast for me to write, and sometimes they still do." After the split, Barry continued to write songs for acts including the Archies and Olivia NewtonJohn; Greenwich developed Leader of the Pack, a musical about her career. The music for the movie was written by Elton John and Tim Rice. Yorke and Greenwood have called their process "defacatory," and Yorke suggests his lyrics are as much stream of consciousness flow, gibberish and "just sounds" as anything confessional. A Number One pop and country hit for Jeannie C. Riley in 1968, it freed Hall to record his own work, which included songs about burying a man who owed him 40 dollars, mourning the death of the local hero who taught him how to drink and play guitar, and "Trip to Hyden," a journalistic tale of a drive to the scene of a mining disaster that was part Woody Guthrie, part Studs Turkel. Without him, the journey would not have been possible." Late in the Sixties, Dozier and the Holland brothers left Motown and launched a few record labels of their own; although many of the hits that followed for the likes of Freda Payne and the Honey Cone were credited to "Edythe Wayne," there was no mistaking the H-D-H sound. Where other writers of the time strove for sophistication, Berns' songs communicated a fierce romantic hunger and longing. When Walter Becker and Donald Fagen met as students at Bard College during the late Sixties, they hit it off over a shared love of jazz, Dylan and the sardonic, post-modern humor of writers like Kurt Vonnegut and John Barth. ", "In British rock," said the Who's Pete Townshend of his onetime rival, "Ray Davies is our only true and natural genius." "Sometimes I hear a melody in my head, and it seems like the first color in a painting," he said in a 1998 interview. But her most famous song is still "Landslide," her acoustic lament for children growing older, written before she'd even turned 30. ("It all counts," Bacharach said. He had one foot off the ground and he'd be writing in his notebooks. Williams learned her sense of concision from her father, poet Miller Williams. Since their nine albums were recorded between 1968 and 1979, Led Zeppelin has been one of the most popular bands of all time, having sold . The two of them were hardcore about songwriting: they bought a cottage on the island of Viggs where they could focus on making their music and lyrics as catchy as humanly possible. His most indelible songs "Izzo (Hova)," "99 Problems," "Big Pimpin'" mix diamond-sharp rhymes with unshakable hooks. He easily takes a spot on our list of best male singers ever. As far away from pop convention as Whitfield and Strong's music could be several of the artists they worked with grew frustrated with their freakiness their sound found its audience: the Temptations' "Ball of Confusion," the Undisputed Truth's "Smiling Faces Sometimes" and Edwin Starr's vehement protest diatribe "War" were all huge hits. .my heart." And voila: there they are. "If George had had his own group and was writing his own songs back then, he'd have been probably just as big as anybody," his fellow Wilbury Bob Dylan said. Whether it's a fleet, planning guitar tune like "Sitting Still" or a luminous ballad like "Nightswimming" or a loopy left-field pop smash like "Stand" the songwriting credit on a golden-era R.E.M. Working most famously with the Temptations, they created "psychedelic soul," built on Whitfield's expansively experimental production and Strong's downbeat, socially conscious lyrics. Throughout his career but especially on a run of albums he recorded during the early Seventies that included 1970's Moondance and 1974's Veedon Fleece Morrison has always rooted his ecstatic visions in a warm, commonplace intimacy perfect for his music's easy-flowing grandeur. "I don't like to make things too obvious, because it gets stale," Cobain said. One of the biggest stars of the 21st century, the West Virginian has had 19 singles top the country charts . These included the benefits of contraception ("The Pill") and the plight of divorcees ("Rated X"), which were banned by many country stations but became huge sellers nonetheless. "Even as a kid, I always wanted the most words to rhyme," Eminem told Rolling Stone. Originated in 1960 by the Everly Brothers for whom the Byrants wrote a string of chart toppers, each one a compact novel of teen desire and struggle and raised to operatic status by Roy Orbison, it became one of the founding documents of alt-country when Gram Parsons covered it in 1974, and a year later was turned into a pioneering power ballad by U.K. hard rockers Nazareth, who took it to Number Eight on the Billboard Hot 100. His haunting bass voice, nylon-stringed guitar patterns, and Greek-chorus backing vocals delivered incantatory verses about love and hate, sex and spirituality, war and peace, ecstasy and depression, and other eternal dualities. Naysayers will no doubt quickly. From the days of 78 RPM vinyl . Blackwell subsequently gave Elvis "All Shook Up" and "Return to Sender," and wrote a cluster of hits for other artists, including "Great Balls of Fire" for Jerry Lee Lewis. Most songwriters are inspired by an inner voice and spirit." and Celine Dion. "There's nothing that isn't pretty fundamental." Hynde's lyrics proved even more influential, articulating a complex female toughness that wasn't just a sexy pose, inspiring guitar-slinging women and self-directed pop stars like Madonna, who said, "It gave me courage, inspiration, to see a woman with that kind of confidence in a man's world. The Triumphs of Oriana (1601) In 1601, Thomas Morley got 22 of his fellow composers, including Thomas Weelkes, Thomas Tomkins and Ellis Gibbons, to write a madrigal for a new collection. Only Van can make a Romantic incantation like "if I ventured in the slipstream/Between the viaducts of your dream" roll out as smooth as Tupelo honey. Leiber and Stoller are rock & roll's first great songwriting team, two Jewish kids who turned their love of rhythm and blues into a run of hits marked by their musical inventiveness and lyrical boldness. Missy hasn't released a new album for 10 years, but she and Timbaland have dropped hints that they've got something brewing. A former Rhodes scholar, he wrote songs "Sunday Morning Comin' Down," "Help Me Make It Through the Night," "Why Me," "Me and Bobby McGee" that borrowed equally from Nashville and the Dylan-influenced singer-songwriter world. In 1983, a year before he died, Marvin Gaye said the goal of music was to "tell the world and the people about the upcoming holocaust and to find all of those of higher consciousness who can be saved." McCartney has always had a much broader range than silly love songs. The mercurial singer-writer-producer's 25-year track record stands on its own: writing or co-writing 30 Top 20 R&B singles for himself or with the Chicago-based group Public Announcement, chart-topping assistance for Puff Daddy, Sparkle and Kelly Price; and the first song to ever debut at Number One on the Hot 100, Michael Jackson's "You Are Not Alone." I don't. "I'm in awe of McCartney," Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone in 2007. raymond anthony aleogho dokpesi | funeral mass | june 22, 2023 | ait live | mass for the dead ", Neil Young's epic career has veered wildly from folk-rock to country to hard rock to synth-driven New Wave pop to rockabilly to bar-band blues. With King handling melodies and Goffin the lyrics, the two former Queens College schoolmates worked a block away from the Brill Building and wrote many of professional songwriting's most evocative songs: tracks like "Up on the Roof," "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," and "One Fine Day" that were tender snapshots of the adolescent experience. He's a king amongst gods. Singer Thom Yorke, guitarist/electronics whiz/orchestral composer Johnny Greenwood and their Radiohead mates, always credited collectively, have produced some the modern era's most glorious songs. West has given us the weapons-grade industrial punk of "New Slaves," the forlorn vocoder balladry of 2008's 808s & Heartbreak (which paved the way for the confessional hip-hop of J. Cole and Drake) and, this year, the haunting Paul McCartney collaboration "Only You." Hell yeah! "Being in close proximity to Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, and Crosby, Stills and Nash, this unspoken thing was created between Henley and me, which said, 'If we want to be up here with the big boys, we'd better write some fucking good songs.'" As he's aged, Petty has movingly explored relationships (1999's divorce chronicle Echo) and the dark side of the American dream itself (2014's Hypnotic Eye), always rooting his music in a sense of our common experience (Johnny Cash told Petty that the title track from 1985's Southern Accents should replace "Dixie" as the region's unofficial anthem). Through it all, her songs have been consistently stamped with her own sensibility and inflected with autobiographical detail. George Michael. "I would come up with a basic musical structure, perhaps a hook line and occasionally a story idea," Fagen once said, recalling their process. "I do it in a very silly way. Guthrie's music, Bob Dylan wrote in Chronicles, "had the infinite sweep of humanity. I would write it out on a piece of paper and underneath, I'd line a word up with each syllable: 'and bend all mystic sentence trees.' He's written some of rock's most finely observed songs not just about his journey through life (from the prematurely wise "These Days," penned when he was 16 years old, through more recent songs like "The Night Inside Me"), but has also ventured into social critiques ("Lawyers in Love") and political protest ("Lives in the Balance"). Who is the queen of dark pop? Songs like "Badlands" could make a rousing anthem out of existential crisis, and as he focused his sound and narrative, his music continued to gain power and the mass audience he knew it always deserved: Born in the U.S.A. delivered seven Top 10 singles as many as Michael Jackson's Thriller. . In "Redemption Song," released a year before cancer took his life in 1981, he gave us a protest anthem that still carries the universal power of a true global call to arms. Lyrically, his use of William Burroughs-style cut and paste made for fascinating, if at times, baffling flows of image and ideas. If you have sublime Bach you don't need the others (and we're only half kidding). . Mann also had a recording career, including a 1961 Top 10 hit about songwriting "Who Put the Bomp (In the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)"; in 2015, Weil published a YA novel, I'm Glad I Did, about songwriting in the Sixties. "It is the finest music I have ever heard. "He'd just say, 'What does it mean to you?' Dylan's vision of American popular music was transformative. Engelbert Humperdinck (35%, 186,786 Votes) His creative ambition never flagged: his last major project, Lulu, reimagined a late-19th century play/early 20th-century opera with Metallica, and as always, he took no prisoners. ", Nilsson was a pioneer of the Los Angeles studio sound, a crucial bridge between the baroque psychedelic pop of the late Sixties and the more personal singer-songwriter era of the Seventies. Her earliest hits honed the electro beats coming out of the New York club scene into universal radio gold. Soundtrack | The Song Remains the Same. The King of Pop is a notional title; few can agree who it should apply to, or even what it means. But it's his ability to nail emotion that makes simple love songs like "Days" incandescent, and elevates a lonely meditation like "Waterloo Sunset" into what some consider the most beautiful song in the English language. Joel has always had a heart in Tin Pan Alley, first hitting it big in the Seventies with the semi-confessional tale of wasting away as a lounge performer, "Piano Man." Votes in 2020. But to my mind it applies when the most popular artist of the time also happens to be the most . Their songs were hits for other artists, too: Richard Carpenter of the Carpenters, who went to Number One with "Close to You," called Bacharach "one of the most gifted composers who ever drew a breath. She always took more pride in her writing than in her perky singing, and much of the lyrical material in her 16 country chart-toppers was drawn from her difficult marriage to Oliver "Doolittle" Lynn, whose alcoholism and infidelities inspired domestic dramedies like "Don't Come Home a-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)." Early songs like "Blowin' in the Wind" became hits for others Peter, Paul & Mary took it Number Two on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1963; Stevie Wonder brought it Number Nine two years later and reshaped the ambitions of everyone from the Beatles to Johnny Cash. My whole goal in life was to reach that certain success where people will say, 'Hey, that guy can do anything. 48. Following a series of early rock masterpieces like 1978's searing This Year's Model and 1980's soul-informed tour de force Get Happy!, Costello delivered an album of pure country with 1981's Almost Blue and then hit another highpoint with the Tin Pan Alley subtlety of 1982's Imperial Bedroom. The songs in the movie are some of the most well-known and popular songs in the Disney movie repertoire. His output slowed down considerably by the mid-1980s and he's released a scant two albums in the past three decades. "Mike would sit at the piano and start to jam, just playing, fooling around, and I'd throw out a line. Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland, For the full playlist with all 100 songwriters visit. Trying to pin down any Top Ten list is bound to cause disagreement - and so it should - but. That's how I feel about songs. "We didn't have the benefit of such sage advice. '", Jackson's innate musical genius could be heard on the earliest Jackson 5 chart-toppers. The storytelling was always a delight, but it was Hunter's way with a homey-cosmic aphorism that made Dead lyrics so tattoo-able, bobbing and bouncing on Garcia's sweet, sad melody lines like glinting revelations.
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