Great Songwriters
Browse through our articles on songwriting and master your craft.
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For decades, a rumor followed "Fire and Rain" around: that the line "sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground" was about a plane crash that killed friends of James Taylor's on their way to see him play. I...
In May 2022, two Swedish men in their mid-seventies opened a custom-built arena in London's Olympic Park for a concert that had been five years and a reported nine-figure sum in the making. Neither of them walked on stag...
In 1968, a twenty-year-old pop singer with two UK hit singles already behind him was told he had tuberculosis and needed to rest, possibly for the better part of a year. Most careers built on momentum don't survive that ...
David Crosby handed Neil Young a copy of Life magazine with photographs from the Kent State shootings, four unarmed students killed by Ohio National Guardsmen during a campus protest in May 1970. Crosby watched it hit hi...
Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice: The Composer and Lyricist Who Wrote a School Concert Into a West EndAndrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's first paying job together was writing a twenty-minute musical for the end-of-term concert at a London prep school. It was performed once, on a March afternoon in 1968, by eight- to elev...
In November 1975, the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a storm on Lake Superior, killing all twenty-nine crew members. Gordon Lightfoot read about it in a Newsweek article and couldn't put it down. He sat with the rep...
Kris Kristofferson had a Rhodes Scholarship, an Oxford literature degree, a captain's commission in the Army, and a job offer to teach English at West Point. He turned all of it down to sweep floors at a Nashville record...
In 1969, Pete Townshend wrote a rock opera about a boy who goes deaf, mute, and blind after witnessing something traumatic, only to become a spiritual guide once the trauma breaks and his senses return. By the mid-1980s,...
In 1965, at the height of the British Invasion, the American Federation of Musicians quietly stopped issuing the Kinks work permits to perform in the United States. The ban lasted four years, kept in place after a string...
Isaac Hayes was trying to get David Porter out of the Stax Records restroom and back to work. Porter yelled back through the door, "Hold on, I'm comin'." Before he'd finished buttoning his pants, the two of them realized...
On New Year's Day 1958, a 20-year-old inmate at San Quentin State Prison watched Johnny Cash perform for the men inside. Merle Haggard was serving time for a botched burglary, one stop in a string of arrests and short-li...
Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry met, started writing together, and got married, essentially all in the same stretch of 1962. Over the next few years they wrote some of the defining singles of the girl-group era, "Da Doo R...
"Sweet Caroline" has been sung by strangers in bars, sports stadiums, and wedding receptions for more than fifty years, and most of them have no idea who Caroline actually was. Neil Diamond eventually told the story hims...
By BMI's own count, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil with producer Phil Spector, has been played more than eight million times on American radio and television, more than any othe...
By the mid-1970s, country radio had banned enough Loretta Lynn songs that she could joke about it from the stage. At the 1975 Academy of Country Music Awards, she told the crowd she wouldn't be performing "The Pill," her...
Harlan Howard once summed up an entire genre in six words: country music, he said, is "three chords and the truth." It's one of the most quoted lines in Nashville, repeated so often it's practically become the industry's...
In 1958, a seventeen-year-old in Los Angeles wrote a song built on words he'd seen on his father's tombstone: "To have known him was to have loved him." Phil Spector's father, Ben, a steelworker, had killed himself nine ...
Neil Sedaka died on February 27, 2026, at 86, and the obituaries mostly led the same way: the man behind "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do," "Calendar Girl," and "Laughter in the Rain." That's fair. It's also only half the stor...
To start Motown Records in January 1959, Berry Gordy borrowed $800. It didn't come from a bank or an investor. It came from his family's cooperative savings fund, a pool the Gordys had built by contributing ten dollars a...
In 1973, Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote the score for a big-budget musical remake of "Lost Horizon." It was supposed to be an event. It was, instead, a disaster, not one song from it became a hit, and several were ou...
Sometime in the late 1950s, broke and working as a radio DJ and part-time music teacher around Houston, Willie Nelson sang his guitar teacher, Paul Buskirk, a song called "Family Bible." Nelson needed money more than he ...
In the summer of 1966, at the absolute peak of his fame, Jacques Brel told his musicians he had nothing more to give and walked away from live performance. Not slowed down, not took a break. Stopped. He played a farewell...
On January 24, 1953, a song called "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive" reached number one on the Billboard country chart. It knocked "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)" out of the top spot. Also a Hank Williams record. He'd ...
Two months before Oklahoma! opened on Broadway in March 1943, its prospects looked bad enough that a producer reportedly walked out of the New Haven tryout at intermission. A cable summarizing the industry's verdict made...
Every songwriter's career profiled in this series, including Johnny Mercer's own, eventually mentions the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Mercer is the reason that sentence is possible to write at all. He was the organization'...
Hoagy Carmichael graduated from Indiana University's law school in 1926, passed the state bar, and joined a law firm in Florida. He was, on paper, a working attorney. He was also the composer of "Stardust," one of the mo...
In 1933, MGM asked Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart for a song for a movie called Hollywood Party. They wrote one, called it "Prayer (Oh Lord, Make Me a Movie Star)," and the studio cut it before the film was finished. Th...
In 1932, the musical Of Thee I Sing became the first musical ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The award went to Ira Gershwin, lyricist, and to book writers George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind. It did not go to ...
Bernie Taupin writes the lyrics. Elton John sits down at a piano with the finished page in front of him, reads it like sheet music he hasn't seen before, and puts a melody underneath it, sometimes in as little as fifteen...
Prince finished mixing "When Doves Cry" the night before Purple Rain's deadline and decided it still sounded like every other song on the radio: drums, bass, keyboards, all present and accounted for and, to him, boring. ...
The song most people would name first if you asked them for a Johnny Cash song, "Ring of Fire," wasn't written by Johnny Cash. It was written by June Carter, years before she married him, about the unsettling, unwanted f...
In 2019, a company Taylor Swift didn't control bought the master recordings of her first six albums. She didn't own the tapes, but she did own something the sale couldn't touch: she'd written or co-written every song, wh...
Bruce Springsteen spent roughly six months writing and recording a single song, the title track of Born to Run, chasing a sound he later described as wanting to hear "Roy Orbison singing Bob Dylan, produced by Phil Spect...
John Lennon and Paul McCartney made a decision as teenagers, before either of them had written anything anyone outside Liverpool would ever hear, that every song either of them wrote would carry both their names. It didn...
Marvin Gaye's own record label heard his best-known song and refused to put it out. Berry Gordy, the man who built Motown, listened to "What's Going On" and called it "the worst thing I ever heard." Gaye had to threaten ...
Irving Berlin wrote more than a thousand songs, seventeen Broadway scores, and the best-selling single in recorded history, and he never learned to read or write sheet music. He played piano in exactly one key, F-sharp, ...- In 2019, a company Taylor Swift didn't control bought the master recordings of her first six albums. She didn't own the tapes, but she did own something the sale couldn't touch: she'd written or co-written every song, wh...
- Bruce Springsteen spent roughly six months writing and recording a single song, the title track of Born to Run, chasing a sound he later described as wanting to hear "Roy Orbison singing Bob Dylan, produced by Phil Spect...
- John Lennon and Paul McCartney made a decision as teenagers, before either of them had written anything anyone outside Liverpool would ever hear, that every song either of them wrote would carry both their names. It didn...
- Marvin Gaye's own record label heard his best-known song and refused to put it out. Berry Gordy, the man who built Motown, listened to "What's Going On" and called it "the worst thing I ever heard." Gaye had to threaten ...
- Irving Berlin wrote more than a thousand songs, seventeen Broadway scores, and the best-selling single in recorded history, and he never learned to read or write sheet music. He played piano in exactly one key, F-sharp, ...
Most songwriters who end up ghostwriting hits for the biggest names in pop eventually stop being a public performer themselves, or they never were one in the first place. Ryan Tedder took the other path. He's spent the l...
In 2013, Sia Furler tweeted her own retirement in one line: "fame is the worst thing that can happen to a person. i choose not to appear in anything publicly. twitter's it!" At the time she'd already written hit singles ...
In November 2023, a fifty-year-old man who'd spent a decade as one of the most recognizable rappers alive released his first new album in seventeen years, and it didn't have a single verse on it. No bars, no hooks, no dr...
Q-Tip has said he hates categories, that he hates "calling shit jazz, hip-hop, rock or R&B," because at its best it's "just music." That's a strange thing to hear from the person most responsible for inventing a cate...