"I felt like a cellophane rapper on a pack of cigarettes.". One of the pioneers in the EDM space, he was the only DJ known to utilize three-deck mixing in his early days. "It can sometimes be stupidly literal." We measured him for the suit, and he tailored it." I was still called a soul singer," he once recalled. 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. So I wrote Blue, which horrified a lot of people, you know." And alone among his peers Dylan's creativity was ceaseless 2000's Love and Theft returned him to a snarling sound that rivaled his electric youth, marking a renaissance that continues unabated. Country music has been growing as an art from since Eck Robertson's recording of "Arkansas Traveler" in 1922. "He'd just say, 'What does it mean to you?' Bjrn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson 100100 100-91 90-81 80-71 70-61 60-51 50-41 40-31 30-21. "Each song had to be different," Andersson said in 2002, "because, in the Sixties, that's what the Beatles had done. "We were kind of like the interpreters of what he had to say. But he also penned darkly introspective masterpieces like "In My Room" and "God Only Knows," as well as groundbreaking symphonic masterpieces like 1966's Pet Sounds, which transformed the idea of rock album-making itself and inspired the Beatles' own masterpiece Sgt. 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. 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. ", Dixon was a fine performer and bass player, but he made his greatest contribution as house songwriter at Chess Records in the 1950s. "I just wanted to cram everything into a record that these people had ignored. 48. His most recent Number One, "The Monster," features bonkers couplets like "Straw into gold chump, I will spin/Rumpelstiltskin in a haystack/Maybe I need a straight jacket, face facts." Taylor himself knows that some people slag him for the first-person aspect of his writing: "If you think it's sentimental and self-absorbed, then I agree with you, basically. "When I heard him for the first time, it was like he was singing only for himself, and now and then, maybe God," Clapton once said. But they would never have gone anywhere if Pete Townshend hadn't developed into an endlessly innovative songwriter. "In other words, it was classic psychedelic thinking in the sense that you didn't take no or yes for an answer, instead tunneling down a little bit to see what else might be there beyond the binary." It took a husband and wife team married for more than four decades and parted only by death to write one of rock's most devastating tales of heartbreak: "Love Hurts." McCartney has always had a much broader range than silly love songs. ", "Hag, you're the guy people think I am," said Johnny Cash to Merle Haggard, whose life and lyrics intertwined magnificently. ("I used to write songs mostly from things you hear people say all the time," Domino said.) Parton tapped her hardscrabble Tennessee-hills upbringing on songs like "Coat of Many Colors" and "The Bargain Store," and throughout the Seventies, her songs broke new ground in describing romantic heartache and marital hardship. On early compositions like dance-floor-filling ska tune "Simmer Down" and the lilting pop gem "Stand Alone" he displayed mastery of sweet melodies and cleverly turned hooks that showed he could've easily done time on Berry Gordy's assembly line as well. Yet, unlike most artists with a literary bent, she focuses on sensual detail just as much writerly scenes and imagery. Through it all, her songs have been consistently stamped with her own sensibility and inflected with autobiographical detail. They always had a simple melody, a hip set of chord changes and a cool groove.". Jimi Marshall Hendrix was born on November 27, 1942, in Seattle, Washington, Guitarist, singer, and songwriter, Jimi Hendrix delighted audiences in the 1960s with his outrageous electric guitar playing skills and his experimental sound. "I have dyslexia, and I've used it to its best advantage. 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 popular Disney movie Lion King was released in 1994 and was written by acclaimed lyricist and composer, Tim Rice. Because he's got you looking both ways, it's bigger, it hits harder. The pair's songs usually emerged from improvisatory writing sessions that began with just a handful of Leiber's lyrics. But it quickly lead to more advanced work like "Madman Across the Water," "Levon" and "Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word," along with goofy fun tunes like "Bennie and the Jets" and "Crocodile Rock." But that multiplatinum triumph was just the tip of the iceberg: Australian brothers Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb were massively successful songwriters for decades. "When you think about it, when you're writing a song, you're always trying to write something that you love and the people will love.". Or softer, depending on how you look at it." Marley drank deep from American soul music; he briefly lived in Delaware during the late Sixties, where he worked in a factory. In reference to his 1972 watershed "Get Up, Stand Up," he said, "I am doing something because I see the exploitation." And those songs, soaked in world-weariness, cynicism, resentment and the occasional happy ending, were so precisely crafted that, decades later, they keep people returning to the records and seeing the band's seemingly endless reunion tour. Their work was at once primal and complex, charged by conflict, desire and anger, and unafraid to be explicit about it musically or lyrically. Elton John has called them "a huge influence on me as a songwriter"; Bono has said their catalog makes him "ill with envy." "Every conversation, every personal hurt, every observance of people in stress, happiness and love . The music he wrote spanned forces - from solo instrumental works, such as the Cello Suites (below), to huge sacred . Prince's own comments on his craft are even more impressionistic. "David approached me with the intention of selling me an insurance policy," Isaac Hayes recalled of his first meeting with the man who would become his songwriting partner although Porter has vehemently denied that anecdote. 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. In his late-Sixties/early-Seventies prime, it was a potent combination: composer/producer David Axelrod called him "the greatest talent in pop music history." But hearing Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" stirred a different sort of ambition in Cooke a need to write something that more directly addressed his experience as a black man in America. Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia, the writing partners at the center of the Grateful Dead, are the psychedelic Rodgers and Hart. Musically, his stylistic breadth seems limitless: He learned early on to lace a heavy funky jam with an unforgettable pop hook, then mastered every form of rock song from three-chord bangers ("Let's Go Crazy") to straight-up power ballads ("Purple Rain") before introducing melodic and harmonic complexities that pushed his increasingly jazzy and experimental compositions beyond ordinary pop constraints. "I have no doubt about my music," Sly said in 1970. ", Barrett Strong sang Motown's first big hit, 1959's "Money (That's What I Want)," but found an even greater success as a lyricist. He didn't start writing songs in earnest until he'd recorded a few albums, and his songwriting gifts have been overshadowed by his vocal mastery. . ", Waits began as a throwback, a beatnik jazzbo singing the praises of old cars and barflies and looking for the heart of Saturday night. Their process has remained nearly identical from day one: Bernie writes a lyric and sends it to Elton, who sits down at a piano and turns it into a song. No one set the bar higher, or had greater impact. Hall of Fame - The King of Music At the heart of Biggie's music was a gift for rolling off scrolls of buoyant lines that were as singable as they were quotable "Birthdays were the worst days, now we sip champagne when we're thirsty," "Poppa been smooth since days of Underoos" and on and on. Like Lennon/McCartney, Jagger and Richards didn't always write together "Happy" was all Keith, while "Brown Sugar" all Mick. Between 1962 and 1971, Warwick charted with dozens of Bacharach/David songs like "I Say a Little Prayer," "Walk on By" and "Anyone Who Had a Heart." The kings "I learned through Jackson's ceiling and my floor how to write songs," Glenn Frey recalled of a period when he lived in an apartment one floor above Browne, "elbow grease, time, thought, persistence.". He's had 30 Top 40 singles in his career, including five Number Ones. "After seven years of trying to make it as a rock star, I decided to do what I always wanted to do write about my own experiences," he said in 1971, around the time of his debut album, Cold Spring Harbor. Who Wrote The Lion King Music | Hearinnh Beyond hits for himself and the Impressions, Mayfield's music provided no shortage of Top 10 songs for generations of artists, including Gladys Knight and the Pips ("On and On"), the Staple Singers ("Let's Do It Again"), Tony Orlando & Dawn ("He Don't Love You [Like I Love You]") and En Vogue ("Giving Him Something He Can Feel"). I'm told I have a lot of feelings." But it all builds off his songs, which transform funk, soul, pop and rock into a sound all his own. Our goal is to find the king fairly and we guarantee that all your votes will be included. 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." ", Nirvana's skull-crushing noise assault would have meant little if not for the deceptively brilliant pop craft underpinning it. As Marley continued to find his voice in the early Seventies, his songs took on an unrivaled breadth and power, especially as he began yoking his skills as an anthemic craftsman to lyrics that raised the banner of Third World struggles against systemic oppression. There are 10 acts in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 to have scored 10 or more No. As the band's charismatic frontman, Bono may soak up a lot of the credit, but he's the first to admit how important the Edge is to their songwriting. On classic albums like 1970's 12 Songs and 1972's Sail Away, Newman developed characters, explored ironies and embodied perspectives no one else of his time had even considered "Suzanne" was sung from the point of view of a rapist, "God's Song" surveyed mankind with disgust from the Almighty's easy chair and "Sail Away" was a sales pitch from an antebellum slave trader to Africans on the wonders of America ("Every man is free to take care of his home and his family"). "They wanted surf music, surf music, surf music," he said in 2011. 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." .It seems like an odd way to gain an inner sense of acceptance of the self. "Everything I ever wrote was a attempt to follow in the footsteps of the best country songwriters I knew," Kristofferson once said, citing writers like Hank Williams Jr. and Johnny Cash. ", For all of pioneering funk radical George Clinton's subversive use of hard grooves, distortion, jamming, Afro-futurism and arena-wowing spaceships, the vast P-Funk canon was built on traditional songwriting chops. ", 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. "And I guess my taste sometimes happens to be what other people, particularly radio programmers, like, too. But no songwriter has explored sex so ingeniously from the frisky flirtations of "Little Red Corvette" and "U Got the Look" to more ambitious therapy sessions like "When Doves Cry" and "If I Was Your Girlfriend." And let's not forget the ebullient "Cracklin' Rosie," the vaguely salacious "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon," just two of the more than 50 songs he's placed in the Billboard Top 100 during his half-century-plus career. Carl Cox The British house and techno producer is one name that you'd have come across among any list of Best DJs. Next: The best singers of all time (overall top picks) 2. ", 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. Led Zeppelin are a popular British band best known for their iconic "Stairway to Heaven" as well as for co-creating the music genre of heavy metal. Mitchell came out of the coffee-shop folk culture of the Sixties, and she became the standard bearing star of L.A.'s Laurel Canyon scene. Benny and Bjrn had already been a songwriting duo for six years when they teamed up with their girlfriends Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Fltskog who were both Swedish pop stars already to form Abba. . "He ricochets around them." Insurance or no, they became an in-house songwriting team at Stax Records, and their collaboration yielded 30 R&B chart hits between 1966 and 1971. ", He may sound (and look) like the prototypical SoCal balladeer, but Browne has spent his career pushing the singer-songwriter envelope. ", No hip-hop artist has reached the Billboard Top Ten more times than Jay Z, and none has done more to shape both the culture and music around him. But her restless brilliance couldn't be confined to one moment or movement. 50 Greatest Prog Rock Albums of All Time - Rolling Stone . Lynn was also a self-taught guitarist, whose earliest songs were in keys seldom used by Nashville session pros. "In the beginning, we were the underdogs," Frey once said. It's possible that no blues writer other than Robert Johnson had had as profound an impact on the development of rock music: Mick Jagger acquired his strut from "Little Red Rooster," which the Stones faithfully covered in 1964; the Doors did a leering L.A. version of "Back Door Man" on their 1967 debut; and Led Zeppelin belatedly admitted the debt "Whole Lotta Love" owed to Dixon's "You Need Love" and "Bring It on Home" when they settled a copyright dispute in the Eighties. The first time most people heard David Bowie, he was playing an astronaut named Major Tom, floating through space, completely cut off from civilization. Freddie Mercury. Prince's talents as a multi-instrumentalist, producer, arranger, bandleader and live powerhouse are peerless. Peter Buck's fluid, arpeggiated guitar runs and sunburst riffs were weaved into Mike Mills' melodic bass lines and Bill Berry's equally musical drumming, creating an evocative compliment for Michael Stipe's impressionistic lyrics. Votes in 2020. Something went wrong. 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. If you have a good imagination, you can go quite far. Led Zeppelin. You can feel really old at 27. The King of Pop is a notional title; few can agree who it should apply to, or even what it means. The scope of his music is almost unparalleled: Guthrie wrote children's songs and Hanukkah songs, songs supporting unions and World War II and the construction of several dams, songs that celebrated Jesus as an outlaw and criticized Charles Lindbergh as a Nazi sympathizer, even a song about a flying saucer. Your opinion is important. Songs like the 1970 soft-rock classic "Heart of Gold," his only Number One single, have led to an image of the tireless 69-year-old legend as a lonely troubadour, but Young insists that's deceptive. "I knew they were pointing the direction where music had to go." But large-scale success as a performer eluded him. "The melody comes second, and then the words.". Gamble and Huff launched Philadelphia International Records in 1971, assembling a crew of musicians and engineers around them, and throughout the Seventies, they were near-permanent fixtures on the R&B charts, working with singers including the O'Jays, Lou Rawls and Teddy Pendergrass. Their songs of struggle and triumph brought class consciousness to Brill Building pop, with hits like "On Broadway" for the Drifters, "Uptown" for the Crystals, and "We Gotta Get Out of the Place" for the Animals, but they are best known for the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'." Their breakthrough was the 1966 Ray Charles party classic "Let's Go Get Stoned," but once the duo went to work at Motown, romantic love became their sole topic. Singer/pianist Antoine "Fats" Domino and producer/bandleader Dave Bartholomew started working together in 1949. As he told American Songwriter in 2010, "Sometimes the songs got to coming too fast for me to write, and sometimes they still do." Kanye isn't afraid to outsource (Chicago rapper Rhymefest co-wrote the lyrics to his first game-changing hit, "Jesus Walks," and the credits to his albums can often read like veritable productions workshops). "There was a time I desperately needed for the world to know that I was no-category guy. But he chose pop music as a career and started writing songs with lyricist Hal David, who had a knack for matching wistful sentiments to Bacharach's unconventional jazz chords and constantly shifting time signatures. IT IS INTERESTING: How Do You Post Songs On Spotify. I go into something minute, then look at it, then go back into it. Jackson's collaborators and co-writers marvel at the way his dance-floor classics sprang full-formed from their creator's head. Over the next 14 years, they collaborated on more than 50 charted singles mostly written by one or both of them and became the architects of the New Orleans rock & roll sound: two-and-a-half-minute jewels featuring effervescent piano boogie, in-your-face rhythms and lyrics that drew on local vernacular. "I had no personal defenses," she said of her writing at the time. "Westerberg could be barreling along and do 'Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out' or 'Gary's Got a Boner,' and then he could slide into 'Unsatisfied' or 'Sixteen Blue,' says Craig Finn of the Hold Steady. ", Fleetwood Mac blew up in the Seventies thanks to three top-notch singer-songwriters guitarist/producer/mastermind Lindsey Buckingham, bluesy songbird Christine McVie and the gypsy queen herself, Stevie Nicks. Leiber, who grew up in Baltimore, and Stoller, who was from Long Island, met in Los Angeles in 1950. His best work ("Ambulance Blues," "Powderfinger," "After the Goldrush") may have come in the Sixties and Seventies, but every single album comes with more than a few amazing moments. . Unique among their peers, they never stopped, writing Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram's 1986 hit "Somewhere Out There" and Hanson's 1997 Top 10 single "I Will Come to You." "The sadness came from. The Beatles' name was inspired by the Crickets and, according to legend, when the Fab Four arrived in America to play The Ed Sullivan Show, John Lennon asked, "Is this the stage Buddy Holly played on? ", No one better rendered the complexity of personal life or global politics, or better connected the two, than Lennon during his solo career in universal songs like "Watching the Wheels" and "Imagine." In 'This House Is Empty Now' [on Painted From Memory], I meant this house [points to his head]. Despite her innate sense of craft, the brash-sounding singer was actually a bit sheepish about her idiosyncratic song structures, admitting, "People talk about songwriting clinics and how to construct a song and I'm sitting there thinking, 'I didn't know that!'" His songs ranged from Friday night party starters like "Hey Good Lookin'" and "Settin' the Woods on Fire" to tales of romantic desolation like "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" to the redemptive anthem "I Saw the Light" to heart-wrenching depictions of dread and isolation like "Lost Highway" and "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive," the last single released during his lifetime. By the early Sixties, as a new generation discovered the blues, plenty of young white men were learning to exaggerate their sexual prowess from Dixon's songs. Who is 'the king' of each genre and subgenre of music ? "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. 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. "I don't think anyone's got his wit or insight or originality or obsession or overall dedication." ", There's a reason Diamond's songs have been covered by everyone from the Monkees and Smash Mouth to Sinatra. The Clash's 1980 watershed London Calling, which Rolling Stone declared the best album of the Eighties, became a double album not by design but because they were writing so many songs so quickly at the time. "I do it in a very silly way. "Smart people know what [the Edge] does, and he doesn't care about the rest of the world," Bono told Rolling Stone in 2005. . "I don't like to make things too obvious, because it gets stale," Cobain said. "Sometimes I hear a melody in my head, and it seems like the first color in a painting," he said in a 1998 interview. "We had no set pattern and just each came up with melodies, lyrics and hook lines and phrases," Porter said, describing a process that could a produce a life-altering balled like "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby" in just 15 minutes. "He had this little dance he'd do. ", The Beach Boys' resident genius wrote gloriously ecstatic California anthems such as "Fun Fun Fun," "I Get Around" and "California Girls," rock & roll's greatest odes to idyllic summertime freedom. But she's really hit her stride with the pop mastery of Red and 1989, especially on confessional ballads like "Clean" and "All Too Well." "There is no filler in a three-and-a-half-minute song.") 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").