![]() Maybe it’s because three is a magic number in and of itself. ![]() It’s as if there are no more than ten truly great tunes in any one human person.Ĭonclusion five: even weirder, you can easily pick the three best songs of any songwriter from their top ten. Maybe you’ll find out who’s really responsible for the songs you sing in your bath.Ĭonclusion four: when you look at the greatest songwriters - one of whom wrote 1500 songs - their most incredible songs never number more than ten per individual. In fact, I wrote this piece to redress this travesty of ignorant bliss under which we all labor. ![]() This credit-the-singer-not-the-writer practice pisses me off so much, I could swallow a porcupine ass-end first. A guy called Bruce Johnston wrote I Write The Songs. And Barry Manilow didn’t write I Write The Songs, although he did write a jingle for Bowlene Toilet Cleaner. A Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley or Johnny Matthis song was never written by Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley or Johnny Matthis. SONGWRITING IS THANKLESS: WE KNOW THE SINGER, NOT THE CREATORĬonclusion three: songwriting is the only art form for which people know the song and the singer, but hardly ever know the creator - the person who actually wrote the damn song. Why? After providing the canon, I’ll give you four reasons why.ġ. It’s been riding its banana skin downhill ever since. The creative spasm of the sixties lasted until the 90s, and then songwriting oomph hit the skids. It’s been a goddam bare, empty, denuded desert out there for almost a quarter of a century. 2010’s Need You Now by Lady Antebellum is excellent, but not great, like Unchained Melody and Hey Jude are great. ![]() Today we get unbelievably excellent pop confections and sonic surprises on the pop charts - Umbrella, Kanye West’s amazing Runaway - but no great songs. Here are my conclusions, briefly, before I get to a putative canon of actual songwriters and their songs: something that’s never been attempted before, which is why I’m doing it now.Ĭonclusion one: there are only eight truly greatest songwriters of all time, and they leave all the others in belly-crawling dust, for an obvious reason that will be revealed shortly.Ĭonclusion two: there are no great songwriters working today, and those who are still alive, have their best work long behind them. But then I started making some comparisons, and came to a number of bizarre conclusions.īTW, when I say greatest songs, I mean those with the greatest melodies, which more or less restricts us to ballads, and also excuses some terrible lyrics (the words of Irving Berlin’s classic White Christmas are absurdly banal the lyrics of Puccini’s soaring One Fine Day are awkward, to say the least and the Rolling Stones’ most moving ballad, Wild Horses, has the stupidest lyrics extant). I’ve been thinking about the greatest songwriters who ever lived, and the greatest songs ever written, and naturally, the Beatles sprang to mind. ![]() Great paintings can go unseen by many great novels can go unread by most humans but a great song is heard by all. A great melody is a whoosh of sublime emotion plugged straight into the human heart in the snappiest concentrate imaginable that, once stuck, stays stuck forever. Every morning, millions of humans belt out songs in their showers. ![]()
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