Kurt Cobain was raised on Beatles LPs, which you can hear in songs like "About a Girl" and "Something in the Way." The Spanish and Italian charts are … "When I realized how popular I was becoming, it was right before Blue," she recalled, in reference to her 1971 masterpiece. Try 50 years. Green sang about romantic ecstasy and failings and deeper longings for divine love (the language of Scripture has never been far from his lyrics, even when he was writing secular material). In 2008, he scored an ASCAP Songwriter of the Year award. "I have dyslexia, and I've used it to its best advantage. Best Known For: Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies,” Rihanna’s “Umbrella” Welcome back for a listen to ten more talented singer-songwriters – you can read part one here. In addition to achieving huge crossover pop success in the U.S., their work was also a massive influence on the British Invasion: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Hollies and the Searchers were just some of the acts who recorded their songs. From the start, Sam Cooke knew how to write the kind of song people wanted to hear Sam Cooke sing — his very first pop single, "You Send Me," was the perfect showcase for his effortlessly gorgeous melismas and easygoing charm. 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. Unsung Heroes: The 36 Best Songwriters Of The 2000s. The melodic and lyrical genius behind Motown's greatest hits is the most influential and innovative R&B tunesmith of all time. He recognized emerging talent, recording Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe" and Kris Kristofferson's "Sunday Morning Coming Down," and one of his signature songs was written by his future wife, June Carter, about their emerging love. Best Known Songs: Rihanna’s “Unfaithful,” Mary J. Blige’s “I Am,” Beyoncé’s “Broken-Hearted Girl” 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. VIBE is a registered trademark of Vibe Media, LLC. Known for her powerful ballads with a pop flair, DioGuardi has also written hits for Enrique Iglesias and Hilary Duff. His early period produced gems like "The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)" and "Jersey Girl," made most famous by Bruce Springsteen. "You want to write songs that are bigger than life," he wrote in his memoir, Chronicles. .He's unique. Dylan, everything he sings has two meanings. We made it. Unafraid of risk, Springsteen followed it with a long period of redefinition, making his sound and his stories ever more intimate on 1987's Tunnel of Love and later 1996's The Ghost of Tom Joad. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Joel started out playing in rock & roll bands before returning to the piano at the beginning of the Seventies. When he started trying to establish himself as a blues singer, he called himself Doc Pomus. That's how I feel about songs. ", "My only weapon is my pen/And the frame of mind I'm in," Sly Stone muttered on "Poet," his clearest public statement on the art of songwriting. After a failed attempt to make it in Nashville as a country artist, Holly returned to his native Lubbock, Texas, where he and his band the Crickets drove to producer Norman Petty's studio in Clovis, New Mexico, to cut a version of "That'll Day Be the Day" (a song Decca Records had rejected), that became a Number One single. The 50 best songs of the 2000s. They wrote personal manifestos with political dimensions like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "Get Off My Cloud"; they brooded on the tumult of the Sixties with "Gimme Shelter" and "Jumpin' Jack Flash"; they detailed the connections between societal evil and the individual (and made it rock) with "Brown Sugar" and "Sympathy for the Devil." Johnta Austin Best Known For: Ciara’s “1,2 Step,” Aaliyah’s “4 Page Letter” and “One in a Million” Whatever the subject, Browne brings the same probing, thoughtful take on what he called, in "Looking East," "the search for the truth." "She is a wonderful confessional songwriter, as well as being a superb hit chorus pop writer. It takes a village. Even if it didn't make sense, that's the kind of drill I would do to practice.". "That second line brass band parade thing. I had someone to write my words for me. "If a song can't be written in 20 minutes, it ain't worth writing," he once said, summing up the no-frills eloquence that makes his songs so fun to sing and easy to cover. Harrison described songwriting as a means to "get rid of some subconscious burden," comparing the process to "going to confession." "Aretha and Otis and Wilson Pickett were out there and getting big. His songs weren't as political as Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway," Justin Timberlake wrote in Rolling Stone, "But if those guys were speaking to you, Al Green was speaking for you. West claims he didn't write down any of his rhymes until taking a more craft-oriented approach on 2010's monumentally ambitious My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. ("It all counts," Bacharach said. "Hi, I'm Taylor," she told the crowds on her Red tour. Creating these catchy tunes has earned him two ASCAP awards as well as two Grammy nominations. But he relaunched his career at age 74 and has continued to tour the world and make sensually luminous albums into the 2010s. The results were a great selection of essential songs for Soul Music lovers. There were even stables of songwriters whose job was precisely that, to sit and write songs for others. The all-ages appeal of his music also has to do with the way Diamond has sketched out his life — and the lives of many of his fans. "There's nothing that isn't pretty fundamental." But she's already written two or three careers' worth of keepers. "I couldn't write the 'Darling, you left alone and blue' or 'I'm drunk in this bar and crying' [songs]— I just didn't get it," he once said. "I had almost like a theater workshop," he said, "where you're casting people in these parts, and that's what my job was then." The son of a truck driver raised in what he called "the suave part of the slums," Robinson had his first hit in 1960 with the Miracles' "Shop Around" and went onto pen the Temptations' "My Girl" and "Get Ready," Mary Wells' "My Guy," the Marvelettes' "Don't Mess With Bill," Marvin Gaye's "Ain't That Peculiar" and many more. The most skilled songwriters can transform an artist’s personal tales into anything from gut-wrenching ballads to club tracks to autobiographical classics. The romantic album highlights the best moments of being in love — and could even serve as a guide on how to add a little spice to a longterm relationship. Best Known For: David Guetta's "Sexy Bitch,” T-Pain's "Bartender" Maybe it's his family's blue-collar background or the years he spent delivering mail before becoming a full-time musician. Through it all, her songs have been consistently stamped with her own sensibility and inflected with autobiographical detail. "He would sing us an entire string arrangement, every part," engineer Rob Hoffman recalls. ", After springing forth in 1977 as a sneering, splay-legged punk rocker with a knack for motor-mouth lyrics ("I was always into writing a lot of words," he said in 2008. Judging by his latest hits, Miguel has mastered the art of writing about love and all its dimensions, whether it’s the simple things (“Let’s Just Be”), pure physical lust (“Quickie”) or showering your partner with affection (“Adorn”). 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. Why He’s Dope: Confessions is Usher’s best album, and most of the songs were based on Jermaine Dupri’s life and songwriting. "I write almost as if I'm in conversation with somebody." We hope you like it! The Kinks' primary songwriter helped invent punk rock with "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night." A Brooklynite who was equally entranced by R&B and country (claiming his favorite singer was C&W mainstay Tex Ritter), Otis Blackwell began his career with 1953's "Daddy Rollin' Stone," which has been covered repeatedly. 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. As Mills said in 2008, "we gradually shape each other's songs into R.E.M. Why She’s Dope: Canadian songstress Melanie Fiona takes her heartbreaks and turns them into hits. Ne-Yo put it best, explaining how Bey lays her signature on every song she belts: “When I write a song for an artist I want that artist to take that song and make it their [own]. But it all builds off his songs, which transform funk, soul, pop and rock into a sound all his own. "Andy Warhol never explained what his paintings were about," Taupin said said in 2013. ", "The words just came tumbling out of me," Petty said of "American Girl," his greatest song and first hit single. May the best song win. Yet, in that brief career, he created an amazing body of work. And if lines like "I feel stupid and contagious/here we are now, entertain us" became generational epigrams, it's in their cryptic ability to nail inarticulate pain. He found his voice as a composer in the Seventies when Four Tops member Obie Benson brought him a song idea that would later blossom into "What's Going On." There's no limit to where she can go from here. By Billboard Staff. .I had discovered what all writers discover, whether they're told or not, that you could do anything." On timeless songs like "Life on Mars" or "Changes" or "Heroes," his ability to combine accessibility and idiosyncrasy makes for music that marries art and pop and transfigures culture itself. The best music of the 2000s came from singers such as Beyonce, Coldplay, Kanye West, and others. Best Known Songs: Usher’s “There Goes My Baby,” Beyoncé’s “Sweet Dreams,” Pleasure P.’s “Boyfriend No. 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. View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 2002 CD release of Songs 2 (The Best Of The Singer/Songwriters) on Discogs. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Female singer-songwriters from the United States: This is a non-diffusing subcategory of Category:American singer-songwriters. "I wanted to write the great American novel, but I also loved rock & roll," Reed told an interviewer in 1987. Top 20 Hot 100 Songwriters, 2000-2011. "We didn't have the benefit of such sage advice. He would actually sing the entire arrangement into a micro-cassette recorder complete with stops and fills. The more you listen, the clearer it becomes that Marr isn't exaggerating. But he become the American punk-rock poet laureate of the Eighties, reeling off shabbily rousing underdog anthems like "I Will Dare" and "Bastards of Young," as well as beautifully afflicted songs like "Swinging Party" and "Here Comes a Regular." ", The definitive hip-hop artist of the last 15 years, Kanye West made his name as a producer with the Doors-sampling beat on Jay Z's "The Blueprint" and emerged as an unquenchably driven song machine releasing groundbreaking music at a Beatlesque clip. I had discovered that my strength was not in the horns, it was in the rhythm." Features Best Female Songwriters: An Essential Top 25 Countdown. .unorthodox never sounded lovelier or more clever. "Being a songwriter is like being a nun," Rolling Stone reported him saying in 2014. He's the Evel Knievel of music. The duo has also penned hits for other artists including SWV's "Can We," Total's "Trippin'" and Tweet's "Call Me." ", "When you're going 80 miles an hour down the freeway you're not necessarily going to notice irony," Randy Newman has said. Soul and female singer-songwriters And sometimes –"Start Me Up," "Rip This Joint" – they just kicked the doors in and burned the house down. For the generation that came of age during the Sixties and Seventies, he rivaled Bob Dylan in creating a mirror for their journey from youthful innocence to complicated adulthood. The adaptable scribe has covered everything from pop (Kelly Clarkson’s “Mr. Setting wry and cryptic, yet oddly poignant, lyrics to music that combined elements of rock and jazz, complex musicianship and smooth melodies, Steely Dan went on a run of near-perfect albums from 1972's Can't Buy a Thrill to 1977's Aja. He was already writing his own songs as a childhood prodigy at Motown during the Sixties (including the 1966 smash "Uptight (It's Alright).". ", 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." Dixon was essential in shaping the sound of post-war Chicago blues, supplying masters like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf with riffs as crisp as the creases in a new suit and lyrics so boastful that they'd be terrifying if half-true. "But things have been good for me for a long time. 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." Martin has said. From the optimism of "Everyday People" to the funky angst of 1971's There's a Riot Goin' On, his music mapped the flower-power era's journey from utopian promise to catastrophic meltdown as well as anyone, and his grooves and riffs have been endlessly sampled by the hip-hop artists to arrive in his wake. Like most indie music, things got truly weird in the 2000s. Then Dylan began to climb the charts on his own with music that turned pop into prophecy: "Subterranean Homesick Blues," "Like a Rolling Stone," "Positively Fourth Street," "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35." "You want to say something about strange things that have happened to you, strange things you have seen." "My songs, they're all about the American identity and your own identity," he once explained. A look at the The Best Singer-Songwriter Albums of the 2000s by User Score. He’s known for enhancing songs with strange phrases, repetitive adlibs—see: the “ella ella” in “Umbrella.” And songs both for himself and other artists tend to have some quirk factor, which led to this VIBE list: How Well Do You Know The-Dream’s Silly Lyrics? As Björk said in 2007, "I guess I'm quite conservative and romantic about the power of melodies. By Bad in 1987, he was getting a writing credit on nearly every song on the record. Oddly, Blackwell and Presley never met. Let's see if they can take it. And you could put together a rock-solid compilation of Green's songs that became hits in the hands of other artists: Syl Johnson's (or Talking Heads') "Take Me to the River," Tina Turner's "Let's Stay Together," UB40's "Here I Am (Come and Take Me)," Meli'sa Morgan's "Still in Love With You," Earnest Jackson's "Love and Happiness," and on and on. 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)." 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"). But it's what I do. Or softer, depending on how you look at it." Over the course of several weeks, thousands of SoulTrackers nominated and then voted on the Greatest Soul Songs of 2000-2009. "Even as a kid, I always wanted the most words to rhyme," Eminem told Rolling Stone. The 200 Best Songs of the 2000s. Between their roaring debut in 1977 and their split in 1983, the duo wrote at a feverish pace, often in Jones' grandmother's flat in a high-rise council estate, bashing out finished songs together as a full band in their rehearsal space. These songs embody the spirit of the 2000s. Why She’s Dope: Conspiracy theorists may balk at Beyoncé’s inclusion, claiming she doesn’t write her own material. You admit everything that's wrong and you talk about it in the sharpest terms, in the keenest way you can.". 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. "Smart people know what [the Edge] does, and he doesn't care about the rest of the world," Bono told Rolling Stone in 2005. That decade also delivers some of the best, boldest, most striking, ambitious music of the genre, of all time. Why He’s Dope: If you pick a top-10 R&B song out of a hat, chances are Sean Garrett was involved in its creation. The Bryants' breakthrough came when the Everlys seized on a composition that had been turned down more than 30 times, "Bye Bye Love," and hit Number Two. 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. Best Known For: “Rock wit U (Aww Baby),” “Breakup 2 Makeup” But beginning with 1969's Aoxomoxoa, and hitting stride with the 1970 doubleheader of Workingman's Dead and American Beauty, they uncorked a vividly mythic America full of crooked gamblers, coked-up train engineers, strange sea-captains, story-telling crows, card-playing wolves, and — fittingly— transcendence-seeking musicians. Yet there's a reason Frank Ocean, Vampire Weekend, Gillian Welch, Mark Ronson, Regina Spektor, Gnarls Barkley, the Punch Brothers and others cover their compositions: because the best —from the acoustic ballad "Fake Plastic Trees" to the digital kaleidoscope of "Everything in Its Right Place" — are indelible. "I felt like a cellophane rapper on a pack of cigarettes.". Pm by Clover Hope or obsession or overall dedication. '' ) a confessional... Playing sets dedicated to their classic albums exploded into the mainstream in the Past three decades industry ''... 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