Dear listeners,
The New York Times Magazine just published a list of the 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters, as voted on by more than 250 music insiders and critics. It’s a sprawling, ambitious project that contains a lot of fun features to peruse — quotes from notable musicians talking about their songwriting heroes, essays from critics (I got to write about Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen and Lana Del Rey — a holy trinity), and video interviews with people honored on the list, like Taylor Swift, Jay-Z and Lucinda Williams. I’d encourage you to take some time to dig in.
Even as a professional critic, lists, canons and phrases like “the greatest” all tend to make me itchy. When evaluating a piece of music, I always try to be as respectful as possible that “greatness” in art is a subjective construct and that my opinion is but one of many. So I had a hard time with this project! My main takeaway was that 30 is an absurdly, punishingly small number. For days after I submitted my ballot, I was stricken with pangs of voters’ remorse, waking up sweaty in the middle of the night shouting names of the many vital songwriters I hadn’t had room to include. (I exaggerate, but only slightly!)
In that spirit, for today’s playlist, I selected some of the songwriters who I personally wish had made the list, but didn’t. I tried to balance the obvious and the surprising, the recognized titans of American song (like Randy Newman, Billy Joel and Tom Waits) with some younger or below-the-mainstream talents who I think ought to be mentioned in the same breath (Alynda Segarra, Frank Ocean and Neko Case). I tried to limit myself to 10 but couldn’t, so this playlist goes up to 11.
This isn’t a definitive statement of who belongs on an “honorable mentions” list: I hope it’s only the beginning of a larger and livelier conversation. And on that note, if you want to submit your own list of the greatest living American songwriters, do participate in the Magazine’s readers’ poll. I’ll be curious to see the results.
Don’t you know that only fools are satisfied,
Lindsay
Listen along while you read.
1. Steely Dan: “Peg” (Donald Fagen)
One of many endlessly debatable questions that a list such as this one prompts: If one half of a great songwriting duo is no longer alive, does that disqualify the other from contention? In the case of Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen and the late Walter Becker, I say certainly not — for one thing, Fagen’s crowning solo achievement, “The Nightfly,” exists. But I also think Fagen’s contributions to Steely Dan — his studio perfectionism, his lyricism and the jazz sensibility he fused with the aesthetics of pop, rock and R&B — were crucial to what made the group so innovative.
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2. The Replacements: “Bastards of Young” (Paul Westerberg)
The Replacements’ lead singer and chief songwriter Paul Westerberg is American rock’s most articulate troubadour of inarticulateness: He mutters his lines like a guy too devoid of satisfaction to know whether the word he’s grasping for is “unsatisfied” or “dissatisfied,” so he ends up trying on both for size. Though Westerberg can growl and snarl like a punk, he’s a power-pop musician at heart, and that strong melodic core can turn even his most disaffected battle cries — like this single from the 1985 album “Tim” — into resounding anthems.
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3. Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes: “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” (Kenneth Gamble and Leon A. Huff)
One of the great songwriting teams of their time, the bards of brotherly love Gamble and Huff basically dreamed an entire genre — Philadelphia soul — into existence, creating their own influential label and house band, and laying the foundation for disco. Among their most enduring compositions are Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones,” the O’Jays’ “Love Train,” MFSB’s “Soul Train” theme “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)” and this wrenching 1972 ballad first recorded by Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes.
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4. Neko Case: “Star Witness”
“Writing a song starts in the middle of a world you haven’t invented yet,” Neko Case says in her recent memoir — an apt description from a musician whose songs all seem like transmissions from uncanny but strangely familiar alternate realities. I love her idiosyncratic approach to structure and melody, her sense of atmosphere and the haunting, impressionistic imagery that she conjures on some of her best songs, like this one from her magnificent 2005 album “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. Frank Ocean: “Ivy”
Frank Ocean’s music is in constant tension between its cool-guy bravado and its disarmingly tender vulnerability, a balance he strikes brilliantly on this crooned highlight from his shape-shifting 2016 opus “Blonde.” Though he’s not as prolific as some other songwriters on the list (especially given the fact that he hasn’t released new music in nearly a decade), Ocean’s creative outpouring in the 2010s remains rich and resonant enough to make him, still, one of the defining songwriters of his generation.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
6. Wilco: “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” (Jeff Tweedy)
As Wilco has gradually evolved from alt-country upstarts to arty minimalists to the elder statesmen of American folk-rock over the course of several decades, the warm, fractured and unmistakable songwriting voice of the frontman Jeff Tweedy has been perhaps the only unifying thread throughout the band’s many lives. This dreamlike incantation that kicks off the band’s great “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” is somehow simultaneously airy and airtight.
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7. Billy Joel: “Vienna”
Look, I know he’s divisive, and I know he’s written some stinkers (the most notorious of which I happen to love) — but he’s Billy Joel! There’s something quintessentially American about his blend of compositional sophistication and Long Island grit; call him the Beethoven of Hicksville. The fact that this ballad of tough-love wisdom continues to resonate with younger generations is proof not only of his enduring appeal, but of his deep connection to the elemental anxieties that make us hopelessly human.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
8. Tom Waits: “Time”
A bar stool poet with the voice of a sanctified corpse, Tom Waits knows as well as any living American writer how to repurpose the sorts of words, sounds and sentiments found in our national gutter into songs of surreal beauty. This ballad from one of his finest albums, 1985’s “Rain Dogs,” is enough alone, in my mind, to punch his ticket into the tower of song.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
9. Hurray for the Riff Raff: “Pa’lante” (Alynda Segarra)
Alynda Segarra, who records as Hurray for the Riff Raff, is remarkably well versed in an American musical history that they carry lightly enough to subvert, whether that means defiantly rewriting an old murder ballad to center the perspective of the dead or using the traditional tools of a folk singer-songwriter to meditate on the modern horrors of ecological collapse. Segarra delivers this fiercely written manifesto of Puerto Rican pride, from their 2017 album “The Navigator,” with stirring conviction and the visionary power of a great artist.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
10. The Mountain Goats: “This Year” (John Darnielle)
Wildly prolific and boundlessly empathic, John Darnielle, the founding member of the Mountain Goats, has released hundreds and hundreds of incisively written songs over the past several decades, creating a body of work inhabited by a motley population of spirited characters — doomed lovers, addicts, biblical figures, even professional wrestlers and amateur metal legends. But one of Darnielle’s most universally beloved anthems is also one of his most vividly autobiographical: this chronicle of teenage trauma and gritted-teeth resilience from his group’s 2005 masterpiece “The Sunset Tree.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
11. Randy Newman: “Sail Away”
A consummate musical craftsman — basically the kind of guy whose picture ought to be in the encyclopedia under the entry for “great American songwriter” — Randy Newman writes from that vanishing point where befuddled humor is indistinguishable from the deepest kind of pathos. “In America, every man is free,” he sings with eerie cheer on this barbed ballad of condescension and conquest from his 1972 album of the same name, before ending the same verse with a walloping irony: “You’re all gonna be an American.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
The Amplifier Playlist
“11 Great American Songwriters Who Didn’t Make Our List” track list Track 1: Steely Dan, “Peg” Track 2: The Replacements, “Bastards of Young” Track 3: Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” Track 4: Neko Case, “Star Witness” Track 5: Frank Ocean, “Ivy” Track 6: Wilco, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” Track 7: Billy Joel, “Vienna” Track 8: Tom Waits, “Time” Track 9: Hurray for the Riff Raff, “Pa’lante” Track 10: The Mountain Goats, “This Year” Track 11: Randy Newman, “Sail Away”
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Lindsay Zoladz is a pop music critic for The Times and writes the music newsletter The Amplifier.
The post 11 Great American Songwriters Who Didn’t Make Our List appeared first on New York Times.
