They work in the shadows, knocking out tunes to order ? sometimes in a matter of hours. The songwriters who work for Jay-Z, Adele, Florence and more tell Alexis Petridis how they do it ? and why times are getting tough
Two years ago, Al "Shux" Shuckburgh found himself catapulted straight into songwriting's premier league. The Londoner hadn't expected much from the track he'd produced and co-written at a songwriting session with American tunesmiths Angela Hunte and Jane't Sewell-Ulepic, about how homesick the pair were for Brooklyn. Later, Hunte sent it to Jay-Z's label, Roc Nation, but received a frosty response.
Then EMI's head of publishing overheard it at a barbecue, and decided it would be perfect for Jay-Z. The following night, the rapper wrote his own lyrics, recorded them, and then excitedly told Alicia Keys he had "a song that was going to be the anthem of New York" and asked her to perform on it.
Back in London, Shuckburgh wasn't even allowed to hear the track. "Well," he says, "I could have heard it if I'd flown out to New York. But they were being so careful about anything leaking. At that point, I didn't really have a track record, they didn't really know who I was, so they didn't know if they could trust me." In fact, the first time he heard Empire State of Mind was when The Blueprint 3, the Jay-Z album it appeared on, finally leaked online. "It was very weird. I remember listening to it in my studio thinking, 'Is this for real?'"
Shuckburgh sounds more sanguine than might be expected for a man who was actively prevented from hearing a song he co-wrote. Perhaps the subsequent effect of Empire State of Mind on his bank balance and status has eased his pain. The track shifted 4m legal downloads and spent five weeks at No 1 in America, making it Jay-Z's first US chart-topper. "It's not like everything's easy now," says Shuckburgh. "But everything's easier."
Maybe that's just how professional songwriters tend to be: whatever other attributes the job may require, a giant ego and a sense of preciousness aren't really among them. This may be why songwriting tends to attract so many former performers, who have either tired of the limelight or watched it fade, and are now making some pragmatic decisions about their futures. Among the more improbable credits on recent hits were the three songs on Beyonc�'s last album co-written by Ian Dench, formerly the guitarist of 1990s British indie dance band EMF (big hit: Unbelievable); then there's She-Wolf by Shakira, partly the work of Sam Endicott, moonlighting from his day job as frontman of New York-based the Bravery.
The washing machine technique
"It's the kind of job where the best thing you can be is invisible," says Shuckburgh's former mentor Eg White. "The very idea of a professional songwriter gets in the way of the singer." White should know. He began his career as a performer ? in boyband Brother Beyond and then in the critically acclaimed Eg and Alice, makers of glossy adult pop. He then went on to become one of Britain's most successful songwriters for hire. He's been responsible, or at least partly responsible, for Will Young's Leave Right Now, James Morrison's You Give Me Something, Adele's Chasing Pavements and Florence and the Machine's Hurricane Drunk.
Tomorrow, as they have been doing for half a century, the Ivor Novello awards will turn a brief spotlight on to the shadowy world of professional songwriters, those people who ply their trade in studios and writing sessions, half-hidden from view, despite being the backbone of the music industry. Up for songwriting awards this year are the composers of such inescapable hits as Tinie Tempah's Pass Out, Katy B's Katy on a Mission and Plan B's She Said. As pop and R&B dominate the charts again (indie bands tend to write their own songs, or if they don't, they keep quiet about it), the songwriter-for-hire is back in demand. At the top of the UK singles chart sits Bruno Mars, whose songwriting credits include Travie McCoy's Billionaire and Cee-Lo Green's Fuck You.
These songwriters do something that seems to go against every romantic notion we have about artistic creativity: they write songs to order (and apparently the current craving among UK labels is for songs that sound like Mumford and Sons, or Florence and the Machine). White, himself the winner of two Ivor Novello awards, is prevailed upon to meet an artist, form a bond, and come up with something chart-topping in the space of a day. "Sometimes less," he says cheerfully. "Sometimes I get two hours. Someone comes over at three, we have a cup of tea, chew the cud for a bit, go: 'All right, shall we write a song?' And by six, they've gone home and we've fucking done it. Chasing Pavements, that took two or three hours."
Enormously affable, White seems to love every aspect of the process, even being forced to make friends with artists he's never met before. "You immediately stop observing the niceties of gentle human contact between strangers," he says, adding that he subscribes to "the washing machine theory" of songwriting. "I tend to play a few records and discuss them: what we need is the beat from that one, the fragility of that one. We try to keep it open, but we talk about the ways it might have precedents in different genres, smash them all together and get something different. If you just put one thing in the washing machine, you're going to get one thing out; but if you put two or three colours in, who knows what colour's going to emerge? Pop music is built out of pop music."
This is not an approach adopted by everyone. Jim Duguid, co-author of five songs on the debut album by Paolo Nutini, says: "Some record companies will give you a list of five songs and say, 'We want something like this.' But that's like someone turning up with a BMW, giving you a load of parts and saying, 'Can you build something like that for me?' It'll kind of look like it, but it won't be right."
Duguid, who was drummer and songwriter with the old band Speedway ? of which Nutini was a huge fan, doesn't care much for knocking out a collaboration in a couple of hours, either. "I try to avoid that like the plague. A lot of industry people think, 'Yeah, we'll throw you together and you'll write a hit in a day.' But we did that in Speedway and it's not the way the best music comes out. I like more of a social occasion, maybe three days of chatting and listening to music, then getting a couple of ideas together that reflect that."
The one thing professional songwriters seem to agree on is that times are getting tough. "Having had some success," says Duguid, "it still shocks me how little money there is in it. I'm lucky in the sense that Paolo is one of the few artists who still sells physical CDs, and there's money in that. With downloads ? at one pence a download between three songwriters ? you've got to be shifting a heck of a lot of records. The real money's in getting your song on an advert or on television, but that's getting harder, because everyone's trying to do it."
A glorious bloody nose
It's a situation that is changing the nature of recording, says White: "Nobody wants album tracks any more, they just want singles. Before, you weren't just chasing the money and the radio play ? you could do something you really wanted to do, and had thus far been thwarted. Nobody wants the beautiful slow song that ends up as track 11 on an album but that everyone who buys the album will end up loving best of all. It's down to iPod playing, cherry-picking, downloading. Fifteen years ago, you would hope that albums would outsell singles two to one. Now, I hear stories about Taio Cruz selling 13m downloads and 300,000 albums. And it's not just him. Katy Perry: massive singles sales, small album sales. For publishing companies, that's not a disaster ? 13m singles is fantastic. But it's a disaster for record companies and it's a human disaster. The album is no longer the way people define themselves: there isn't enough meat in there."
For a moment, White's ebullience seems to desert him. Then he mentions Adele's LP 21, which has just spent its 15th week at No 1 in the UK, and suddenly he perks up: he has a song on that. "Oh, that's a glorious bloody nose to the music industry. Short-termist arses. Start fucking making music with your hearts! The record industry was saying no one was buying records any more, and then someone makes a very stoical, honest, beautiful record and people are buying it in shedloads. Because it's nutritious."
Anyway, he says, album tracks or not, it's a great job. "I've had Matt Cardle in today. We've both been making a fuck of a lot of noise, turning the guitars up really loud." Matt Cardle off The X-Factor? Loud guitars? Noise? Really? "Yeah," White chuckles. "Songwriting really is great fun."
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