Ron Sexsmith?
I’m not convinced that Jabberwocky is talent on Jabberwocky scale.
would heartily agree that Joan Armatrading is way way underappreciated especially on this side of the pond.
Plenty of writers and thinkers too, William T. Vollman and Jerry Mander come to mind.
Jerry Ragovoy. Not a famous songwriter, but a writer of famous songs. Examples: “Time Is on My Side,” “Eight Days on the Road,” “Piece of my Heart,” “Cry Baby.” Songs recorded by Dusty Springfield, Mannfred Mann, Miriam Makeba, Janis Joplin, The Rolling Stones, B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt, Elvis Costello, Mary J. Blige…
So he died in July. I’ll bet you didn’t hear about him even then.
Songwriters who are singer-songwriters get much better press.
Singer/songwriter Aimee Mann is absolutely amazing and I never hear much about her. I became a fan of hers after seeing the move, Magnolia, for which she did the soundtrack. Her voice is beautiful and haunting, and her songs really touch me.
As clever as the song “Bob” by Weird Al Yankovic is, note that Yankovic didn’t come up with most of the palindromes (and probably didn’t come up with any of them). There are a number of books, websites, etc. with large collections of English-language palindromes, and Yankovic undoubtedly searched through them for lines for the song. It was interesting for him to come up with the idea of doing a parody of Bob Dylan doing the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (both the song itself and the music video) where all the lines were palindromes, since they sound at first equally meaningless. (The video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is actually just a clip from the documentary Dont Look Back. That’s Allen Ginsberg and Bob Neuwirth in the background of the Dylan video.)
There are people who would argue that “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is a much more interesting and influential song and video than “Bob”:
I agree, she is amazing. Unappreciated by the general public, unfortunately, but she’s done well for herself. She was in a massively popular group (‘Til Tuesday) that still gets played on the radio, she’s married to a well-known singer-songwriter (Michael Penn), is the sister-in-law of a famous actor (Sean Penn) and so has access and connections that most people would never dream of having, and has tons of credits on IMDB, which besides Magnolia, include appearing in the Coen Brothers’ arguably most popular film (The Big Lebowski). And then there’s that Academy Award nomination (lost to Phil Collins, unfortunately).
Another songwriter who is “damn popular, ridiculously rich and with carer longevity” is composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, yet he is also dissed to the nth degree.
Bill Finger deserves a co-credit alongside Bob Kane’s on any Batman work.