Does it bother you if singers don’t write their own material?
I thought of this question when I heard Hillbilly Deluxe by Brooks and Dunn. It didn’t sound like something they would write, and I was right. They do write a majority of their material though.
So for artists who have their songs written by others, what do you think? Do you disapprove? Why?
Me personally, I don’t *really *care. But sometimes it’s nice to know that the artist I’m listening to really did put the thought and emotion into what they are singing.
It bugs me a little. Someone like Britney Spears (who may or may not write her own stuff she is just a name people would recognize and thus I used as an example) gets all the credit and makes millions off of songs and the guy/girl/team who actually penned the words probably got $500 for the song.
Singing and writing are two different talents. There has been a popular movement in one or two genres of popular music in the last 40 years for the fans to believe that the two talents should be intertwined (although any examination of any serious discography will demonstrate that there is a lot of “sharing” going on), but I see no reason to deprived of the talents of a great singer because that singer does not happen to have written his or her own material–and I see no reason to be deprived of a writer’s music because his or her voice makes Bob Dylan sound like Pavorotti or Domingo.
The singer gets bigger bucks for being able to to draw crowds to concerts or sell disks, but most songwriters who provide more than one hit live comfortably. They get a smidgen of return from every disk sold, whether it was recorded by Spears or covered by some unknown group in Idaho or (ten years from now) the London Symphony. (So stop pirating disks! )
I love to hear great songs sung well. I admire song writing and singing as separate skills which are sometimes present in the same person. There are lots of song writers who are quite grateful that other singers are willing to record their songs. I saw John Hiatt in concert once and he introduced his “Are You Ready For This Thing Called Love” by saying “Bonnie Raitt recorded this one. Thanks, Bonnie, that put a few sets of tires on the old tour bus.”
It doesn’t bother me that some singers don’t write their own songs, but it bothers me a lot that there are so many online lyrics sites that give credit to the singer and not to the lyricist & composer. If, like Darrell Scott, I had written an incredible song such as “Long Time Gone,” it would pain me mightily to see the lyrics posted online, with credit given to the Dixie Chicks (who weren’t even the first to record the song).
I’m not particularly troubled that Mozart didn’t sing all of the parts in his operas. It doesn’t trouble me much if a musician didn’t write the music he’s playing or the lyrics she’s singing or what have you. They are performers. Some people can write really amazing stuff, and aren’t particularly spectacular at singing or producing it. For example, Leonard Cohen is all right, but some of his songs give me absolute chills…when they’re sung by someone else.
There is a long tradition of lyricists writing for different singers so no, it doesn’t particularly bother me. The talent of singing is far removed from the talent of writing. For that matter, the talent of singing is also separate from the talent of playing and the outrage of those criticising a singing group because they ‘don’t play the instruments’ is amusing for it’s complete irrelevancy.
Go back to the 30s & 40s (and even the 50s), and very few singers wrote their own songs. Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Russ Columbo, Rudy Vallee, Doris Day, Lena Horne, and even Elvis Presley all took songs from great popular composers and sang them. The composers didn’t sing all that well, and the performers didn’t write songs (except in very limited cases, and usually not successfully).
That started changing in the 50s with people like the Everly Brothers and Chuck Berry writing and performing. By the time the Beatles came along, it was expected that musicians play their own music, so much so that someone like Joe Cocker was a major anomaly. This was the standard expectation.
Now, it’s come full circle. A lot of performers – mostly the newer pop music divas – are solely performers. They can’t write music (and many can’t sing all that well, either, but standards allow for a lot of echo on recordings to make them all sound the same).
I don’t think writing the music is necessary, though the big problem is that the music that they are singing is so mediocre and formulaic.
If the writers are fully credited, it doesn’t bother me. I do think that singing someone else’s songs is kind of more like acting - the performer might do a great job of conveying the emotion, but you don’t know whether they really believe/feel what they’re singing or not. In many cases, this isn’t all that relevant, but sometimes it is and that’s when it’s not so hot.
True Story: Somone at work asked me to get the lyrics to Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” She got really really pissed off when I gave her the lyrics to Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.”
As per Antinor01 in the above post, even singers known for writing their own songs have recorded ones they did not write. The Beatles’s did the Isley’s “Twist and Shout,” Springsteen did Tom Waites’s “Jersey Girl.” I guess my favorite non-song-writer singer would be Joan Baez, and she has written a few.
My favorite songs were sung by people who sang so many things there is no way they could have written them all.
It’s fun to find singer-songwriters, but often you get people like Jim Croche that should have had help because all his songs have spots that are just wrong.
A measure of a great singer is his/her ability to sell a song to an audience, whether they wrote the song or not. An actor’s talent doesn’t depend on whether he wrote the script; same with musical performance. Some people can write great songs, some people can sing great, but the numbers of people who can do both is very few.
Why did she get pissed, just because it was a cover tune? Houston’s performance is still great.
I don’t have a problem with it. I know I can’t write songs, and I gave up trying to find a band or people to jam with as a guitarist, because it seemed like nowadays everybody only wants to do only originals. The problem is that more often than not, those originals aren’t very good, and not being able to write, myself, I didn’t have anything better to offer. I’d have had much more fun just rocking out on actual songs I’d been working on at home, or similar material.
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