They Wrote My Love Letter For You (P.1)

I'm obsessive about music in the kind of way that I'll read the artist biographies, look them up on social media/YouTube, watch interviews... and read their track lists to see who wrote the music. Now, I don't do ALL of this for every band I happen to like, but I do do a good bit of it for various bands. Today, I want to talk about something that makes me very proud and really pissed, depending on the band The Question:

Who wrote your music?

Seems like a simple question, right? The band wrote the music, duh. Or did they? A lot of time, you can predict the results based on the band's genre and background. You can judge the book by the cover a lot more than they say you can. But I digress. So before we start looking into who wrote the music, let's ask why.

Reasons Musicians Write With Others/Others Write Their Music:

• Musicians inspire each other
• For new bands, writing with someone who has experience can help foster their own talent
• The band is like family. Perform together, write together
• Writing alone is hard (you can't write in a vacuum)

And yes, I'm going there..

• Don't know how to write/Not talented enough to write

The way I see it, it can make a lot of sense to write with someone else. ESPECIALLY for a new band.  And it totally makes sense for a band to write together- though in reality, it's often only 1 or 2 of the band members will do most of the writing- and since all members will be involved in the performance, writing together is a good way to make sure everyone is on board. If you don't have several other equals to you, meaning, you're a solo artist, then yeah, it can be a great help to have someone come in and help you write. As long as most everything is coming from you, right?

I have a new motto for you. Whatever motto you may or may not have had previously, this is what you need now. Question your world. 

Yup. I will never get to question all the bands I'd like to and understand how they all work, but I spent some time on wikipedia and went screen-shot-happy all for you. I'm pretty sure you'll be okay to trust Wikipedia on this one, despite what teachers like to say all the time. So, where shall we start?

I've decided to start with The Beatles. I'm mostly focusing on modern bands, but since everyone compares everyone to the Fab Four, I'm definitely not going to pass up a chance to talk about one of my favorite bands. Why am I not starting with the Beach Boys or the Four Seasons? For the Former, their history is confusing without spending thorough time studying them because although "they didn't play their own instruments" they did mostly write their own music and had nearly 30 albums. Whilst also complicated, I know the Beatles. I'm gonna talk about what I know. The Four Seasons/Frankie Valli (solo) didn't appear to write their own music, but again, when a band has a history going that far back, you need to dedicate a good chunk of time to be able to talk about them. 

1963 Debut Album: Please Please Me

So, The Beatles. If you go back really early in their history, you can find a lot of covers. Wow, they're totally normal. Maybe it was because they were all geniuses, maybe it was because of the countless hours that they spent in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1960, but here they are, their first album, and we're ready to ask our question for the first time... who wrote your music? 8/14 of the songs they wrote completely by themselves.

1970 12th Album: Let It Be

Within the same year they released their 2nd album (With The Beatles), once again, 8/14 they wrote themselves, with the rest being covers. I don't believe any of them were written for them, although they did make some of the songs more famous in their cover form. Like most bands do, they grow out of covers and soon their albums are completely written by themselves. Their 4 names are the only ones in the "writers" column. Who wouldn't be proud of them?

Moving on, we're going to go straight to bands of the current decade. Here's a couple examples of some other bands that I love:

Muse....

2012 6th Album: The 2nd Law

If you look through their Discography, the writer's column looks exactly the same almost every time. Matt Bellamy writes everything, my gosh. The first 5 albums are all his writing except for one cover. So here's their 6th album where (hooray!) Chris writes some stuff. Matt is amazing and we love him to death, but this just proves to me that their improving as a whole, enough to record a song that Matt didn't write. Also, they are amazing in concert. Had to include that.

Fall Out Boy....

2013 5th Album: Save Rock and Roll

These guys are pretty solid, too. While Pete and Patrick were the main writers earlier, they all grew into writing. Other writers are few and far between (Infinity on High has the most with 2 other writers between 4 songs) and they are more likely to feature somebody on their song. I guess once they got to album 5, they started to let people write their own features, because here we are. I'm still in awe of the fact that they basically made a movie by creating a music video for each song on this album.

Parachute....

2013 3rd Album: Overnight

We have now moved genres from Rock to Punk to Pop. While it's hard to categorize a band in 1 genre, I'm going by what the music was labeled as in my iTunes when I uploaded the CDs. Parachute is definitely Pop, and I wanted to use them as my segway into the pop world in all this writers-talk. What do you expect from Pop? I personally am not a fan of most music in the Pop/Top 40 category, but I like these guys. Lead singer writing most everything is not something we haven't seen before.

What happens when you look at the writers column for some of the biggest top 40 world-touring pop bands for right now? Glad you asked. 

To be continued...

See ya!