#songwriting

#songwriting

“The song fell out of me almost immediately after finishing The Music of Chance. It's a novel which I really loved,” he says. “It's a tale of travelling across the US, random encounters, and the absurdity of having to repay a poker debt by building a wall for two eccentric millionaires called Flower and Stone. It felt like something out of Beckett or Camus.”

Power Ballad is about making it and dreaming big, about every busker never giving up on hopes of one day being mega. But as so often with Carney, it's about something else, usually left unacknowledged in movies about music or any sort of showbusiness: the terrible binary of success and failure. For every star there is an invisible army of losers, the sad cases who used to be the star's home town friends or early collaborators and have a lifelong task ahead of them coming to terms with not making it.

The character of Joe, Toledo explains, was an homage to Daniel Johnston, who used the name in several songs "as a sort of joke, a stand-in for himself." He goes on, "I started thinking-who is Joe? And how do the songs, in the way they're sequenced on the album, reflect what he's going through? As I started asking this question, a story emerged with startling wholeness and clarity, like finding the foundations of an ancient city while digging in my backyard."

“I like to be silly,” she said. “I also wanted an artist name that felt lucky. I'm a Sagittarius rising, which means my chart is ruled by Jupiter, the planet of luck. When I started making music, I was anxious all the time. The name helped me feel confident enough to keep pursuing it. I also like the work of bell hooks, a feminist writer and social critic, who uses lowercase to decenter identity and challenge hierarchy.”

Hoop looks out an airplane window and sees a whirling vortex the size of a stadium. Is it a body of water? A crop circle? No-as the plane descends, the scene comes into focus: thousands of men, women, and children, spinning "like thread around a spool," terror on their faces, trampling those who lose their footing. The uncanny vision is made even eerier when Hoop spots her late mother dragging her five children through the human tide.

I said: Man, we'd better hurry up and write an original song with a catchy intro or, five years from now, people will go, Oh yeah, George Thorogood wasn't he good at playing Chuck Berry or something?' Bad to the Bone is a male fantasy. Let's face it: every guy wants to be bad. We were raised on Hollywood movies and all those tough guys, like Bernardo from West Side Story, or Howlin' Wolf we opened for him in 1974 and he had a ferocious reputation.

For the first time, we hear Roxanne's lovely, wispy voice in lucid detail, as she contemplates loss and desire over slow and stripped-back compositions. The album artwork for Poem 1. Photograph: Lyric Shen The record opens with a collection of mournful ballads which draw more on pop songwriting than Roxanne's usual amorphous style. Her yearning is tangible in the simple yet evocative lyrics, but also beyond: the tense vibrato of the strings in The Age of Innocence; the sustained keys in Keepsake.

The career of Kenneth Edmonds, better known as Babyface, offers one of the clearest expressions of that truism: a body of work that echoes the past even as it reshapes the present.

Dave Mason lived a remarkable life devoted to the music and the people he loved. He was a frontman who wrote and performed some of Traffic's biggest hits, but who hopped in and out of the lineup.

Kacey Musgraves is back with her latest single, Dry Spell, which is full of horny double entendres and signals a return to her earlier, humorous style. The song features a parched guitar sound that evokes a sense of desperation, calling out for attention. It is co-written by a hall of fame lineup of songwriters, showcasing a lyrical wit that fans have missed in her recent work.

The greatest adjustment in Cornfield's new music is her lyrical framing. In the past, her songs were so littered with personal details that listening felt voyeuristic.

She watched her peers get called up for groups like SHINee and f(x), but her own debut never came. When Kim, now known professionally as Ejae, was finally dropped by the agency in 2015, the explanation she got was simple: This was a business. As she recently told the Philippine media network ABS-CBN, "SM has a very specific vision and sonic sound and I just didn't really fit that."

Originally from Illinois and now based in Maine, where he has lived for the past four years, Pokey LaFarge brings a lived-in perspective to American roots music. Drawing from early jazz, blues, swing and folk traditions, his songwriting balances warmth, rhythm and emotional clarity without slipping into nostalgia for its own sake. Over the years, LaFarge has grown into a confident bandleader, known for performances that feel loose but intentional, with space for both musicianship and connection.

Right now I have some writing sessions [in Monterrey] for Fuerza Regida's new album, two days from now I start Carin León's new album, then I go to L.A. for the Grammy Week,

"I feel like we were a different band than we were pre-pandemic," says Ryan Jarman, who along with his brothers Gary and Ross lead long-running UK band The Cribs, who just released their ninth album, Selling a Vibe. "It's been like six years since we recorded a record. We weren't sure what we were going to do. We weren't entirely sure how the band was going to move forward.