Paul Westerberg wasn't precious about his craft ("I hate music/It's got too many notes," he sang on the first Replacements album in 1981).
You admit everything that's wrong and you talk about it in the sharpest terms, in the keenest way you can." "You write a song about something that you think might be taboo, you sing it for other people and they immediately recognize themselves in it," Prine says.
But John Prine has always had the innate ability to emphatically capture the highs, lows and occasional laughs of everyday Americans and fringe characters: the drug-addled vet in "Sam Stone," the lonely older folks in "Angel from Montgomery" and "Hello in There." One of a group of early Seventies singer-songwriters to get pegged with the unfortunate tag "New Dylan," Prine has written poignant songs of romantic despair ("Speed of the Sound of Loneliness"), songs that sound like centuries-old mountain ballads ("Paradise") and ribald comic masterpieces aimed at advice columns and various crazies. Maybe it's his family's blue-collar background or the years he spent delivering mail before becoming a full-time musician. Besides their own hits (including a string of six consecutive Number Ones), the brothers wrote the title song for Grease, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton's "Islands in the Stream," Barbra Streisand's "Guilty," and Destiny's Child's "Emotion." "We see ourselves first and foremost as composers, writing for ourselves and other people," Robin Gibb said. But when they took a stab at disco with 1975's "Jive Talkin'," their career kicked into an even higher gear. Number One single, "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart," was promptly covered by Al Green. Elton John has called them "a huge influence on me as a songwriter" Bono has said their catalog makes him "ill with envy." The Bee Gees' earliest hits ("New York Mining Disaster 1941," "To Love Somebody") were melancholy psychedelia, and their first U.S.
But that multiplatinum triumph was just the tip of the iceberg: Australian brothers Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb were massively successful songwriters for decades. "And so I started writing these story songs."Īmerica first discovered the Bee Gees with the 1977 disco soundtrack Saturday Night Fever.
One of Nashville's most overtly political songwriters, he was a liberal who recorded "Watergate Blues" and turned a drink in a bar after the 1972 Democratic convention into a Number One country hit called "Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine." "I couldn't write the 'Darling, you left alone and blue' or 'I'm drunk in this bar and crying' - I just didn't get it," he once said.
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Riley in 1968, it freed Hall to record his own work, which included songs about burying a man who owed him 40 dollars, mourning the death of the local hero who taught him how to drink and play guitar, and "Trip to Hyden," a journalistic tale of a drive to the scene of a mining disaster that was part Woody Guthrie, part Studs Turkel. A Number One pop and country hit for Jeannie C. Taylor uses so much ice when her husband's out of town. His best work was charged with literary irony but unfolded with the ease of spoken language, as when the mini-skirted heroine of "Harper Valley P.T.A." struts into the local junior high and exposes small-town hypocrisy by asking why Mrs. Hall was an English major who said he learned to write songs by osmosis, soaking up everything from Dickens to Hemingway.
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