When making a list like The 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters, there’s a bit of a paradox for critics to cope with. On the one hand, they’re aware that they’re tackling an absurdly immense task and that every judgment they make is open to endless debate; it would be very easy to decide the whole thing’s hopelessly subjective and there’s clearly no “right” answer. On the other hand: They have to do it anyway, sitting down and trying to maintain as much care and intellectual rigor as possible, across thousands of tough choices, in search of the rightest answer they can muster. One thing that became clear as we worked on this issue was that in the phrase “the 30 greatest living American songwriters,” the only word that wasn’t going to present that daunting level of complexity was “the.” There are 30 spots, but the critics also included collaborative teams of multiple writers. They weighed out how to judge partnerships in which some members were living and some were not. They debated “greatness,” obviously, but also the parameters of “songwriting” itself, an act that can — in all the countless ways songs come into existence these days — easily blur into producing, beatmaking, arranging, improvising. And of course there’s the question of “American”; more on that below. Looking through readers’ responses, it’s been especially gratifying to see the moments when people were led to think in new ways about how songwriting works. Some discovered, or were reminded, that writers like Babyface, Diane Warren and Carole King were behind huge numbers of songs they enjoyed from other performers. Some may have changed (or declined to change) their assumptions about whether stars like Mariah Carey and Taylor Swift write songs. Some were fascinated by the role of professional songwriters in systems like Nashville’s Music Row; some were eager to investigate the work of artists they were less familiar with, like Stephin Merritt, Lucinda Williams or Missy Elliott. Part of the joy of making a list, though, is starting a conversation, and it’s been thrilling to hear readers’ thoughts — not just about their own unjustly omitted favorites, but also about the scope and the values of our critics’ list. Below, I’ll speak to a few sentiments we saw this week. |
