I Write the Songs … Sometimes
11 acclaimed songwriters who peaked with someone else’s tune.
“Re-Make/Re-Model” isn’t just the title of track one on Roxy Music’s 1972 self-titled debut album. The headline of the glam-rock pioneers’ opening statement, a song that doesn’t actually include the word “re-make” or the word “re-model” in its lyrics, also could serve as something of a pop-music mantra.
For better and perhaps more often for worse, pop would be nothing without the remake. Entire albums, from David Bowie’s Pin Ups to Annie Lennox’s Medusa, have been built around them. Some, like Natalie Cole’s Unforgettable … with Love, Tony Bennett’s MTV Unplugged, Ray Charles’s Genius Loves Company, and Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Album, have gone on to win the coveted Album of the Year Grammy — a prize that continues to elude The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and Madonna.
Artists re-make and re-model at their own risk, though. Covers albums are often dismissed as the fruit of lazy artistry, mere placeholders between credible creative statements. Interpretive singing doesn’t get much more respect. To many music snobs, you’re only as good as your best self-penned song.
But let’s not underestimate the power of the musical interpreter. Some of the greatest performers in various genres over the years have been masters not of songwriting but of interpretive singing. Without it, Elvis Presley wouldn’t have become the king of rock & roll, nor would the likes of Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Bing Cosby, and Ella Fitzgerald have become 20th-century icons.
If it weren’t for songs sung by someone other than whoever wrote them, there’d be no Great American Songbook, no Tin Pan Alley, no Brill Building, no Motown, no Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, no Leiber and Stoller, no Burt Bacharach and Hal David, no Broadway musical, no Philly soul, no disco, no country, and no gospel. The sound of music would be the sound of silence.
And were it not for the power of interpretive singing, a number of excellent singer-songwriters wouldn’t have scored their greatest hits, like these 10 …
Bobby Goldsboro
I wonder how a gifted songwriter like Goldsboro feels knowing that two of his three biggest hits —…
