Who Are the ‘Big 4’ of Songwriting Duos?

Plenty of songwriters want to work alone, crafting hits completely on their very own. Others discover their finest work comes out of collaboration with one other particular person.

Often, the connection seems innate, as if the expertise was there from start and solely wanted the proper circumstances to be revealed to the world.

“I stumbled into songwriting,” Keith Richards defined to Rolling Stone in 2002, “so did Mick [Jagger]. You know the story: Andrew Oldham locked us in the kitchen and forced us to do it. You either find you’ve got it or not.” (The “story” is that the Rolling Stones’ supervisor Andrew Loog Oldham did certainly lock Richards and Jagger away till they got here up with 1964’s “As Tears Go By.”)

Not everybody has the very same expertise, however that is the place actually fascinating issues can occur. Bernie Taupin and Elton John discovered that they created their finest work when Taupin wrote the phrases first, adopted by John composing the music.

“I think the lyrics themselves dictated the melody ultimately,” Taupin mentioned to Vulture in 2023. “But he likes it that way and we’ve done it for decades. It’s definitely the way I like to work, but at the same time, I don’t mind if he jerry-rigs things after I’ve written it. If he says, ‘That doesn’t quite work there,’ or ‘This is a little too long,’ we edit something out.”

Below, we’re having a look at the “Big 4” of songwriting duos.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Let’s start with the apparent: Paul McCartney and John Lennon, arguably the most profitable songwriting partnership in music historical past. Much has been written over the years about their collaboration — how and why it labored so nicely — although to try to distill it down to at least one rationalization is futile. Lennon and McCartney demonstrated a yin/yang dynamic, the former sharp, witty and a bit cynical, the latter extra romantic, delicate and candy. Or as Lennon put it himself in 1980: “[Paul] provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes.” Neither had any formal music coaching after they started writing songs collectively, as a substitute counting on intuition and the push and pull of their two opposing personalities. Unlike different songwriting duos that featured one lyricist and one composer, each Lennon and McCartney wrote lyrics and music.

This is not to say the pair did not have their disagreements, and it also needs to be famous that though many Beatles songs had been credited to “Lennon-McCartney,” that did not imply their contributions had been all the time 50/50. However nicely they labored collectively, a way of competitiveness remained. “It bugged [Lennon] that Paul could write those sweet melodies like ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Hey Jude,'” Dan Richter, a former aide to Lennon, informed The Telegraph in 2023. “He couldn’t do that. He was just too acerbic or too intelligent.”

But the numbers actually do communicate for themselves. Between 1962 and 1970, roughly 180 songs had been collectively credited to Lennon and McCartney, many of them historic hits. For a long time after their artistic partnership ended, the two have served as the final position mannequin for collaborative songwriting. McCartney mentioned it merely on his McCartney: A Life in Lyrics podcast in 2023: “That interplay was miraculous.”

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, aka the Glimmer Twins, a deadly, provocative and electrifying mixture.

To perceive these two, one should look all the manner backward to after they first met as youngsters in London. They knew each other peripherally — each had been followers of American blues music — however every had been equally satisfied nobody else inside miles of them had comparable pursuits. “This is a true story – we met at the train station,” Jagger recounted to Rolling Stone in 1995. “And I had these rhythm and blues records, which were very prized possessions because they weren’t available in England then. And [Richards] said, ‘Oh, yeah, these are really interesting.’ That kind of did it. That’s how it started, really.”

It was off to the races from there. The story goes that of their very early days, the Rolling Stones’ supervisor Andrew Loog Oldham locked Jagger and Richards in a room collectively and informed them to not come out till they’d written a music. They did — “As Tears Go By” — and continued on to write down nicely over 100 songs, which is to say nothing of their work collectively as producers in the studio. Like Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards had been (and are) each robust personalities, every teeming with each lyrical and musical expertise, each closely influenced by these aforementioned blues information in their very own methods. But there was a stability to be struck.

“The thing in leadership is, you can have times when one person is more at the center than the other, but there ca’’t be too much arguing about it all the time,” Jagger defined in 1995. “Because if you’re always at loggerheads, you just have to go, ‘Ok, if I can’t have a say in this and this, then fuck it. What am I doing here?'”

If you seemed by means of the Rolling Stones’ catalog hoping to discern which man wrote which songs, you’d discover it troublesome. “Every song we’ve got have pieces of each other in it,” Richards mentioned to Rolling Stone in 2015.

Elton John and Bernie Taupin

Elton John and Bernie Taupin are the quintessential instance of respective abilities merging to create one singular inventive image.

For Taupin, narrative was the whole lot. “I always wanted to be a storyteller,” he informed Q With Tom Power in 2023, explaining that American nation songs like Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” seemed like the holy grail to him. “When I heard that song, I went, ‘Wow. You can write stories and have people sing them too.’ And that was always my mantra all the way through my life: I wanted to be a storyteller. I didn’t understand the process of songwriting or what really a lyricist was. I didn’t like to be referred to as a poet and I loathe it still to this day, you know. I just always wanted to be a storyteller.”

Thus, the excellent foil was John, a gifted pianist, composer and reside performer. The two first met in 1967 and inside only a couple of years had been writing music after music collectively. “When I first started writing with Bernie it was exactly the same as it is now; I would get a lyric, I would go away and write the melody and play it to him. That’s never changed,” John defined to Jimmy Kimmel in 2016. (The one and solely time John got here to Taupin with the music first was with 1976’s “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.”) “We’ve been writing 49 years together, this year…and I don’t try to analyze it, but it’s strange but it works.”

Don Henley and Glenn Frey

Don Henley and Glenn Frey first bought to know each other after they had been each members of Linda Ronstadt’s backing band, but it surely did not take very lengthy for the two of them to go off and type their very own group, Eagles.

Even earlier than that, Henley and Frey knew they labored nicely collectively. “In those days, we didn’t have enough money to put people in separate rooms, so Glenn and Don were rooming together, and they each discovered the other could sing and was a great songwriter,” Ronstadt informed Billboard in 2016, the 12 months Frey handed away. “Glenn used to call Don his secret weapon.”

But like Taupin and John above, in addition they discovered that their variations made them much more efficient artistic companions. “[Frey]’s much more disciplined,” Henley as soon as defined to American Songwriter. “I sort of just wait for it to come to me. He likes to block out a certain amount of time every day and sit down and go ‘okay, we’re writing.’ Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. … Lyrics and songs usually come to me when I’m doing something else, like loading the dishwasher or gardening or riding the horses.”

Perhaps much more importantly, constructive suggestions was all the time half of the equation. What makes an excellent collaborator? “Somebody with enthusiasm,” Henley answered American Songwriter, “somebody who is willing to carefully criticize and examine themselves, that’s where most people fall down on the job. Most people don’t take criticism very well from others or themselves. Glenn and I are very willing to criticize ourselves.”