Transcript of The 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters New

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily on Sunday. Over the past year, under a veil of secrecy, my colleagues at The New York Times Magazine have been arguing over a list of the best living songwriters in America.

Good, stupid, what type of facts?

It's a love story, sunshine.

Across all genres of music, famous lyricists, you make me feel, sonic pioneers, strange powers, hit machines, you're a part of me, and beloved storytellers.

Oh, someday, girl, I don't know when, we're gonna get to that place.

Today, Times journalists explain how this list was made, and we hear from the artists themselves about how they created some of the greatest songs ever written. It's Sunday, May 3rd. Sasha Weiss.

Michael Barbaro.

You must be exhausted.

We've had some late nights here.

Yeah.

But fun ones. Really fun.

And just to explain, you are the deputy editor of The Times Magazine, and you were deeply involved, along with a vast crew, in creating this list. And I wonder, how do you even begin to create a list as ambitious as this?

Well, we decided to draw on the wisdom of the crowd. And—

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But not just any crowd.

00:02:03

Not just any crowd. We wanted to really canvas a lot of different music experts from all walks of life. So we sent ballots out, of course, to working musicians and songwriters, but also to producers, to label executives, to many generations of music critics, to top editors of music magazines, to scholars, to authors, to DJs, to music supervisors. So we really tried to go wide. And in the end, the list that was generated by that balloting process had over 700 individual names.

Wow.

What followed the balloting process was a second part of the process, which was inviting Times critics and sometimes affiliated critics to come to the Times for a long day of debate.

And just kind of slug it out.

To slug it out.

Were you in the room?

Oh, yeah.

What was it like?

Passionate, contentious, sometimes heated. You know, I mean, there were some people who were obvious shoo-ins. They balloted high above the rest. Stevie Wonder was one. Dolly Parton was another. Bob Dylan was another. Carole King.

So hold your fire. Those guys are in.

Those guys are in. And that was part of our rules. And sort of the lower down we got in the balloting, the more they had to reach consensus. So there was a lot of debate. There was a lot of playing music in the room. But when they couldn't get agreement, sometimes they had to move on.

Crushing.

It was crushing. I mean, I think at various points, different people in the room felt crushed. You know, part of what we were trying to do here was to complicate the image of a kind of singer-songwriter bard that a lot of us have in our heads and that, you know, some of the kind of usual suspects represent. That's one mode of songwriting, a very important one. But It's actually relatively new. You know, it was really in the '60s that Bob Dylan, among others, kind of inaugurated that kind of songwriting. You know, and we wanted to represent these other traditions. So how do we do that? So who to include from Nashville? That was a big question. And how to arrange that, you know, how to explain that to readers.

Well, let's talk about who ultimately got left off because so much of our conversation today is gonna be about who makes it. And I'm gonna go first here, okay? Because I have— I've had a chance to evaluate your list. And just off the top of my head, Billy Joel.

Sure.

You left off Billy Joel, the poet laureate of New York, the man who turned dinner at an Italian restaurant into an opera.

You're not alone there, Michael. Many commenters on our project have been lamenting the absence of Billy Joel.

Yeah.

Now, Billy Joel Everybody in the room would agree, I think, at least most of them would agree that Billy Joel belongs on a list of great songwriters. But when you're making a list of 30 and you're rooting it in a balloting process, you have to make hard choices. And there were people who were higher than he was. And, you know, there were also people representing the Piano Man schmaltz tradition. Um, there—

Schmaltz?

Sure.

Schmaltz meant in the best sense, emotionalism, opera, you know, a kind of like bigness of storytelling, which is a venerable tradition in American song, you know, and represented on the list. But Billy Joel, some people argued in the room, as a lyricist, if you're kind of putting him up against a Springsteen and a Dylan, people who he admires and I think pays homage to, some people argued he's not quite there. And there are others who are better. And we do have to represent the Piano Men. They're there, but The Piano Man himself, ultimately— Is not. Is not.

I wonder what you see and/or hear when you look at the final list of 30.

I think it's a list that reflects the world that we move through. I think it reflects the way that American music comes out of everything from, like, a speaker at a bar mitzvah, you know? A dance floor at a bar mitzvah. [SINGING IN Yiddish] what you see on TikTok to, like, the thing that you'd sing at karaoke that everybody would know.

Mm-hmm.

We have people who are layering in production and a kind of sound that threads its way through popular R&B and soul and hip-hop. We have schmaltz, and we have avant-garde indie, you know, weirdness.

I spread like strawberries, I climb like peas and beans.

Uh, you know, we have, we have all of it, um, and we really wanted to show a range and to show that songwriting is not just one kind of songwriting. So the list tells Several stories about that.

And I'd argue best of all, for our purposes, is that because this list of 30 songwriters required them to be alive, we can actually hear from them.

Yes. So that was sort of the third step in the process. Once we went through the very difficult work of winnowing this list— and by the way, it wasn't just one session. It was many, many sessions over weeks to get to where we got.

We wanted to go to these practitioners of song and say, "How do you do what you do?" [Speaker:JAD] And for the rest of this episode, we're actually gonna hear from a couple of our colleagues who helped create this list and did these interviews with these living songwriters. And we're gonna start with a colleague who spoke with arguably the biggest name in music today. And we're actually gonna hear from her. In the great tradition of schmaltz, I'm gonna use a pun here. We're going to hear from her quite swiftly.

Excellent.

We'll be right back. Joe Coscarelli.

Hey.

Welcome to The Sunday Daily.

Thank you for having me.

You cover pop music for The New York Times. You co-host a show, podcast. You were one of the journalists who helped winnow this wisdom of the crowd that Sasha mentioned down to the 30 best living American songwriters. And most relevantly for our purposes, you interviewed the queen.

Not Beyoncé.

The other queen.

Not Madonna.

Taylor.

Yes.

Pretty big deal.

Yeah, fun, fun one. A good assignment.

Mm-hmm.

Tell me why Taylor Swift made the list.

How could she not? That's my stance. I think there's a lot of hemming and hawing over Taylor's omnipresence as a celebrity, as a cultural figure, her sort of imperial reign over pop music, especially in the last 5+ years. The fame is one thing, but the music is at the core of the fame, and I think that ultimately is the reason for everything else. It's the songs.

And that's what puts her on the list of best living songwriters. You're a student, maybe even dare I say a scholar, of Taylor Swift. And you've been studying her work for how long?

I mean, I've been listening to Taylor Swift since I was a teenager.

Uh, which is when she was a teenager.

Yeah, we're about the same age. She's 1989, as we know. Uh, I'm 1988. We've grown up in parallel. She's always been there. As a soundtrack to my own adolescence and young adulthood. And then I've been covering her as a journalist for 15 years now, 12 of which are here at The Times. I interviewed her before for my songwriting series on YouTube called Diary of a Song. That was in 2019. And then after that interview, she essentially goes dark from speaking with reporters about her work until Until now. We're good?

Yeah.

Ready to rock?

Oh, absolutely.

All right.

Thank you so much for doing this. What a treat.

Thank you for inviting me to talk about songwriting.

I have a million—

Where do you start this conversation with her about her songwriting process?

You know, I actually started with the first line of the first song of her first album she ever released called Taylor Swift in 2006. That song is called Tim McGraw.

He said the way my blue eyes shine. —put those Georgia stars to shame that night.

I said, "That's a lie." We use that to get into all of these little songwriting tricks that she still does today that started with her initial schooling in what it means to make a record.

There was almost this tradition of sort of breaking the fourth wall, making the song then a part of the song, or the writing of the song becomes a part of the song.

And one of the tricks I've always loved that Taylor Swift uses, which is a very country music thing to do, is this sort of plot twist, this perspective shift at the end of a song.

And I did that in a song called Tim McGraw, where, you know, I'm singing about this, this kind of love lost.

And there's a letter left on your doorstep, and the first thing that you read—

and then in the bridge, it's revealed that I wrote song, and I hope he hears it.

This is something she was doing on that first album, on songs like Tim McGraw and Our Song.

The song Our Song, which I, I still love so much, it's, it's all about this romance and this relationship, and then in the end it says, um, I grabbed a pen and an old napkin and I wrote down our song. So I loved doing that. I still kind of love doing that, the kind of just like, and it was me.

And then she drew the thread all the way years and years later to a song on her album Folklore called called, uh, The Last Great American Dynasty.

Rebecca rode up on the afternoon train.

It was sunny. It is just so much fun to, like, tell this story about this real woman who lived in history, and, and she defied the social norms, and she drove people crazy, and she had a marvelous time ruining everything. And you talk about the house she lived in on the coast And basically then in the end, you're like, you know, she moved away from Holiday House. It sat quietly on that beach.

On that beach, free of women with madness, the men and bad habits.

And then it was bought by me. And then it was bought by me. And you're like, every time I get to that part when I would sing it on tour, I just like, like I wanted my grin to go from here to here, but that looks crazy. So it's like I had to like taper down my own excitement that that that that hook happened.

As you two are discussing the early phases of her career, she mentions a musical influence that I had not quite expected: emo. Breathe in for luck, breathe in—

I was intensely impacted by emo music, right? Dashboard Confessional, Chris Carrabba, uh, Fall Out Boy, Pete Wentz's lyrics.

Am I more than [Speaker:MICHAEL] This was a real light bulb moment for me because Taylor and I are about the same age. We grew up on the same MySpace-era music. And so when I asked her about this thing she's always loved to do, which is playing on idiom and even cliché, she drew it directly back to these sort of maligned at the time youth culture bands who were known for putting a sort of clever twist on an expected phrase.

Phrase.

They take a common phrase and then they just twist the knife of it, right? Like, "I'm just a notch in your bedpost, but you're just a line in a song." "Drop a heart, break a name." I'd be reading those lyrics and I'd just finish reading a line and just go, "Oh my God." And that got her talking and thinking about all these little language tricks she likes to lean on. I really gravitate towards juxtaposition and polarity in a line, right? So, "Hey, what could you possibly get for the girl who has everything and nothing all at once?" "Our coming of age has come and gone." She talks about these little rules she has for herself.

Like, she doesn't like one word to end on the same letter that the next word starts with.

A really funny bugaboo.

For example, in the song "Our Song," it was supposed to be when you're on the phone and you talk real low. But I was like, "I don't like—

I don't like the real low." So it's turned into "when you talk real slow." When we're on the phone and you talk real slow, 'cause it's late and your mama don't know, our song is a way to go. Taylor is famous for her bridges in songwriting. And here, I'm just gonna confess, I don't think I've ever really understood what a bridge is, but I know you guys talked about it.

I think an easy way to think about a bridge is that it's a section standalone part of the song that comes near the end, and you've never heard it before, and it probably doesn't repeat. I knew I had to talk about bridges with her because Taylor has made a point to really make the most out of this part of pop songwriting structure.

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I think the importance for me of a bridge, it just feels like we're painting a picture, we're setting a scene. You can start like painting the picture in the verse, you can get to the heart of it at the chorus, but then the bridge can be where you zoom back, you walk 20 feet back, and you see what this entire painting was supposed to be. Like, you've seen brushstrokes, you've seen the color tones, but the bridge can be when you step back and you feel everything that that piece of art was supposed to make you feel. That's just how I feel about bridges.

And she zeroes in on something she likes to do that she calls the rant bridge.

We love these rant bridges where it's basically like stream of consciousness, endless pouring out of emotion.

I'm drunk in the back of the car and I cried like a baby coming home from the bar.

Intrusive thoughts, like, like blended with metaphor, with discussion, with shouting.

I love you, ain't that the worst thing you ever heard?

[SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE] You want this ramp bridge to feel the most intense of what that feeling is that you're trying to establish over the course of the song.

[SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE] My favorite moment in the interview, in case you wondered, is when Taylor Swift describes to you how an entire song just starts to come to her. And that has always felt like the divine in the songwriting process. And she recounts a recent example of that.

Yeah, she's talking about the song "Elizabeth Taylor." [MUSIC] [SPEAKING ENGLISH] She's talking about this really sort of mundane moment of being on vacation with her boyfriend, now fiancé, Travis Kelce.

I go on and on and explaining to Travis, like, why I love Elizabeth Taylor so much. She fought for artists' rights. She was exploited in so many ways, and yet she—

You can just imagine Travis, you know, in the driver's seat or whatever it is, just sort of like, "Hmm, okay, interesting," you know, learning all about Elizabeth Taylor.

I'm just going on and on. I'm like, "Her eyes were violet. Some people said they were blue. Some people said they were violet. I think they were violet." And we arrive, we get home, he gets out of the car, and I'm just in my head, I'm like, this intrusive melody of like, "I'd cry my eyes violet, Elizabeth Taylor." And I'm just like scrambling to open my record, like, app on my phone.

I'd cry my eyes violet, Elizabeth Taylor.

For somebody who is writing songs constantly, I think a conversation easily becomes art.

But that's like one of those spontaneous places where it floats down like a cloud in front of you, and all you have to do is grab it, and the song transpires from there. It comes as if from nowhere.

I was struck, Joe, by how Taylor Swift thinks about her own reputation as a songwriter.

I see what you did there.

She's exceedingly sensitive, and she tells you this to the idea that other people have written her songs.

Totally. And that's something that started very early in her career. Taylor's third album, Speak Now, is one that she wrote entirely alone with no other co-writers.

When I wrote Speak Now, uh, I was 18 and 19, and I was coming from this big, massive moment that I had with an album called Fearless, and it had won Album of the Year at the Grammys, and it was this big— it was the first time there was like this big debate over whether I deserved to be there. There are always gonna be—

After Fearless, her second album blew up, you had a bunch of people coming out of the woodwork saying like, "Haha, cute, look at this little girl.

Who's writing her songs?" Mm. I was like, these discussions can lead to a really bad place if I don't do something to counteract them and to prove that no, it wasn't my co-writers that did all this work. And yes, I am the author of— of this entire body of work that I was very proud of.

And I think that's something she's had to return to over and over again throughout her career, this idea that, no, no, she in fact is the chief architect and author of everything she makes, even if she works with some of the biggest songwriters on Earth.

I'd written so many songs alone, and I love collaboration, I love co-writers, but it's not something that I needed.

One of the things I've always loved and respected about Taylor is that you can tell she is in tune with the conversation around her, even as she's gotten to this level. And if you pay close attention, you can hear her in this interview responding to different lines of criticism.

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I do kind of like it when people challenge me on something, because I never want to be in the room with creators who are afraid that if if they have a better idea, like, they can't— they can't argue with me because it must be my idea that makes it through.

I'm never going to grow that way. When she says something like, when I am collaborating, it's the best idea wins in the room, AKA I'm not surrounded by yes-men, which is something again that a lot of people have said. Oh, Taylor's songs are slipping because she's so famous, because no one in the room with her can tell her when she has a bad idea. So she does this thing where she not only internalizes the criticism and responds to it in a forum like this, but also responds to it in the music and in the songs and in the way she makes them. Right. I'm glad you brought this up.

She talks with really bracing frankness about the concept of criticism and about how she thinks you're supposed to best use it in songwriting and how you're not —supposed to use it, and the balancing act of that.

I thought that was maybe her savviest and most wise section of this interview.

Yeah, criticism has been a huge fuel for me. It's been a huge jumping-off point, like a creative writing prompt or something.

She says basically, like, dip into it, get a taste of it, and then use it in your art. As fuel.

There are so many songs in my career that would not exist. Like, "Blank Space." would not exist if I hadn't had people being like, "Here's a slideshow of all her boyfriends." And then "Antihero" is a song that I'm so proud of still, like—

Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby and I'm a monster on the hill.

That song doesn't exist if I don't get criticized for every aspect of my personality that people have a problem with. It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me the problem, it's he, hi. My favorite thing when I sit down with new artists or songwriters, I'm like, why are you reading your comments? Like, you're inundating yourself with too much criticism that doesn't really have a focus. But I think a little bit of it, you got to just and just be like, "This is part of it." You, with your words like knives and swords and weapons— Don't make this make you stop writing or make you edit yourself or whatever. If it's an interesting point to you to kind of respond to, then that's a gift for you to be able to write something. Maybe you wouldn't have written something that day. Picking on the weaker man— Don't, like— God, don't go to the Notes app and post it. Like, write about it. Write, make art about this. Don't respond to like trolls in your comments. That's not, that's not what we want from you. We want your art.

A final question, maybe even a curveball. Mm. Did you vote for or against Billy Joel?

Oh, putting me on the spot. I voted against Billy Joel. Why? I find Billy Joel to be schlocky. I think just because people want to singing your songs at karaoke or a bar. That's one ingredient to a great songwriter. But I don't know that the catalog itself stands up when you put a little more pressure on it. Well, Joe, thanks for all the hate mail, Michael, in advance.

Thank you for most of this conversation. Maybe not the very end. Really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

We'll be right back. Jody Rosen, welcome to The Sunday Daily.

Thanks, Michael. Great to be here.

You're one of the esteemed critics, I would argue. Shucks. Deeply involved in this songwriting project. And we just spoke to Joe Coscarelli, about his conversation with Taylor Swift, just so you know where you're entering here. That's one kind of songwriting tradition. When it comes to this list, that wasn't the tradition you focused on.

No, I actually wrote about— had conversations with songwriters who represented a bunch of different other styles, idioms, traditions, vibes, if you will.

Well, let's start with rap, with hip-hop, and who you focused on there.

Yeah, so I went out to Los Angeles and had a conversation with a New Yorker. That is, with arguably the New Yorker, or at least one of them, Jay-Z, who, of course, is Brooklyn-born and bred. [Speaker:JAY-Z] Yeah, yeah, I'm out that Brooklyn.

Now I'm down in Tribeca, right next to the neighborhood—

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Mularthing's the writer, rapper behind arguably our great New York anthem of the 21st century, Empire State of Mind, among many other songs.

[SPEAKING JAPANESE] Beyond Billy Joel's, obviously. Yeah.

[SPEAKING JAPANESE] Yeah, I think of him as sort of a more of a bridge and tunnel bard. But moving on. [MUSIC] So Jay-Z, of course, chronicled his life, his kind of hardscrabble upbringing meaning in Brooklyn, in a lot of his music.

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Whoever said illegal was the easy way out couldn't understand the mechanics and the workings of the underworld.

[Speaker:JOSHUA MACHT] His kind of mythic journey from street corner hustler to famous rapper to now mogul and yep.

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I bought some artwork for $1 million. [Speaker:JOSHUA MACHT] Billionaire. [Speaker:JAY-Z] Two years later, that shit worth $2 million. Few years later, that shit worth—

[Speaker:JOSHUA MACHT] Jay-Z, of course, is a master storyteller, but also kind of a legendary technician. H to the Izzo, V to the Izzay. Just a true genius when it comes to writing rhymes, finding rhythmic pockets and flows. Not guilty.

He who does not feel me is not real to me. Therefore, he doesn't exist.

So poof, bam, move, son of a— Just one of the great practitioners of his art form ever.

What was the most revealing thing he said to you about his songwriting process?

Well, it was really fascinating speaking to him about sort of how songs start for him.

Most times I come up with the flow first. You may have heard, like, people, like, he does his Rain Man in the studio, because I'm just like, mm, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. I'm trying to work out the pockets, and then I'll fill it with words.

Jay-Z is famous for hearing it, coming to the studio, hearing a beat and kind of writing very quickly in the studio to that beat.

These are the ingredients I got to work with. I'm making this type of meal, and I have these sort of things, and I— that's it. You take one of your arms and you tie it behind your back. That's a challenge. But it's a challenge as a writer that you relish and you want.

So if you listen to, like, a great early song of his, like "Dead Presidents 2"—

Who wanna bet us that we don't touch lettuce, stack cheddars forever? Live treacherous, or leave centerless.

What you hear there is intricately rhymed lines with double entendres, triple entendres, puns, wordplay, all that. You feel me?

Factions from the other side would love to kill me, spill 3/4 of my blood into the street, let alone the heat.

Fuck 'em. For me, that's where I really thrive, like when I'm challenged to, like, do a thing, to make a word mean more. Triple entendre, quadruple entendre. That's when I feel like I'm at my best.

So Jay-Z had to be on this list because he is just a master practitioner of this, of this great art form, which maybe not enough people recognize as central to songwriting itself.

Now, from Jay-Z, you then veered into a kind of songwriting tradition that, in my mind, is kind of unheralded and to a certain degree unseen. And that is a group of writers in Tennessee.

Yeah. So I wrote about the 3 honorees on our list who are probably the least well-known because they operate mostly behind the scenes. Not entirely behind the scenes because one of our 3, Brandi Clark, is herself a hallowed singer-songwriter. Mm-hmm. But— She does a lot of work behind the scenes coming out of the tradition that is referred to by the catch-all Music Row, which of course refers to the kind of row of song publishing offices in Nashville that has been the epicenter of the country music business and songwriting tradition for decades, generations. The other two people who are in this little collective that we chose to recognize is a songwriter named Shane McAnally and a guy named Josh Osborne. Collectively, between them, they have written dozens and dozens of hits over the past decade and a half. But they represent this tradition of writers who approach songwriting as a 9-to-5 job. They get together, have what they call co-writes, little sessions that last for a couple hours. Usually, it starts at 11 in the morning. And then they ping-pong ideas, chord changes, melodies back and forth. And they tend to produce a lot of songs, like many songs over the course of a week.

Mm-hmm. And of course, these writers aren't the ones, generally speaking, whose— Names go on the record. You know, they kind of shop their songs to stars, to performing artists. It's a different mode of production than, you know, okay, the singer-songwriter who's pouring out his or her heart, you know, in a kind of, like, Byronic romantic mode. These people are trying to write hits and trying to place songs.

What are some of the hits that this collective of 3 songwriters have made?

Yeah, so this group are notable because while they operate out of this Music Row tradition, they're also kind of, I would say, subverters of tradition. That is, they came in and kind of innovated a little bit. They kind of teamed up with some of the more progressive stars down in Nashville. So artists like Kacey Musgraves.

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If you save yourself from marriage, you're a bore. You don't save yourself from marriage, you're a—

She sung about smoking weed, about being who you are no matter what your sexual preferences. Follow your arrow. That was a song that was written by Brandi Clark and Shane McAnally. And Daddy's hooked on Mary, two doors down. Another great Kacey Musgraves song, kind of her debut single, I believe, a song called "Merry Go Round," which was written by Josh Osborne, Kacey Musgraves, and Shane McAnally. And that song is a kind of gritty look at small-town life in, I believe, East Texas, where Kacey is from.

We think the first time's good enough. We hold on to high school love, say we won't end up like our parents. It looks at things like adultery, dead-end lives in an unvarnished way that was very surprising.

You've got a cold heart and a cold hard truth that got me. Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne have written a lot of songs with Sam Hunt, who's a big star down there these days and who is another kind of innovator. He really has brought an R&B sound and sensibility to country music. Bartender looks at me like, "Pony up, man. We're closing down." I paid the tab and I turned around.

Well, talk about your conversation with them and what you learned about how this trio, and I know it's sometimes in different formations, 3 or just 2, how they do this work. Yeah.

So I went down there and interviewed them in a place called the Bluebird Cafe, which is a legendary songwriter's hangout. They spoke a lot about how they're kind of constantly writing and how that even impacts their everyday life.

There's this great scene in the movie Walk Hard where Dewey Cox, his wife, and he are having this big fight. And he says—

All right, that's fine. I get it. You're innocent and I'm guilty. Guilty as charged.

I'm guilty as charged. Guilty as charged.

Don't you dare write a song right now, Dewey!

And that's exactly how my husband feels. Because he'll be talking and I'll glaze over. And he'll be like, "Are you writing a song? This is our life." But that's how it happens.

It's scary how accurate that is.

Another thing they said about their dynamic is how they kind of function as a support group for one another. Osbourne and McAnally were talking about the process of working with Sam Hunt on one of his— very first songs, a great song called "Take Your Time." I don't know if you were looking at me or not. You probably smile like that all the time.

I don't mean to bother you. Sam and I had a co-write set up with an established older writer that had had some hits. We were both very much in awe of this person, admired this person, really excited to be in the room with them.

Sam Hunt brought that idea into a session, and there was an older writer there.

Sam said, "I have this idea for a song. I think it would be really—" interesting in this day and age if you had a song where in the verses I was literally talking to the girl.

And that idea landed with a thud.

And the older writer started laughing, and he said, "I don't think anybody's gonna wanna hear that on the radio, Sam." And he left the room to get some coffee.

But Osbourne and McAnally knew that it was a great idea.

The second he walked out of the room, I said, "Don't tell that to anybody else." We're gonna play that for Shane. 'Cause I knew Shane would get it.

He got the last laugh.

He did get the last laugh. But, you know, that's— Changed his career.

And I think it's really interesting because, you know, these guys are— Again, they're trying to write hits. It is different than, you know, the kind of confessional tradition that we associate with singer-songwriters who operate more as, you know, kind of lone creators.

Finally, Jody, you spent time with a songwriter on this list of 30 whose creations, in my mind, feel like they kind of belong to all of us. Somebody who wrote dance anthems in particular that are so ingrained in our lives that we— and here I mean me— forgot to ask who actually wrote them.

Yeah, I spoke to Nile Rodgers, who is co-founder, band leader of She's Chic, the great '70s, early '80s disco band. He is a legendary guitarist. When you hear his guitar sound, if you don't off the top of your head know what Nile Rodgers' guitar sound sounds like, trust me, you know it. Just listen to, for instance, the song Good Times. Good times. These are The good times, leave your cares behind. He's written songs like I'm Coming Out, the Diana Ross song.

We Are Family. We Are Family.

He's the greatest dancer. Sister Sledge songs. Ah, freak out. Le Freak. Ah, Freak Out. Mm-hmm. Forgive me. [SPEAKING HEBREW] These songs are— what I love about them is, you know, they sound like glossy products of a very sophisticated recording studio environment, but they also sound like songs that were found under a rock. Mm. Because they sound like they have always been and should always have been. Yeah, they're Talmudic.

They've always been there.

But of course, they haven't always been there. They came out of a very particular moment, cultural and historical moment. And that's what's so great about talking to Nile Rodgers.

I went to this club called the Gigi Barnum Room. He talks about, for instance, writing the great song "I'm Coming Out." And that particular night was not just a heavy trans night, but for some reason, I guess they were having a Diana Ross lookalike kind of night. So I was standing there—

Now, I was at a club downtown, in the bathroom, at a urinal.

I just happened to look to my left and see, like, 6 or 7 deep Diana Rosses. And I look to my right, and I see 6 or 7 deep Diana Rosses.

And sort of like a lightning bolt, it hit him.

I ran outside, and I called Bernard up, um, because, you know, it was the days of pay phones.

We didn't have cell phones yet. He called his co-writer, co-founder of Chic, and partner, the great bassist Bernard Edwards.

I said, "Wake up, wake up, write this down." He said, "What?" I says, "Write down 'I'm coming out.'" He says, "What?" I says, "Write down, 'I'm coming out,' because I know I'm gonna get drunk and forget." Now, what struck him at that moment was it was both a bolt of inspiration, artistic inspiration, and a commercial lightning flash. I'm telling you, if we do this, the gay community alone will buy a million records to have Diana Ross come. I'm coming out. I'm coming out.

I want the world to know. Gotta let it show. I'm coming out. I want the world to know.

Jody, you have the distinction, or I guess you have the burden, of being the last word on this list of the 30 best living American songwriters. So, when you look at this list, all the names on it, from Taylor to Jay-Z to Nile, and recognizing, of course, how imperfect the creation of any list inevitably is, what wisdom do you extract from the project?

It's obviously a list that represents all kinds of genres, traditions, eras. No pun intended. Oh, yeah. But what I hear is a kind of grand tradition that pulls us way back through the mists of history. American popular song has lots of strains, lots of streams. So you can go all the way back to West Africa and follow the kind of griot tradition that West African enslaved people brought to this country through field hollers, spirituals, the blues, up through jazz, the great traditions of African American music. You can look at the music that came from the British Isles and found its way into Appalachian folk song and country music. You can look at the music that Eastern European and Western European immigrants, lots of Irish people and Jews, brought to New York— right here in New York City. All these different strains fed into the music of the individuals on our list. And it's too late, baby. So when you listen to a Brill Building songwriter like Carole King, if you be my bodyguard, I can be your bodyguard. Or even Paul Simon, who began his career as a very young man in the Brill Building, you're hearing stuff that came out of that Tin Pan Alley tradition.

Crazy. It's the same for everyone on this list, whether you're listening to Willie Nelson sing "Crazy" or whether you're listening to Stephen Merritt, the kind of quirky indie songwriter who updates Tin Pan Alley in all kinds of mischievous ways. [SINGING IN FRENCH] When you're listening to Smokey Robinson.

I put my thing down, flip it in reverse.

It's your primitive, it's where I'm at. Or someone like Missy Elliott, whose music sounds like it's from outer space. Or Stevie Wonder.

Looking back on when I was a little nappy-headed boy.

So what I hear is maybe not a single tradition, but maybe a grand tradition, one big tradition that brings together all these different strains, but represents a kind of hive mind, a kind of something that can be called American music, you know, an E pluribus unum way of song.

00:42:07

We were happy with the joy of the day with Bree!

00:42:12

Well, Jordy, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

00:42:15

Thank you, Michael.

Read at the back.

Today's episode was produced by Luke Vander Ploughe and Alex Barron. It was edited by Wendy Dorr. Our production manager is Frannie Carr-Toth. This episode was engineered by Sophia Landman. Contains original music by Diane Wong. If you want to watch extended video interviews interviews of some of the artists we talked about today, including Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, the Nashville Three, and Nile Rodgers. Visit nytimes.com/30greatest. That's nytimes.com/30greatest. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.