Eight Songs Written By Unexpected People
Giving credit where credit's due.
That lovably petite musical genius Prince has been in the news quite a bit lately: he was honoured with an ‘Icon Award’ at last weekend’s Billboard Music Awards, where he also performed his new single ‘Fix Ur Life Up’, while earlier in the month, his original demo for The Bangles’ ‘Manic Monday’ became a viral hit.
The discovery got us thinking. One of the most wonderful-yet-baffling moments of being a music scholar (that’s right) is being completely sideswiped by the knowledge that a certain song you’ve been digging was actually written by a completely different artist. It can throw your entire world off axis — like when you find out the longest word you can type using the keys on the top row of a typewriter is ‘typewriter’ — or it can be the final piece of the puzzle that makes that track make sense. Sometimes, it’s just a shock that one of the Bee Gees didn’t write it. Below are eight examples of popular songs written by successful artists that you probably didn’t know were even aware of the track — compiled by Nathan Jolly and Caitlin Welsh.
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Miley Cyrus: ‘Party In The USA’
If you are in love with the image of Nashville-born chipmunk Miley Cyrus hopping off the plane at LAX with nothing but a dream and a cardigan, overwhelmed by the blinding lights of Sin City, keep in mind that she was raised in Toronto, her godmother was Dolly Parton, she was a star in her own right by the age of 12 and her father was Billy Ray Cyrus, a man whose ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ was topping sales charts worldwide while Miley was still in utero. There’s also that other aspect just scratching away at the little-girl-lost credibility of the storyline: namely, the fact that UK pop singer Jessie J wrote the track.
Jessie J (who co-wrote the track with professional song-doctors Claude Kelly and Dr. Luke) has distanced herself from the massive swinging pop hit, doing mock-covers of it at live events, before playing her own ‘edgier’ material. But while Jessie J’s cooler-than-thou image and piercing banshee wail would have killed this track, Miley’s unabashed I-don’t-give-a-fuck-and-will-cover-Nirvana-live-because-fuck-you-ness turned ‘Party In The USA’ into one of those rare pop singles that sold millions of copies while also receiving critical acclaim from stuffier quarters: New York’s Time Out, The Guardian and Billboard were among those who praised the song’s freewheeling spirit. The whole saga was made even better by Miley’s admission that she’d never actually heard a Jay-Z song before releasing the single.
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The Bangles: ‘Manic Monday’
Pining for a less stress-heavy working day has been a common songwriting trope for years, but never before The Bangles’ ‘Manic Monday’ was Sunday summed up so succinctly as the “I-don’t-have-to-run-day” that it truly is. Elsewhere on the track, the band push women’s liberation back a few decades with the eye-batting excuse for tardiness, “It takes me so long just to figure out what I’m gonna wear”, before dragging it back again with the plea, “Doesn’t it matter that I have to feed the both of us?”
Despite the clunkers contained within, ‘Manic Monday’ was a nice throwaway pop song and an obvious first single choice for their breakthrough record, Different Light. The song’s clumsy couplets and faint pre-feminist notions can be explained away, however, by one simple fact: it was written by Prince. He penned the track in 1984, before offering it to The Bangles the next year in an attempt to bed frontwoman Susanna Hoffs, obviously with the assumption that her weakness is Year Nine-level poetry. It’s not like His Purpleness stretched out musically, either. Listen to the verse melody and cadence; it’s basically the same as his earlier hit, ‘1999’. Still, the single was a massive hit for The Bangles, reaching #2 on the charts in January 1986, and only being held off the top spot by… Prince’s ‘Kiss’.
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Feist: ‘1234’
‘1234’ is a strawberry jelly bean of a song, sweet and familiar and perfectly formed, and the homespun Starburst-ad vibe of the clip only adds to its ability to spread mild, unassuming Canadian sunshine everywhere it plays. The cute numerical motif made it sound ready for a pop-goes-kindergarten compilation, were it just about learning to count rather than learning that as you get older your ability to cope with heartbreak and disappointment and regret slowly wears away until you’re just a skeleton coated in a thin layer of tears and self-loathing. “Wait a second!” you cry, “that doesn’t sound right at all! Canucks are all about hockey and niceness! No Canadian songwriter has ever pierced hearts the world over with the power of raw emotion and flawless lyricism!” That is a true statement, and you’re onto something there: ‘1234’ was originally written by ‘Our Sally’ Seltmann.
The artist formerly known as New Buffalo — who, as you know, hails from that icy bastion of darkness and emotional torment, Sydney, NSW — wrote the song and decided it sounded more like Feist than herself, eventually handing it over one night when they toured the sunny prairies of Canadia together in 2005. It ended up in an iPod commercial, a deal which we can only assume netted the Seltmann household so much moolah that it’s the reason why her husband Darren’s been sitting on his fucking hands for a decade, being fanned by banana-leaf wielding slave girls, instead of getting his shit together and making another goddamn Avalanches album.
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Bart Simpson: ‘Do The Bartman’
Before the advent of smartphones killed the kind of beer garden debates that end in jugs being flung and hair being pulled, a guaranteed screamer could be started by wondering aloud if Michael Jackson really did do the voice for The Simpsons’ Leon Kompowsky. Homer Simpson’s cellmate in the mental institution he’s sent to for wearing a pink shirt to work is a 300-pound skinhead who thinks he’s Michael Jackson, and does an uncanny impression of the King of Pop (not that Homer’s heard of him). MJ did in fact do his own voice-work on The Simpsons, though he’s credited as “John Jay Smith”. He also co-wrote and co-produced the timeless hit, ‘Do The Bartman’, a masterpiece of gated snare, breathy backing vocals, judiciously spare licks of electric guitar and squeaky, tuneless rapping that has MJ’s pop DNA all over it.
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Phantom Planet: ‘California’
It’s so hard to think of Jason Schwartzman as anything but an adorably pompous vision in tweed, as East Coast as bagels. But as a member of the Coppola clan (he’s Talia Shire’s son, Francis Ford is his grandfather, and Nicolas Cage and Sofia are his cousins), he’s an LA boy through and through. It’s appropriate then that as the drummer for Phantom Planet, he co-wrote their biggest hit, the wide-eyed ‘California’.
“Hustlers grab your guns, your shadow weighs a ton, drivin’ down the 101” is not a line any of Schwartzman’s characters could pull off with conviction (not that singer Alex Greenwald is that much more gangsta), but the song’s legacy was sealed when Josh Schwartz and his crack team of music supervision ninjas selected it to be the theme song for the hit millennial teen drama, The OC. It will always sound sun-drenched, wistful and triumphant, evoking the verbose tribulations of a nebbish proto-hipster, surrounded by pretty people who don’t see his value. (Doubling down on the Schwartzman family’s place in the not-inconsiderable OC soundtrack pantheon: his brother’s the frontman for the criminally under-rated Rooney ROOONAAY!).
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Madonna: ‘Bedtime Story’
In 1995, Madonna released a pulsating acid house-infused single named ‘Bedtime Story’, which signaled the futuristic direction that her music would travel in from that point onwards. It was hypnotic and challenging, and despite opening with moans of pleasure, and having the word ‘bed’ in the title (sidenote: ever noticed that the word ‘bed’ looks like a bed?), it was deemed too odd for mainstream audiences, and failed to attract radio play. This resulted in ‘Bedtime Story’ becoming the first Madonna single since ‘Holiday’ in 1983 not to land in the Billboard Top 40. It was a bold move from an uncompromising artist at the top of her commercial game, and although the single bombed, it ushered in the most critically acclaimed stage of her career. Oh, and it was written by Bjork!
It makes sense: the minimalist techno flourishes, the transcendental lyrical content, and the original title, ‘Let’s Get Unconscious’, all scream ‘Bjork’. If this single was released in today’s climate, it would be a top ten hit for either artist, but back in 1995, radio programmers were wondering what happened to the good ol’ days where Madonna’s bedtime stories were solely about sex.
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Badfinger: ‘Come And Get It’
Badfinger struck with four huge power pop hits as the lysergic-soaked ‘60s slid into the cocaine-riddled ‘70s: ‘No Matter What’, ‘Baby Blue’, ‘Day After Day’, and the smilingly optimistic ‘Come and Get It’, which basically takes the “he who hesitates” thing Shakespeare was shooting for and tousles its hair up a bit. If you’re not familiar with the track from the title alone, it’s that “If you want it, here it is, come and get it…” song, which you may know from lottery ads, liquidation sales, or perhaps by its original incarnation as a Beatles demo, tossed off quickly one morning by Paul McCartney during the Abbey Road sessions.
McCartney was fairly heavily involved in Badfinger’s career: he signed them to his label Apple Records, they changed their name to Badfinger after the McCartney demo ‘Badfinger Boogie’ (which morphed into ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’), and he gifted them their first hit single. Peter Ham and Tom Evans from Badfinger were astonishing songwriters in their own right, penning the Nilsson classic ‘Without You’, the chorus of which (“I can’t live, if living is without you”) took on an unfortunate weight after both songwriters committed suicide in the coming years.
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Pink: ‘Feel Good Time’
By the time ‘Feel Good Time’ — Pink’s mega-smash single from Charlie’s Angels 2: Maximum Extreme Full Throttle — had had its chart run, everyone in the English-speaking world was fairly sick of it, but it certainly had its immediate charms. It’s not the best showcase for Pink’s voice, rolling around loosely in the bottom of her range and making her sound nasal in the chorus, but its fierceness and oddly whimsical take on hedonism (“paint our money black / spend it on the enemy”; “We know how to pray / party every day / make our desolation okay”) elevate it above your average blockbuster tie-in anthem.
Surprisingly, the woman behind couplets like “You make me sick / I want you and I’m hating it / Got me lit like a candlestick / Get too hot when you touch the tip” isn’t solely responsible for the vein of weird running through this hit: William Orbit originally co-wrote and produced the track with Beck. They recorded it sometime during his hyper-acoustic Sea Change era, which makes the swirling, glittering onslaught of ‘Feel Good Time’ even more of an outlier. Beck gave the track to Pink when she expressed an interest in covering it, proving that she knows shit from hits, guys.
A bonus factoid: Orbit sampled a track, ‘Fresh Garbage’, by late ‘60s act Spirit for the tiptoe-ing, psych-rattle hook. Spirit was fronted by two guys: Jay Ferguson, who wrote the theme to the US version of The Office, and Randy California, who we can only assume is now working as one of Sterling Archer’s alter-egos.
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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer. She has written for The BRAG, Mess + Noise, FasterLouder, Cosmopolitan, TheVine, Beat, dB, X-Press, and Moshcam.
Nathan Jolly is the Editor of The Music Network, Australia’s number one music industry magazine/embedder of that video where Bieber raps.