#56 Madonna



Before she was a star, Madonna was a songwriter with a sharp ear for a hook and a lyrical catchphrase, playing tracks like "Lucky Star" for record companies in the hope of scoring a contract. Her earliest hits honed the electro beats coming out of the New York club scene into universal radio gold. But songs like her greatest statement, "Like a Prayer," can also summon an anthemic power to rival Springsteen or U2. Madonna has enlisted numerous collaborators en route to selling more than 300 million albums — she started working with longtime writing partner Patrick Leonard after he brought her "Live to Tell" in 1986, and from Shep Pettibone and William Orbit in the Nineties through Diplo, Avicii and Kanye West on 2015's Rebel Heart, she's worked successfully with producers across many genres. Through it all, her songs have been consistently stamped with her own sensibility and inflected with autobiographical detail. "She grew up on Joni Mitchell and Motown and. . . embodies the best of both worlds," says Rick Nowells, who co-wrote with Madonna on 1998's Ray of Light. "She is a wonderful confessional songwriter, as well as being a superb hit chorus pop writer."

#97 Taylor Swift



Many singer-songwriters reach the point where they have too many great tunes to fit into a live show. Taylor Swift reached that peak before she turned 21. And then she just kept going. She might be the youngest artist on this list — as you may have heard, she was born in 1989, the year Green Day released their first record. But she's already written two or three careers' worth of keepers. "Hi, I'm Taylor," she told the crowds on her Red tour. "I write songs about my feelings. I'm told I have a lot of feelings." Swift's first three albums display her emotional yet uncommonly inventive country style — even early hits like "Our Song" and "Tim McGraw" sound like nobody else. (Only she could slip the line "Any snide remarks from my father about your tattoos will be ignored" into a teen romance like "Ours.") But she's really hit her stride with the pop mastery of Red and 1989, especially on confessional ballads like "Clean" and "All Too Well." There's no limit to where she can go from here.