Celeb News: .

Cherry

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Well we’re eating, but I’m just going to say it anyway, I was literally taking a **** at the Royal Garden hotel in London. My wife was on the other side of the wall and she was having one of those ‘I feel so ugly’ days. I shouted ‘you’re not’ and in my mind I was thinking ‘wow, that’s one of the great things about you is that you don’t know how beautiful you are and that’s what makes you beautiful’. I literally wrote down the phrase and then I went to the studio with Rami [Yacoub] and Carl [Falk]. I had the melody of “baby you light up my world like nobody else” in my head and then everything connected.

How romantic.

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Didn’t it take two weeks to nail ‘If U Seek Amy’?
Yeah. It was mainly to get the lyric right. The chorus melody was an idea on Shellback’s phone for like two years that he thought of for Sean Paul.

Nicktbfh

so is LMLYD the song that Demi was talking about that a producer gave to another artist when she didnt want to make it a second single?

Superbitch

ugh popjustice is blocked at my job

you shouldve posted some of it

Broken Like Glass

I feel like some of this article shades Dr. Luke. He is the guy who requests that his songs are the leads. No mention of him and no recent work with Max.

Max / Savan / Ilya / Karl / MXM >>>>>> Dr. Luke

Dalai

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Originally posted by Superbitch

ugh popjustice is blocked at my job

you shouldve posted some of it

This is what I found interesting:

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How involved are some of the popstars who don’t have a credit on the songs? How much are they in mind when you write for them?

A lot. I’ve been blessed to have the reach where I can say that I won’t work with an artist until I can meet with them. I meet with them and then I like to get to know them, usually with female artists. I was always the girl’s friend in High School. I never got the girl, I was always their friend, and for some reason it’s like that with female artists (laughs). We just talk. With Ellie Goulding and the stuff we have coming out with her we just talked. We had the melodies sorted out and then we’d just talk and then we fit in lines. Sometimes you get to know the artist and you know what they would say or what they wouldn’t say.

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When you’re working with Max and Ilya Salmanzadeh and Ali Payami and all those people, are there specific roles for each person? Do people have things they’re better at in terms of creating the songs?

It can differ from song to song. Ali and Ilya mostly do track but Ilya also has a very good melodic sense, so he started the ‘Love Me Like You Do’ chorus. Ali and Ilya really started that song and then Max and I came in. I thought it would be great for Demi and then we had the meeting with Fifty Shades Of Grey and Max said it would work well with the scene we’d watched. So he took it, tweaked it, I wrote the lyric and there it was. Tove Lo also wrote on it. And that’s the other thing, and Max has really been the leader of it, there’s no ego. Even though we have to give a little bit of percentage away, none of us really cares about credits or anything like that. That’s the lucky thing about the Swedes – you don’t get that ego. Which is why Max has been able to stay so successful for so long because other people get hits and it goes to their heads and they want labels and they want all this stuff and then you never hear from them again.

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Does you sometimes have to get rid of bits you love?
There was a bridge to ‘Can’t Feel My Face’ and I loved the melody to that but it didn’t work for the song. So sometimes you have to kill your babies, as we call it. Everything has to be for the betterment of the song. Melody is the timeless element. Cool words change and cool tracks change, but the people who consistently win are the people who remember that it’s all about the melody.

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I had two years of huge success and then started seeing things fail and was like ‘oh shit’ and then Ariana Grande walked in my life. You’re lucky in your career to find artists that are muses to you and at some creative level her voice and my vision just matched. She’s seen as a lot more credible so for the first time I started tasting that world. So when her A&R pushed to get The Weeknd on ‘Love Me Harder’ I don’t think any of us knew what that would do to all of our careers.

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We didn’t know anything about The Weeknd. When he did ‘Love Me Harder’ and it exploded he apparently realised the difference between having a hit in the credible world and having a hit in the commercial world. He’s an ambitious guy. Super talented. I hadn’t heard any of his music until we worked on ‘Love Me Harder’ and I don’t think Max or anyone had either. We talked on the phone a couple of times. We didn’t know what to expect really, but we prepared a couple of things and he came in and wasn’t sure and said it wasn’t really him. Now I understand because those songs were more for Usher or someone like that. He went in with Ali and was talking about Michael Jackson and ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’ and that’s how ‘In The Night’ came about, but that was after we saw him at the Hollywood Bowl. We’d had a difficult day in the studio where we weren’t reading each other well and we saw him at the Hollywood Bowl and we realised how big he is and how big he could be. Also how brave he was. He could have just continued doing what he was doing and to take that risk with us, I think we learnt to respect him a lot more. We understood it. Something snapped in all of us that night and then we did ‘In The Night’, ‘Can’t Feel My Face’ and ‘Shameless’.

Nicktbfh

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Originally posted by macrocycle

No! that was def 'Break A Sweat'.

https://twitter.com/ddlovato/status/430217081087209472

thanks, i just read through the entire article, such a good look into everything that goes into our fav songs.. like CFTS being a boundary pushing pop song

Jezang Looz

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Originally posted by Broken Like Glass

I feel like some of this article shades Dr. Luke. He is the guy who requests that his songs are the leads. No mention of him and no recent work with Max.

Max / Savan / Ilya / Karl / MXM >>>>>> Dr. Luke

It seems like it. Poor Luke

he's a good producer but seems like he had a fallout with them.

He needs to bounce back and start collaborating with more artists before Max/Savan/WolfCousins completely take over

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But this is interesting about Rihanna.

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It feels like maybe she does need a massive hit again. She should pop over, maybe?
It’s amazing to have kept it up for seven albums though. Credit to all of her team. So I think she can be forgiven for a couple of missteps. In general, not with Rihanna, artists get more control after a while and try to change history sometimes. Artists can be forced to record a song, then it becomes a hit and suddenly when it comes to the next album they go ‘well I had a hit so now I want creative control’. It’s like ‘you only had that hit because we forced you and you didn’t want to do it!’. I’ve had hits that record labels didn’t like and it’s done well and then they come back and ask for another one of those.

I hope they work with her. She should ask them and Bonnie to work with her

awsuki

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Originally posted by Jezang Looz

It seems like it. Poor Luke

he's a good producer but seems like he had a fallout with them.

He needs to bounce back and start collaborating with more artists before Max/Savan/WolfCousins completely take over

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But this is interesting about Rihanna.

I hope they work with her. She should ask them and Bonnie to work with her

You guy are reading way to into that. There is no shade being cast at all what so ever. It was a general conversation about different approaches to things.

Jezang Looz

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Originally posted by awsuki

You guy are reading way to into that. There is no shade being cast at all what so ever. It was a general conversation about different approaches to things.

It was just a hunch, no one said it was him as a fact. But it is interesting at the lack of work being done between the camps when they were once so close.

revel8

I thought this was an interesting paragraph

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Do you think it comes down to the fact that people assume it’s really easy to write a hit song?
Yeah. Which is our fault in a way, because the idea is that we’re meant to write songs that seem easy but that’s actually really hard. I think pop music shoots itself in the foot because what happens is it’s all about image, right, so you’re not going to get these big artists who don’t write their own songs saying ‘hey, I need these guys’ because it affects their image. They want people to assume they wrote their songs. That’s the trouble, we can’t get Rihanna to say ‘fight for songwriters’.

cloudinthesky

This was a great article. This section stuck out to me because it's literally what all these songwriters and producers have been saying about streaming and still everyone seems to want to cover their ears and pretend like it's just "rich people trying to get richer".

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With the way the industry’s changing, do you worry about the future of songwriting?
With Maroon 5’s ‘One More Night’, which was Number One in America for nine weeks, you look at the Spotify statement for that and it was streamed over 78m times. We all had a third of that song and I made $11,000 off one of the biggest songs of that year. The reason I’m explaining how big that song was is because you think about the average songwriter who maybe has an album cut or a hit that’s maybe Top 20 on radio, that used to get you a living. Now a Number One song for nine weeks makes you $11,000 from streaming and it’s all going to go to streaming eventually. Radio might go away because of how streaming is and because of portable devices. I always read on the comments about the Taylor thing [re Apple Music] and I think she’s been super brave fighting for songwriters, and I know that she’s genuinely doing that for songwriters and not just herself. She’s telling people that there are others that have helped make this thing.

Taylor’s work obviously continues so she can go off and make money through other avenues too.
Yeah, this is the only way we make money. You really need public support and for them to realise that. It’s not about me or Max Martin, it’s about the next generation and the guys who are making the music now. They’re not going to be able to make a living in the future. The laws have to change, especially in America and the public perception has to change. We’re not being greedy, we just want to get paid. We’re creating a product.

Do you think it comes down to the fact that people assume it’s really easy to write a hit song?
Yeah. Which is our fault in a way, because the idea is that we’re meant to write songs that seem easy but that’s actually really hard. I think pop music shoots itself in the foot because what happens is it’s all about image, right, so you’re not going to get these big artists who don’t write their own songs saying ‘hey, I need these guys’ because it affects their image. They want people to assume they wrote their songs. That’s the trouble, we can’t get Rihanna to say ‘fight for songwriters’.

Yet she is one of the few big stars who doesn’t add her name to the songs she hasn’t written.
I’m really happy about that.

It's not about the Taylors and the Jay-Zs of the world. They're artists, they have the luxury of touring and selling merch and doing sponsorships. It's about the smaller songwriters who are just now coming up, whose main job it is to write your faves' hits. They're not going to be able to make a living in the future if streaming royalties continue down this path, that's what some of yall aren't understanding about Spotify vs Tidal/AM.

Superbitch

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Originally posted by Dalai

This is what I found interesting:

thanks sis oh this was a very good read! I wish we'd have more behind the scenes info liek this and he was really respectful towards the people he writes for.

I spoke to another songwriter who said they always ask to hear the song that’s been chosen as the first single if it wasn’t one of theirs.

Yeah I don’t do that. Most people are like that but we don’t really think like that because you can’t force something to be great. It has to be great already. Songwriters forget that it’s about the best song. I’ve been on the A&R side and there’s too much at stake to just take a single because of politics. When they pick the single they’re picking what they think is the best choice for the project. If you can’t respect that then get your own ****ing artist. Some people have it in their contract that they should have the first single but then if a better song comes along all you’ve done is hurt the artist and the album.

this was a very interesting point and I couldnt agree more I just dont get how they can be that greedy and at the end it could hurt the artist like he said. Luke shade?

Tristan

i really love reading these kind of stuff. nice insights and great read