I really like these articles about songwriting and production. In fashion, there are the runways and fashion week where leading designers lay out the year’s hottest trends, which seems to drive designs for the next little while. In music, things aren’t so transparent and it seems like there is a secret cabal of producers like Timbaland, Max Martin, and now Dr Luke make the music that you will be listening to.

If Max Martin was the king of the 90s, then it looks like Dr Luke is succeeding him. He’s produced Ke$ha and Katy Perry’s hits such as Tik Tok and California Gurls. But while these stories make these men as geniuses who come up with Billboard Top10s on their own, and I imagine them shutting themselves in a room tinkering away on keyboard writing 2011’s hooks, it’s not actually that way.

Dr. Luke wrote “Dynamite”—sort of. It’s not entirely correct to say he writes his songs, at least not in the romanticized sense of a lonely dude scratching notes while strumming away on an acoustic guitar. Rather, he assembles songs. He curates them. He hears a song before it exists, then he figures out who can best help him bring that song into existence.

In this case, he created a basic beat track with his fellow producer Benny Blanco. (Dr. Luke has a slate of producers signed to his company, Prescription Songs.) The track was originally intended to go to the rapper Flo Rida, but it wasn’t a good fit as a rap song, so Luke sent it to Sweden, to Max Martin, who wrote half of a hook for the chorus. Luke wrote the other half, then sent that track to Bonnie McKee, a lyricist. Then Luke started looking for the right vocalist to attach.

Just like every project, from software to marketing campaigns; it’s a team. Dr Luke just happened to be the leader getting the glory.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: music