NYT 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters

Yeah ok

Individual ballots from musicians/industry folks are interesting:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/27/magazine/critics-pick-greatest-american-songwriters.html

(For instance, Dua Lipa submitted only one name: Patti Smith.)

Surprised that Tom Waits didn't end up on the list, with the number of people who had him on their ballots.

Also kind of shocked that Jagger/Richards didn't end up on a single ballot.

It's American songwriters which tbf i also missed

when i glanced at that article on the nyt website and saw mariah carey front and knew immediately ILX would be polling this.

not to knock her, but when every song post-Butterfly generally has 2-3 writers attached to it, you kinda lose that songwriter label in my book.

i would've put joanna newsom on there

Dammit, searched for this and didn't see it. Mods please feel free to delete my post.

No Randy Newman, jeesh.

Billy Bragg agrees with that (Joanna Newsom).

Jeff Tweedy is one of three who voted for Jeff Tweedy.

David Byrne put Olivia Rodrigo, though she has few solo credits.

Billy Joel got votes but didn't make it.

Looked at the individual ballots, which I found interesting. Stephin Merritt isn't mentioned by anyone, yet he's (rightfully) on the list. Am I missing something? I guess that's just a sampling of the ballots?

also, if they're going to lump josh osborne, brandy clark and shane mcanally as one, it's completely unforgiveable to not include the wu-tang clan in the list.

It's American songwriters which tbf i also missed

ohhh that makes so much more sense now. I woke up and immediately read the article pre-coffee.

I guess that's just a sampling of the ballots?

yeah there were 250 ballots, which were then aggregated and whittled down by NYT critics. sounds like the critics automatically included the very top vote-getters and then collectively decided on the rest.

More about the.methodology:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/27/magazine/greatest-living-songwriters-methodology.html

*extremely gigantic eyeroll*

respect to jeff tweedy for voting for himself

not too offensive of a list, but this made me go back to check if jimmy webb was still alive and turns out, he is.

Dammit, searched for this and didn't see it. Mods please feel free to delete my post.

― TO BE A JAZZ SINGER YOU HAVE TO BE ABLE TO SCAT (Jazzbo), Tuesday, 28 April 2026 14:59 (twenty-three minutes ago)

Locked it for you.

berry gordy's list also had tow major snubs imo: gamble & huff, mike stoller

*two

I know this is a popularity contest as much as anything but David Berman is the first person I would make sure was on there.

i have some tragic news

not to knock her, but when every song post-Butterfly generally has 2-3 writers attached to it, you kinda lose that songwriter label in my book.

― My homies buttthole surfers' record sounds like a f (Western® with Bacon Flavor),

So if you co-write songs you're less of a songwriter?

As I said on the other thread:

Would be more interested in Greatest Active American Songwriters. The Greatest People Who Did Their Great-Ass Shit 60 Years Ago just isn't that compelling of an article premise.

― peace, man, Tuesday, April 28, 2026 10:21 AM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

That being said, Joni Mitchell not being included on the main list or any of the nomination lists is appalling. She's American enough.

xp yeah Alfred i was going to ramble about "what is a songwriter?" but I'm not hopped up enough for that yet, your question is more concise and yeah please let's not reduce this to lovers in their garrets ffs

"Loners in their garrets" I thought i typed but that is a pleasing typo

I'm not gonna argue that anybody should be excluded from the list (I have never heard a Young Thug song) but yeah, Tom Waits feels like a major omission. Would also argue for Dwight Yoakam.

lol what a shitty fucking list. the NYT is such a piece of shit

"Loners in their garrets" I thought i typed but that is a pleasing typo

― einmal ist keinmal (Noodle Vague),

love the typo!

Jody Rosen said on Bsky:

"We felt it was maybe not the best moment, geopolitically speaking, for a bunch of Americans to lay claim to a Canadian just because she's awesome."

https://bsky.app/profile/jodyrosen.bsky.social/post/3mkkkvssfqs2h

the sad thing for me is that a lot of current and former ILX0rs have more interesting and valuable critical insights and _used_ to be able to, like, share those insights professionally, but now it's all down to the fucking New York Times and Jeff Tweedy saying "I think Jeff Tweedy is one of the Greatest American Songwriters" which I read as the equivalent of a cocked eyebrow, I mean list like these are always sus, but folks here could at least make canon-building clickbait like this _interesting_.

the fucking _new york times_. fuck. god, america sucks right now. who the fuck cares about who the greatest living american _anything_ is in 2026? david berman is a more authentic reflection of 2026 america than bob dylan is.

one thing to note is that both this list and the NYT's 100 greatest films of the 21st century list were based primarily on votes from industry insiders. NYT staff then used those votes to produce a final list, which obviously entailed making some editorial decisions in favor of some selections over others. but I have to imagine they would be different lists if they were based only on the critics' own picks.

I think what imago was trying to point out upthread is that David Berman is not a living songwriter. He died, lads, he died.

I liked Jay-Z's insights shared in that video.

So if you co-write songs you're less of a songwriter?

― boners for bombs (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 28 April 2026 15:37 (twenty-four minutes ago)

I'm going to say no, but I do think it's harder to know what parts someone is responsible for if they're always working with a songwriting team. Maybe they wrote most of their songs, maybe they changed a couple of words, it's just more difficult to tell.

(NB I think Mariah Carey's songs suck ass so I don't care if she writes with a team, my comment is meant more generally)

She writes the melodies and always writes the lyrics, which one can tell because she's (in)famous for the polysyllabic drop.

re: solo songwriters vs co-songwriters, I wonder if Donald Fagen and Walter Becker would have made the list as duo if Becker wasn't dead?

should be on the list: Rickie Lee Jones, August Darnell

Personally, I think it's funny that this list has managed to rile up dudes who are annoyed at the omission of rootsy folk-influenced songwriters like Jason Isbell. Sure, Isbell is a good songwriter from what I have heard, but it's a style of songwriting that some people treat as objectively superior to other styles and whose belief in the greatness of musicians who employ it is often largely based on that notion. These people might begrudgingly admit that Mariah Carey has some catchy tunes, but she cannot be a great musical artist in their eyes because she is not a great songwriter as they define it. Including her on this list undermines their premise.

having jermaine dupri vote on the best living songwriters in america and then leaving him off the list for young thug and lana del rey is some sick shit

xp yeah jay all of that is true but it's 2026 and we're far too tired to keep arguing this nonsense surely?

Anyway in re the vote it's ridiculous I refuse to pick one unless there's a particular choice that will get maximum rise out of the Campaign For Real Songwriting

Though there's about 10 of these I don't know well, I'd vote Lana Del Rey for consistency or Dylan for scope.
I'd have put George Clinton on the list or, if I was looking to cause arguments, the Friedbergers.

Or the Maels.

The results are kind of hilarious. Can see fans of X singer-songwriter melting down over Bad Bunny, etc.

probably will vote for stevie, but only because it feels weird to vote for the hollands without dozier

On Bluesky, Ann Powers mentioned Trent Reznor as an omission.

john fogerty

I mean, seriously. I don't even know what the standard/criteria is. Overall career/impact? Lyricists? Teams? Do they have to be active? What about other producer/writers like Timbaland or Pharrell? Lots of Americana or folk-adjacent acts, plus survivors like Paul Westerberg or whomever? Chrissie Hynde? Jimmy Webb? What about Madonna? Tom Waits? Etc.

Basically, lists are dumb.

A lot of votes for Tom Waits and Billy Joel on those ballots, but they didn’t make it for whatever reason. At least one for Westerburg too. A lot of the criteria seems to be ‘people I’d like to work with.’

dear lord, i should've walked away when i saw the billy joel placement but managed to stick around for the jason isbell one. this is one of those classic "reasons why i don't subscribe to the NYT".

Joel was particularly likely to be chosen by people who voted for Garth Brooks, Don McLean or Barry Manilow.

hmmm an even shittier list

they both fail to be interesting, the worst kind of list in other words. but of course it "sparks debate" i guess that's all we have left of a culture at this point, the clicks

there's also mindlessly powerchugging new albums so we can be the first to tell the internet our valuable insights!!!!!!!!!!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4XKNXMMvi4

I mean the readers list is really boring but I think the Top 30 is a far more accurate accounting of the 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters

Joel was particularly likely to be chosen by people who voted for Garth Brooks, Don McLean or Barry Manilow.

LOLLLL

They write the songs that make the whole world sing

(Manilow of course did not actually write that song)

Written by Bruce from the Beach Boys!

I mean the readers list is really boring but I think the Top 30 is a far more accurate accounting of the 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters

― EsBeeKid (Whiney G. Weingarten), Thursday, June 4, 2026 2:18 AM (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

For a guy with 25 merzbow cds or whatever your tastes sure run trad

it's not inconsistent to enjoy a wide variety of music and also hold a narrow definition of "songwriter"

like I don't think most Merzbow fans would call Masami Akita's output "songwriting"

xps Why hasn't a promoter put together a tour with Billy Joel, Barry Manilow and Don McLean? Because that's obviously a blockbuster triple-bill waiting to happen.

and Meezbow

it's not inconsistent to enjoy a wide variety of music and also hold a narrow definition of "songwriter"

― c u (crüt), Thursday, June 4, 2026 11:26 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

its not inconsistent to find it funny that the merzbow guy is glad billy joel is back on top where he belongs

I think its corny that the only good rap songwriter to The People is Kendrick Lamar, sorry

a stand-in for Acceptable Prestige

https://i.postimg.cc/JzVWhLLt/Capture.jpg

It's no longer visible, but for a while, there was a YouTube upload of a 1989 episode of Later where Bob Costas interviews Dave Marsh (promoting the just-released The Heart Of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Every Made). Unprompted, Costas lays into him and the rock critic establishment for underrating Billy Joel, but Marsh wasn't moved. (IIRC he said something like "'We Didn't Start the Fire'? That's a bad rap song without a beat.")

I know three millennials with a tattoo of “Vienna” lyrics. Not a bad metric for songwriting quality. (I hope I’m not seen as the Merzbow Guy — screen name was just some timely wordplay.)

merzbow dn but i bet you can't even name 5 of their songs

you can play merzbow songs on an acoustic guitar and they still hold up

I didnt' realize that "in the mood for a melody" was a Billy Joel thing. I know that phrase from Robert Plant!

maybe there's a different thread for this but... did traditional songwriting (the kind we know from popular music post ~1930 with verse-bridge-hook structure and clear melodies that also work as ringtones or spanish guitar covers) somehow outplay its role? there are obviously still relatively popular songs that are quite melodic and composed in a somewhat traditional manner but it doesn't seem to be the place to look for the best current songs out there and at least to my ears they can't hold a candle to most stuff on a random billboard chart from 1984

Isn't the history of pop music in the 20th century the story of rhythmic characteristics (descended from African and Latin American sources) becoming progressively more prominent and eventually overtaking traditional melodic values?

Not entirely rhetorical question, I've assumed this for ages but dunno if it's actually true.

I didnt' realize that "in the mood for a melody" was a Billy Joel thing. I know that phrase from Robert Plant!

― peace, man, Friday, June 5, 2026

same here

xp that makes sense

but then lately it seems what's overtaking the charts for the past ~10 years is not as much the growing prominence of rhythmic characteristics as the prominence of... extra-textual context? vibes?

Could Geir answer that question?

As far as the top of the charts goes, there's been a lot more Country music, which still follows traditional songwriting patterns, as well as a lot of drippy stuff like "Ordinary."

I thought corrs point was that stuff sucks ass :)

Isn't the history of pop music in the 20th century the story of rhythmic characteristics (descended from African and Latin American sources) becoming progressively more prominent and eventually overtaking traditional melodic values?

The history of pop music in the 20th century is the story of hip-hop changing everything. When hip-hop came along, with its entirely rhythm-based (and specifically rhythm loop-based) structure, pop music as a whole followed. Almost all pop songs are built around loop-based structures now. And it's not just pop music! Jazz drummers under the age of 40, who grew up listening to hip-hop, play completely differently from players over 40.

21st century maybe

the history of pop music in the 20th century is a lot of things

there were like 75 years before hip hop existed

Also, “loop-based” music has existed in various forms before the advent of sampling; look at canons/rounds and fugues for example, or da capo arias where you have an A section, then a B section, then a restatement of the A section.

Technology has enabled a specific codification of a musical technique people had been doing manually for centuries.

I was actually going to end my original post with "culminating in Hip-Hop and Dance music", which would cast those genres as the end result of a long process as opposed to the tabula rasa approach unperson suggested.

As I said though I'm not bullish on this idea, obviously huge stars don't line up with it and if you take it to stuff outside the pop charts it falls down entirely.

Technology has enabled a specific codification of a musical technique people had been doing manually for centuries.

ding ding ding ding ding ding ding

i think pop has always been a balancing act between the rawness of folk and blues - not necessarily as genres but as places of origin - and commercial success. afaict the same dynamic exists before and after both hip hop and all the big studio recording advances, all the way back to recording technology being invented. maybe sheet music publishing before that too. those two poles - the fields/streets vs. the charts - structurally responsible for all of the forms that emerge. melodic western music itself probably emerges from the same dynamic.

the gradual receding of great american songbook style harmonic interest and musical instrument proficiency in the past 30 years seems to mirror the same thing happening in classical composing 100 years ago and jazz 50 years ago, and in the arts more generally (painting, poetry, architecture getting radically simpler yet weirder blah blah).

i think pop has always been a balancing act between the rawness of folk and blues - not necessarily as genres but as places of origin

Hmmm. This goes pretty strongly against rock's origin myth - that it was responsible for bringing these influences into the pop sphere. Admitidely the truth is always more complicated, not least the question of how we define these genres - but would still suggest on a macro level those influences became more predominant in post-rock & roll pop music than they were to, like, the Andrews Sisters or Rudy Valee.

Hmm. I'll have to think about looping and repetition as it's done today vs how it's been invoked/enlisted in the past. For example, "Stayin' Alive" as I understand it features the first ever drum loop, at least in a pop song; the drummer is even credited as "Bernard Lupe." Now, they could have just had a drummer play that part for five minutes or whatever, and iirc they tried, and also tried a drum machine, but there was something about those particular several seconds of Dennis Bryon in an infinite loop that they preferred to someone just playing it over and over again. For sure our ears react to the perfection of robotic repetition differently than to how they hear something simply repeating, like in a round or phase work or whatever, where the subtle imperfections/imprecision conveys some element that maybe the quantified perfection of something programmed might not. Like Dilla's radical notion of (for lack of a better term) imperfect loops, or the way the Bomb Squad trigged all their loops manually, which gave them an implied swing that the beats might not have had were they arranged on a grid.

but would still suggest on a macro level those influences became more predominant in post-rock & roll pop music than they were to, like, the Andrews Sisters or Rudy Valee.

sure. i was trying to point something outside of genre. a place of origin. roots is probably the word i'm looking for. roots <-> commercial success always in dialogue, as genres emerge and fade.

I don't think I follow? A lot of pre-rock pop music has I think very different roots from what came after, but I'm at a loss as to how to discuss that w/o resorting to genre.

those influences became more predominant in post-rock & roll pop music than they were to, like, the Andrews Sisters or Rudy Valee

have you ever heard Sing Sing Sing? the rhythmic thing was always there

and the screeching annoying sounds for that matter

I don't think I follow? A lot of pre-rock pop music has I think very different roots from what came after, but I'm at a loss as to how to discuss that w/o resorting to genre.

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Friday, June 19, 2026 3:03 PM (forty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah i guess i'm trying to point out that all genres have roots, and at the other side of roots is commercialism. the dance and spark between those two things, roots and commercialism = pop.

Technology has enabled a specific codification of a musical technique people had been doing manually for centuries.

ding ding ding indeed, but it isn't just about loops. writing on DAWs is innately different than writing on guitar, piano or any other traditional instrument, and i think you could argue that ableton, logic, etc., have fundamentally changed not only how pop is recorded but also how it is composed.

xp @ map, i definitely think of music as existing along several axes, with raw/commercial being one. the other key ones in american music for me are white/black, rural/urban, and gospel/secular