Melody and lyrics songwriting is how songwriting is supposed to be, if you ask me.

Right?

With the melody-and-lyrics method, one person writes the lyrics (preferably the artist) and then maybe the artist collaborates with a partner or two on the best melody.

None of this assembly room stuff.

But it’s hard to know why I have this aspirational format I’m clinging to – or why I am being nostalgic about it.

I mean, talk about specialization though…

In country music, the melody-and-lyrics method is still the standard method of writing songs. (Nashville is in some respects the Brill Building’s spiritual home.) But in mainstream pop and R& B songwriting, track-and-hook has taken over, for several reasons. For one thing, track-and-hook is more conducive to factory-style song production. Producers can create batches of tracks all at one time, and then e-mail the MP3s around to different topliners. It is common practice for a producer to send the same track to multiple topliners—in extreme cases, as many as fifty—and choose the best melody from among the submissions. Track-and-hook also allows for specialization, which makes songwriting more of an assembly-line process. Different parts of the song can be farmed out to different specialists—verse writers, hook smiths, bridge makers, lyricists—which is another precedent established by Cheiron. It’s more like writing a TV show than writing a song. A single melody is often the work of multiple writers, who add on bits as the song develops.

-John Seabrook, The Song Machine

Track and hook songwriting is not how people think songwriting is done.

Let’s be honest.

I want a tortured artist slaving away in a mountain retreat. Maybe they are dealing with spirituality or death or family. They go for a few walks, drink too much coffee and then bleed out lyrics. Later in the studio they add music, and then we get a hit of pure gold.

That’s how music should be made.

We don’t want our music made like sausage…

But we don’t always get what we want, do we?

BY THE MID-2000S the track-and-hook approach to songwriting—in which a track maker/ producer, who is responsible for the beats, the chord progression, and the instrumentation, collaborates with a hook writer/ topliner, who writes the melodies—had become the standard method by which popular songs are written. The method was invented by reggae producers in Jamaica, who made one “riddim” (rhythm) track and invited ten or more aspiring singers to record a song over it. From Jamaica the technique spread to New York and was employed in early hip-hop.

-John Seabrook, The Song Machine