His most recent Number One, "The Monster," features bonkers couplets like "Straw into gold chump, I will spin/Rumpelstiltskin in a haystack/Maybe I need a straight jacket, face facts." Even if it didn't make sense, that's the kind of drill I would do to practice.". Though Petty often took co-writing credit on his songs, Holly was one of the first rock & roll singers to write his own material, exerting a huge influence on the Beatles and Rolling Stone, among countless others. All three began their careers as singers, but when they started working together behind the scenes, they made magic. When he convened Sly and the Family Stone in the late Sixties, he deployed a fast-talking radio jock's ear for aphorism ("different strokes for different folks," "I want to take you higher") and an ability to make tricky arrangements seem natural ("Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin" builds raw funk out of everyone in the band playing radically different parts). 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. Green sang about romantic ecstasy and failings and deeper longings for divine love (the language of Scripture has never been far from his lyrics, even when he was writing secular material). His personas shifted, but songs like "Tangled Up in Blue," "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and "Forever Young" continued to define their eras in lasting ways. "Being a songwriter is like being a nun," Rolling Stone reported him saying in 2014. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner, a former student at the University of California at Berkeley, and Ralph Gleason, a jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. The Bryants' breakthrough came when the Everlys seized on a composition that had been turned down more than 30 times, "Bye Bye Love," and hit Number Two. "It was like that [with Kanye].". Few songwriters use repetition as skillfully as Williams: on 1988's "I Just Wanted to See You So Bad," she ramped up the song's sexual obsession by restating the title after every other line, and the title track from her 1998 masterpiece Car Wheels on a Gravel Road captures the peculiar rhythms of childhood memory by restating the song's title at the end of each stanza. But they would never have gone anywhere if Pete Townshend hadn't developed into an endlessly innovative songwriter. "He knew the balance between innovation and America's digestive system," Questlove has said of his idol. Thus began the symbiotic relationship that produced a string of sophisticated, acerbic songs that still felt at home amidst the laidback mood of Seventies FM radio — hits like "Do It Again," "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" and "Peg." It's hard to imagine anyone but Whitney Houston giving shape to "Exhale (Shoop Shoop)," anyone but Mary J. Blige taking a stand with "Not Gon' Cry," anyone but Toni Braxton lending the necessary sultry edge to the many songs he's written for her over the past quarter-century. Starting in the Nineties with the Backstreet Boy's "I Want It That Way" and Britney Spears' "…Baby One More Time," among others, Martin helped create the whooshing, hyper-energized sound of modern pop — a talent that has extended to a mind-boggling list of recent collaborations that include Taylor Swift's "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night" and "Teenage Dream," Ariana Grande's "Problem," Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" and Adam Lambert's "Whataya Want from Me." Among Haggard's 38 Number One country hits, signature tunes like "Okie From Muskogee," "Mama Tried" and "Sing Me Back Home" mixed autobiography and attitude with a honky-tonk spirit in the tradition of Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams. "She grew up on Joni Mitchell and Motown and. In songs like "You're Breaking My Heart" (". Paul Westerberg wasn't precious about his craft ("I hate music/It's got too many notes," he sang on the first Replacements album in 1981). ", There's a reason Diamond's songs have been covered by everyone from the Monkees and Smash Mouth to Sinatra. 'To me, country, as opposed to Tin Pan Alley, was white man's soul music," he once said. (Sometimes Hayes played keyboards on songs they'd written together, or Porter sang backup.) "I'm a country guy because of my raisin', but I'm a Chuck Berry man. Between their roaring debut in 1977 and their split in 1983, the duo wrote at a feverish pace, often in Jones' grandmother's flat in a high-rise council estate, bashing out finished songs together as a full band in their rehearsal space. As Björk said in 2007, "I guess I'm quite conservative and romantic about the power of melodies. His output slowed down considerably by the mid-1980s and he's released a scant two albums in the past three decades. But the same organic give-and-take governed their later albums as well. But with 1983's Swordfishtrombones and 1985's Rain Dogs he blossomed into what he called his "sur-rural" period, drawing on old blues, German cabaret and street-corner R&B to create songs populated by dice-throwing one-armed dwarves, men with missing fingers playing strange guitars and phantom truck-drivers named Big Joe. It was in newspaper format with a lead article on the Monterey Pop Festival. He didn't start writing songs in earnest until he'd recorded a few albums, and his songwriting gifts have been overshadowed by his vocal mastery. "It can sometimes be stupidly literal." Yet there's a reason cutting-edge jazz instrumentalists —Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, Dave Douglas, Greg Osby — keep covering her tunes, not to mention peers like Thom Yorke, Bon Iver, Death Cab for Cutie, Dirty Projectors, No Age and others. 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