I'd put Steve Earle ahead of all the guys you mentioned except, perhaps, Prince. But he is kind of in a category all by himself given his iconic status--and the fact that his incredibly visionary music is often undercut by mediocre or simply embarrassing lyrics.

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I would personally put Slayer and Bad Religion over all of them but I was trying to go with decorated resumes over personal taste.

and yes....I find Steve Earle a hell of a lot more relevant than Bruce Springsteen.

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*Emphatic Disagreement*

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Kash, and Don

Yeah, I agree. "American Girl" is a major cultural statement. "Better Man," while a good song, feels like it sprang from an intro level women's studies class.

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At least I offered up a hit....Frank offered up a song that wasn't even released as a single

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Stairway to Heaven wasn't a single either.

And American Girl never even made the charts upon its first release.

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I spent two winters in Florida training horses. I feel like I know the "American Girl." She's a young idealistic local. Probably a waitress. She met some rich kid who was on spring break who told her he loved her. But that was all bullshit just to get her in the sack. She spent the night at his hotel in Daytona or Fort Lauderdale. She could hear the waves crashing on the beach. But back in her shitty studio apartment on Orange Blossom Trail in Apopka or Holden Heights all she can hear are the cars rushing by on the highway.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Kash, and Don

The Tom Petty/Pearl Jam comparison is a little bit strained. Different people will obviously view music differently, but I'm either in a Tom Petty mood or a Pearl Jam mood, and almost never both. The Petty box would have Springsteen, Dylan, Earle, Zevon, etc. While the Pearl Jam box would have the rest of the grunge cohort, Led Zeppelin, The Who, the Stones, etc. As far as I'm concerned, it's difficult to make an apples to apples comparison between artists from different boxes.

Yeah, there are different styles, different voices you may or may not like, but I think we're talking about songcraft. That's why as much as I like Slayer, I couldn't put them in the conversation. There are no melodies.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Kash, and Don

I believe we (myself included) were discussing American Songwriting Greats. Yep...Slayer not there.

I like PJ, but I don't consider them in the arena of American Songwriting Greats. Tom Petty is not one of my favs at all, but he is worthy of being in that discussion as much as Springsteen.

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At some point it becomes impossible to compare song craft across genres, doesn't it? Can we compare OutKast to Donovan or Beethoven to Prodigy in some sort of meaningful way? If the connection between two artists becomes too attenuated, it just becomes a question of personal preference.

Probably depends what people mean by songwriting. I genuinely have no idea what people are referring to when they say it - lyrics, instrumental, story…combination of everything?

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I think everyone knows what a good, strong, catchy melody is. You know a hook when you hear one. If you can't sing it's pretty difficult to write a song/melody so guys like Tom Araya just try to blow you away with power. That's niche stuff.

A great song can be covered in various styles. My mom was born in 1936. She liked the kind of stuff you might expect- Streisand, Sinatra, but also some Elton John. One time she heard Rickie Lee Jones covering "Rebel Rebel" in my car, probably on XRT. She had no clue who Rickie Lee Jones was and she wouldn't know Bowie either. But she knew it was a good song. She may not have recognized it as a great song if she had heard the original version, probably too aggressive. The song is there though. She did say, "That girl sounds like she's high."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPQJCt2gNVo

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Kash, and Don

Petty is a top notch if not the best post Dylan American songwriter. The lyrics don't require depth. He didn't need to reinvent rock. The dude just cranked out classic after classic after classic. Theres no trash in his catalog. You ever watch the guy live? Fucking amazing. Every time.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

Like Dylan, it bothers me some that he can't sing.

Like Dylan, it don't matter.

_________________
"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

Bravo, Darkside, bravo.

He can sing enough to put the songs across.

Lou Reed is another great American songwriter who somehow- I'm not sure how- manages to craft great melodies with a two note range. It's a gift.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Kash, and Don

One of the great paradoxes of modern music is that none of the best singers can sing.

19th century musicians endlessly pursued the perfection of sound. Beginning in the 20th century, musicians began to wage a war on the concept of perfection, authenticity and transcendence. That's in part why I rank Tweedy as the greatest American songwriter of the past half century: Beginning with Being There, his work implicitly and, sometimes explicitly, becomes an extended meditation on the (im)possibility of achieving transcendence through music and human experience itself. Being There is often viewed as a revival of classic rock conceits within the context of an insurgent country subgenre. But exactly the opposite is true: The album would have been more accurately titled Not Being There as it foregrounds the void left by the quixotic pursuit of transcendence (through classic rock conventions and the lifestyle associated with this music), the leftover desire, unrealized aspirations and waste that is essential rather than peripheral to the culture and process of music-making. Being There simultaneously assumes the form of authenticity even as it questions the concept of authenticity itself and thus serves as a brilliant rejoinder to Son Volt's landmark Trace album, which fetishizes and reifies the concept of authenticity to produce its indisputably transcendent beauty.

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I like Petty and even saw him live at Poplar Creek back in the day, but you’re really overselling his importance.

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“Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.”- JD Vance
“My god, what an !diot.”- JD Vance tweet on Trump
“I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy”- JD Vance

Cool.

_________________
"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

sounds like she's channeling Lucinda

Orange Blossom Trail, got arrested there once.

Impressed when I found out that Neil Peart wrote the lyrics for most of Rush's stuff.
You don't think of drummers as being primary songwriters. Or maybe Alex and Geddy after listening
to their music realized it would be a bitch to put lyrics to and foisted the job on the drummer.
But they're Kanaydian anyhow.


What about the GBV guy? Deserves mention at least for prolificacy.


Stephin Merritt's more popular in cover versions (esp Papa Was A Rodeo) than his various bands (Magnetic Fields,
Gothic Archies, Future Bible Heroes) and his songwriting hits or misses when he skips across genres, like on 69 Love Songs.
It almost seems like a parlor trick with Merritt, who has an actual PhD in American songwriting, for real. But sometimes he hits



although it's probably just someone else's song from a long time ago.


I'll take Prine over Springsteen or Dylan. Dylan or Springsteen never inspired anything like Cop Shoot Cop.

But there are some genres of music that don't necessarily strive for catchy melodies and hooks. Does jazz have catchy melodies and hooks? What about classical music? Also, what about Dylan and Tom Waits? They do have some hooks here and there, but for the most part they don't set out to make the catchiest song possible.

Do you consider those "songs"? I love Kind of Blue (Who doesn't?) but I wouldn't call any piece on there a "song." And certainly not for purposes of this conversation. And I would say the same about classical pieces. I wouldn't call Beethoven a "songwriter." He's a composer.



I would argue that both of those guys write songs that have strong melodies. Sometimes the melodies get lost beneath strange instrumentation (Waits) or sometimes vocal limitations make the melodies less than they could be (Dylan), but when those songs are covered it becomes clear how great they are.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Kash, and Don

I might not call them "songs," but I think (at least in some sense) that this song/music distinction proves my point. There are certain genres of music that are so different, you really can't compare them in any meaningful way.

The difference between Pearl Jam and Tom Petty is not as great as the difference between Miles Davis and Simon and Garfunkel, but it's different enough to make comparisons problematic.

Tom Petty set out to make a folk rock/roots rock album. Pearl Jam set out to make a hard rock album. You wouldn't listen to a Tom Petty album and say "where's the distorted guitar solo? This album sucks," and you wouldn't listen to a Pearl Jam album and say "I was hoping for something that sounded like a modern interpretation of the Byrds and instead I got Led Zeppelin." You kind of have to assess each piece of music based on what the artist was trying to achieve.

Going back to my Dylan and Waits comments, there might be hooks and melodies in a Dylan or Waits song, but they're nothing compared to the hooks or melodies you might find in an Oasis or Green Day song. That's because Dylan and Waits' primary focus is not on making the biggest hooks and catchiest melodies possible. Therefore, it would be unfair to pan a Dylan album because it doesn't contain a three minute song the sounded like "Basket Case."

don't give billie joe any ideas. he might think he can pen the next great tom waits album green day style.

I want to like him. He knows a hook and he drinks regular beer. I have a hard time getting past the fake accent though.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Kash, and Don

Guided By Voices fans are like vegans or cross-fitters or atheists. Devoted and evangelical. If you have a friend who is into GBV, you will be forced to attend GBV concerts. Among the song and canned beer GBV fests I've attended, I thought their set squished between Bob Mould and the Jim O'Rourke iteration of Sonic Youth at Goose Island Fest one year was much more enjoyable than the marathon, self-indulgent and insider-reference heavy headlining GBV sets I'd seen.

It was also the best Sonic Youth set I'd seen, might've just had some really good gear that night. Don't really recall much of the all-ages mosh-fest I saw in a wedding hall in suburban Baltimore where Sonic Youth opened for Beastie Boys. Recall Thurston Moore claiming and complaining from the stage at Bonnaroo one year that Sonic Youth were the true heirs to the Dead, but no one bothered to follow them around. Before playing extended noodle versions of their songs until the chick got to sing.

After O'Rourke moved to New York and threw shade on Chicago he briefly joined Sonic Youth. Not much into O'Rourke's solo albums. But adding Jim O'Rourke to any band = I'm in. Notice that when guys who produce bands (like O'Rourke or Albini ) perform live the guitars get cranked up and fuzzed out a bit more. O'Rourke did the same thing when he would occasionally sit in with then in flux Wilco lineups.