Sir Elton John expressed his disappointment with the lack of actual writing in modern pop songs in a recent interview with BBC Radio 6 Music.
COS:
"[Father John Misty] reminds me a little bit of me, the way he writes songs," he praised, adding, "Conan [Gray's] from America and he's the only person in the American Spotify Top 50 to actually write the song without anybody else." John was referring to "Heather", a track currently sitting at No. 12 on the US Top 50 Spotify chart — below three Juice WRLD songs, BTS' "Dynamite", and reigning champ "WAP" from Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion.
John continued, "Everybody else there's four or five writers on (a track). You look at most of the records in the charts — they're not real songs. They're bits and pieces and it's nice to hear someone write a proper song." And John's right; none of those songs is credited to fewer than two songwriters, save for Gray's. (To be fair, Juice WRLD's Marshmello collab "Come & Go" is credited to only those two artists.)He went on to suggest pop music now is churned out for unsophisticated listeners and mass consumption. "I like people who write songs. And there's plenty of people that do, but a lot of them don't get played on the radio because they're too sophisticated and we get songs made by a computer all the time and I'm not interested in that," he concluded.
P.S. Fifty years ago this week Elton played The Troubadour.
image via Eltonjohn.com
