How One Man Changed Songwriting Forever

Today, I'm excited to share another excerpt from my debut book, Uncharted Territory

If you read this newsletter regularly, you’ll know that I have a book coming out this fall. It’s a data-driven history of popular music called Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. If you’re a fan of the newsletter, you’re sure to like the book.

Each month until publication, I am sharing excerpts from the book. So far, we’ve shared pieces on the evolution of sampling in the early 2000s and fraud on the Billboard charts in the 1970s. This month, I want to get closer to the present and share an excerpt from Chapter 11 where I talked about how the Swedes transformed the hit songwriting process. The only thing you need to know is that if a song is followed by a date (e.g., “Drop It Like It’s Hot” by Snoop Dogg (December 11, 2004)), then that song was a number one hit and that was the date it topped the charts.

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How the Swedes Altered the Songwriting Process

Dag Krister Volle loved pop music. And his colleagues clowned him for it. But Volle didn’t care. As part of SweMix, a Swedish DJ collective that remixed American hits for European audiences in the 1980s, he defiantly assumed the name Denniz PoP. While working, PoP noticed there were two strains of music that people enjoyed. There was the rhythmic music that they danced to in nightclubs and the melodic music that they sang along to on the radio. Maybe, PoP posited, there was a way to combine them. John Seabrook described this in his 2015 book The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory:

In the United States, melody was kept at arm’s length by the DJs who were the producers of house music, because in the clubs, whenever a strong melody came over the speakers, the dancing stopped. But in Sweden, it was different. As Jan Gradvall observes, “In discos in small towns all over Sweden in the ’80s, people danced to the biggest hit song rather than the funkiest songs or best mixes. When choruses came around, that’s when the dance floor boiled.”

After PoP and his colleagues sold SweMix, he set out to create his version of popular music. In 1992, he and Tom Talomaa opened Cheiron, a studio and label. Though the label foundered, the studio got work. In 1994, PoP produced the reggae-infused earworm “The Sign” for Ace of Base (1994), and it went on to be the biggest hit of the year. At the same time, he was assembling a team of songwriters and producers to work for him. This team would soon find wild success writing and producing some of the biggest hits of the 1990s.

That success wasn’t a fluke. Over the years, PoP’s protégés have continued to write smashes. Rami Yacoub, for example, worked on “Rain on Me” by Ariana Grande and Lady Gaga (June 6, 2020), “Starships” by Nicki Minaj, and some songs by One Direction. Andreas Carlsson helped craft “Inside Your Heaven” for Carrie Underwood (July 2, 2005) and “Waking Up in Vegas” for Katy Perry. Jörgen Elofsson cowrote Kelly Clarkson’s chart-toppers “A Moment Like This” (October 5, 2002) and “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)” (February 18, 2012). That said, all the Cheironites paled in comparison to Karl Martin Sandberg.

Sandberg was the onetime singer of a Cheiron Records rock band called It’s Alive. After their album Earthquake Visions failed to make an impact, It’s Alive was dropped from the label. PoP saw something in Sandberg, though, so he invited him to stick around to write and produce for others. It was during this time that PoP gave the young man a new name: Max Martin.

In the four years between his first credits on a Cheiron production and becoming the de facto leader of the studio after Denniz PoP’s death from stomach cancer in 1998, Martin transformed into a pop music maven, writing and producing 12 top ten hits for everyone from teen stars—like Britney Spears (e.g., “Oops!. . . I Did It Again”), Robyn (e.g., “Show Me Love”), NSYNC (e.g., “It’s Gonna Be Me” (July 29, 2000)), and the Backstreet Boys (e.g., “I Want It That Way”)—to established acts, like Céline Dion (e.g., “That’s the Way It Is”) and Bon Jovi (e.g., “It’s My Life”).

Pop songwriting superstar Max Martin [Credit: Getty]

If the Max Martin story ended there, he would be known as a talented musician who made a very specific brand of pop music throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. And for a while, that’s what it looked like. Between 2001 and 2004, Martin didn’t write any top ten hits.

Years later, Martin reflected on this period: “We were doing so well . . . Then music changed. Pharrell came and ruined it all, crashed my party, and I found myself in a place where I actually thought everyone else was wrong and I was right.”

Martin is referring to Pharrell Williams, one-half of the production duo The Neptunes that Williams founded with Chad Hugo in the 1990s. And he was correct. Pharrell’s music was dramatically different than his. “Drop It Like It’s Hot” (December 11, 2004), a song The Neptunes crafted with Snoop Dogg, is exemplary of this. It’s a sparse hip-hop record whose rhythm is built around mouth pops and tongue clicks, not the drum machines and synths that Martin was familiar with.

But it wasn’t only Pharrell. Martin also had to deal with the likes of Timbaland and Scott Storch. Timbaland brought off-kilter beats to songs like Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On,” Jay-Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder,” and both Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” (September 9, 2006) and “My Love” (November 11, 2006). Storch’s rhythms were more traditional, but some of his tracks, like Terror Squad’s “Lean Back” (August 21, 2004) and 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop” (March 5, 2005), had Middle Eastern flair.

While most would double down on how they originally found success, Martin decided to change: “I remember clearly that I had [an] epiphany . . . Maybe I’m the one that’s wrong. Maybe I’m the one that should start listening to some other music.” And that’s what he did.

The Swede headed to New York, where he befriended Lukasz Gottwald, an aspiring producer who paid the bills playing guitar in the Saturday Night Live studio band and DJing around the city under the name Dr. Luke. Luke and Martin’s skills complemented one another. Whereas Martin could show Luke how to produce vocals and write a strong melody, Luke could introduce Martin to other genres, like hip-hop, and use his guitar to expand Martin’s instrumental palate.

In late 2004, the two wrote and produced “Since U Been Gone” for Kelly Clarkson. It peaked at number two and was Martin’s first hit since 2000. Since then, Martin’s success has continued unimpeded. That success is partly due to the process that Deniz PoP created, and he carried on.

PoP Principles: Melody and Rhythm Should Work Together

This was the key insight that inspired PoP’s music. You could make music with a strong enough rhythm, so people could dance, and a strong enough melody that people could sing along. You can hear this idea on Katy Perry’s Martin-cowritten “California Gurls” (June 19, 2010). The melody is deeply catchy, but you feel compelled to move while you hum along.

PoP Principles: Keep Things Simple

PoP despised complex harmonies. His SweMix colleague StoneBridge recalled, “Whenever I would play . . . complicated jazzy chords, Denniz would make a face. That was the thing that drew him to pop—the simplicity of it.” You can hear how Martin agreed with his mentor’s sentiment on a four-chord romp, like Katy Perry’s “Part of Me” (March 3, 2012).

PoP Principles: Lyrics are Secondary

English wasn’t PoP’s first language. So, he grew up listening to American music without any idea what the lyrics meant, and he liked it all the same. Because of that, he wasn’t willing to sacrifice a musical element for a clever lyric. This put Swedish-crafted pop in direct opposition to the wordplay-heavy hip-hop that was also popular at the time.

Martin continued this lyrics-serve-the-melody tradition. Bonnie McKee, a frequent collaborator, summed it up succinctly: “Max doesn’t really care about lyrics because he’s Swedish . . . I can write something I think is so clever . . . but if it doesn’t hit the ear right then he doesn’t like it. He’s also really stubborn about syllables . . . If you add a syllable, or take it away, it’s a completely different melody to him.”

You can hear the syllabic stringency in many of his compositions. The verses on Pink’s “So What” (September 27, 2008) are built around a 13-note guitar riff that the vocal melody follows. This leads to lines like “The waiter just took my table / And gave it to Jessica Simps.” Whereas many composers would bend the melody to fit Jessica Simpson’s entire name, Martin won’t.

His Swedish origin has also led to some of his compositions being accidentally controversial. Whereas Martin’s lyric “Hit me baby one more time” on Britney Spears’ “ . . . Baby One More Time” (January 30, 1999) was an attempt to use hip American lingo to mean “hit me up on my phone,” some took it to be sado-masochistic. Similarly, Martin was surprised when Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” (July 5, 2008) sparked outrage. Growing up in the socially progressive Sweden, bi-curiosity wasn’t a big deal.

PoP Principles: The Bigger the Chorus the Better

PoP and Martin loved songs with massive choruses, like Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and Europe’s “The Final Countdown.” Listening to Usher’s “DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love,” Pink’s “Raise Your Glass” (December 11, 2010), or any other Cheiron-descended composition, you can hear how the chorus is always the focal point.

PoP Principles: Collaboration is King

You will seldom find a Cheiron production written or produced by a single person. The Swedish artist E-Type compared Cheiron to an Italian painter’s studio in the 1500s: “One assistant does the hands, another does the feet, and another does something else, and then Michelangelo walks in and says, ‘That’s really great, just turn it slightly. Now it’s good, put it in a golden frame and out with it. Next.’”

After Cheiron closed, Martin continued collaborating. When he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, he noted, “In my career . . . a lot of the songs there’s two or three or four, sometimes maybe five, writers . . . I don’t think I would have lasted this long if I had been stubborn sitting in my chamber alone writing.”

It should thus come as no surprise that in the same way Denniz PoP took Max Martin under his wing, Martin has done the same for others, his two most famous protégés being Shellback and the aforementioned Dr. Luke.

Shellback (née Karl Johan Schuster), another long-haired, Swedish hard-rocker-turned-pop-savant, has created his most well-known work with Martin but has also had some big hits without his mentor, like Maroon 5 and Christina Aguilera’s “Moves Like Jagger” (September 10, 2011).

Dr. Luke has achieved even more success. Along with collaborating on most of Martin’s number ones in this era, he worked on Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA,” Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” (May 5, 2007), and Kesha’s “We R Who We R” (November 13, 2010), among many other hits. Like Martin, both Shellback and Dr. Luke never work alone.

Whether you like Martin’s work or not, the Swedish-style collaboration model was exported all over the world as he and his colleagues found success both within and across genres. It’s part of the reason you see almost double the songwriters on hits today as you did 40 years ago. Still, we need to unpack a few more things to understand the increase in songwriters on hits in the 2010s. But you’ll have to wait for the next section for that.

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This was an excerpt from Chris Dalla Riva’s forthcoming book, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. If you enjoyed it, you can pre-order a copy of the book today. And if you think you have a way for Chris to promote the book, please reach out via this form.