The room
In 2023, ten writers had co-written the majority of Billboard Top 40 hits across pop and country. They worked in rooms — literally rooms on Music Row — where two to six writers assemble a track in a single session, each contributing a hook or cadence optimized for a...
The spectrograms don’t lie
Nine chord changes. Fourteen timbres. 18 dB of dynamic range. "Superstition," 1972.
Morgan Wallen, "Last Night," 2023. Number one, sixteen weeks. Three chords. 6 dB. The vocal compressed to a 3 dB window.
Oh come on. This is not taste....
Three chords, sixteen weeks
Morgan Wallen’s "Last Night" was the number-one song in America for sixteen weeks in 2023. Three chords. No key change. Dynamic range of 6 dB — the loudest moment and the quietest are about as far apart as two people talking at slightly different...