Thoughts on the visual appeal of musical waveforms. Memories of the late Quincy Jones. Debate over the role of peer pressure in the popularity of New Kids on the Block. These were among the points of pre-roundtable chitchat on a recent afternoon in West Hollywood when The Times gathered five musicians nominated for prizes at February’s 67th Grammy Awards.
Our panelists:
• Songwriter Amy Allen, 32, who’s nominated for songwriter of the year for her work with Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo and Koe Wetzel; song of the year for Carpenter’s “Please Please Please”; album of the year for Carpenter’s “Short n’ Sweet”; and song written for visual media for “Better Place,” from “Trolls Band Together.”
• Musician, songwriter and producer Annie Clark, 42, who performs as St. Vincent and who has nods for alternative music album with “All Born Screaming,” alternative rock performance with “Flea” and rock song and rock performance with “Broken Man.”
• Musician and songwriter John Legend, 45, who’s up for children’s music album for “My Favorite Dream” and an arrangement award for a rendition of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” he recorded with Jacob Collier and Tori Kelly.
• Producer and songwriter Daniel Nigro, 42, who’s nominated for producer of the year for his work with Rodrigo and Chappell Roan, album of the year for Roan’s “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” record and song of the year for Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” and song written for visual media for “Can’t Catch Me Now,” from “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.”
• Musician, songwriter and producer Willow, 24, whose last name is Smith and who’s up for an arrangement prize with “Big Feelings,” from her album “Empathogen,” which received a nomination for engineered album, non-classical.
Several of the artists were meeting for the first time; some went way back, including Nigro and Allen, who co-wrote a song on Rodrigo’s 2023 “Guts” LP, and Clark and Legend, who once teamed up to cover Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You” with help — for some reason — from Zach Galifianakis. (The latter two also share a friend and collaborator in Sufjan Stevens, who produced Legend’s “My Favorite Dream.”) Yet all of them agreed that in a music industry fueled by gossip, they’d heard only good things about the others.
“There’s plenty of people I’ve heard bad things about,” Legend noted with a laugh. “Not this crew.”
1. ‘Obsessive about the sounds’
You all come from different backgrounds and represent different traditions. But one thing that unites the five of you, I think, is a real devotion to craft. Put another way: You all have a touch of music nerd about you. Is that fair?
Legend: I’ve always been a nerd. I was a 16-year-old going to college.
Clark: You went to college at 16?
Legend: And I was homeschooled before that.
Smith: Me too! Shout-out to homeschool kids.
Legend: We made it.
What does it mean to be a music nerd?
Smith: You study.
Legend: You care about the details and about understanding the history and the legacy that you’re carrying forward.
Allen: And figuring out why your favorite things are your favorite things. That’s how I geek out: What’s actually happening in this Dolly song or this Tom Petty song?
Smith: Is it the chord progression? Is it the words they’re using? Like, what exactly?
What’s a detail in a song by each of you that people might not recognize but that you love? For me, an example is the bridge in “Good Luck, Babe!” where you can hear Chappell panting in the background.
Nigro: That’s literally what I was thinking about. I wanted people to notice that it sounds like she’s getting out of breath.
Smith: It adds to the feeling.
Legend: I have this song called “Safe,” and there’s this one moment when I do this run and Sufjan has this arpeggio going the opposite direction. It’s just this simple thing, but it’s my favorite moment on the album.
Smith: Every album I make, I try to come to the songs with something different about my vocal approach. For this album, I was listening to a lot of Indigenous music, and there’s something that a lot of Native American singers do — this kind of ancestral call. I do it on “Big Feelings.”
Annie, you produced your album yourself, which I assume means you were especially attentive to the sounds.
Clark: Very attentive to the sounds — obsessive about the sounds. On the song “Broken Man,” I had my friend and great drummer, Mark Guiliana, come over and play around on that song at my studio, and he played this fill that was so sick. Later, we recorded some drums and bass at Electrical Audio in Chicago —
Steve Albini’s studio.
Clark: Rest in power. And I’d gotten so attached to that fill that I had Mark replay it but with sounds from Electrical Audio.
Allen: I remember when Jack [Antonoff] did the key change in “Please Please Please.” We were all really excited about it in the room. I don’t know if the common listener would know there’s a key change in the second verse. But I’ve had a lot of family and friends be like, “There’s something that happens halfway through that song that just lifts me.” Being able to really lean into the musicality of pop right now is so exciting.
I’d call “Please Please Please” the key change of the year, but that would suggest I can think of a bunch of others.
Allen: Not a lot of competition.
Clark: If Shania was in the room you might have some. Shania loves a key change.
Smith: Just keeps going up and up and up.
Allen: Same with Beyoncé in “Love on Top.”
Legend: “Love on Top” is the key change of the decade.
Anyone foolish enough to try “Love on Top” at karaoke?
Smith: Only the Talking Heads at karaoke. That’s my go-to.
Legend: I used to cover “Burning Down the House” in my early demo days.
Smith: For a singer, I feel like doing karaoke —
Allen: It’s a trap.
Legend: It’s not for professionals.
Allen: It’s lose-lose because if you kill it, everybody’s like, “F— that guy.” And if you underplay it, they’re like, “John, why didn’t you go harder?”
Nigro: I did karaoke for the first time at like 34 because I was so intimidated. Although I do remember at my cousin’s wedding — this is 10, 12 years ago — they had a timbale player along with the DJ, and I was so smashed that I stole the timbales at one point and started playing them. My dad was like, “You know, for a musician, you really suck.”
2. ‘Unruly in a good way’
What’s a musical era you wish you’d been around for?
Smith: Earth, Wind & Fire, Ohio Players, that whole era.
Legend: The series of Stevie Wonder albums in the mid-’70s when he won three album of the year Grammys — I wish I were alive when those were being made. Those were probably the most inspiring albums for me coming up.
Clark: It shows.
Allen: I think about vocalists back then — how locked in you had to be from the jump. Watching people record harmonies in real time, everyone on one mic, having to match the tonality of everybody else.
Legend: A computer allows you to do so much manipulation. They had to come in and just deliver a take.
Nigro: It’s interesting how our ears have become so adjusted to everything sounding perfect now. In my 20s I was really into Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” — listened to it all the time. I hadn’t listened to it in years, and then I put it on the other day and I was like, I can’t believe how out of tune this guitar is. For the first time, it was driving me crazy. And I didn’t want it to drive me crazy.
How’d you deal with that desire for perfection on the Chappell album? It doesn’t sound —
Legend: It feels unruly in a good way.
Nigro: For me, it’s time — sitting with the song, listening to it, what it makes me feel like. I’ll listen, then I’ll walk away and come back: “Oh, that vocal’s rushing — I’m gonna move the vocal.” It’s natural, but there’s definitely editing being done.
Legend: Are you writing on these songs too?
Nigro: Yeah.
Legend: When you’re in your songwriter moment versus your producer moment, what’s the difference?
Nigro: I never care about any production when we’re writing. I’m lucky enough that when I work with Olivia or with Chappell, they don’t care either — they just want to get a song. Sometimes with Chappell, we’ll put a beat on so we know what tempo we’re writing to.
Smith: That’s so cool. So you record the whole song with no production?
Nigro: “Good Luck, Babe!” was just a kick, a snare, a vocal and a synth — not even any chord changes. The chords are the same in the verse and the chorus.
Is that cheating?
Clark: I was just looking at every Madonna hit from the ’80s — just studying chord progressions for fun — and it’s a classic move.
Legend: We’re not nerds at all.
So then what distinguishes the chorus from the verse?
Legend: Sometimes just changing the melody over the same chords can make it feel completely different.
Nigro: Although there’s lots of hit songs where even the melody for the verse is the same as the chorus melody. Calvin Harris and Rihanna, “We Found Love” — same chords, same melody. The whole thing never changes. But the song feels like it’s propelling.
Allen: Tale as old as time, that trick. But it’s really hard to do.
3. ‘The best version of herself’
Last year, Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer” — which Annie co-wrote — topped the Hot 100 four years after it came out because people on the internet decided it should be a hit. This is a thing that happens now.
Smith: I put out “Wait a Minute!” years ago and then TikTok was like, “Oh, we love this song.” Yo, I’ve put out three albums since then!
Nigro: “Pink Pony Club” did that. It’s going now, and it came out almost five years ago.
When an old song takes off, you ever hear something in it you wish you could change?
Nigro: The crazy thing is that you can. Chappell and I changed “Femininomenon” six months after it came out. I’m not really a dance producer, and the drums [on the original recording] just didn’t hit the way I wanted them to. Every time I heard it, I was like, “The fricking snare’s just not right.” I hated it more and more as time went on. So when we were set to put the record out for real, I called a friend: “Can you please change the kick and snare in this for me? I have like a week before we have to hand in the vinyl.” And we ended up swapping it out.
Annie, you just remade your latest album in a Spanish-language version.
Clark: Sí.
Why?
Clark: I’ve been lucky enough to play a lot in Mexico and in South America and Spain, and I was always blown away by the fact that people will sing along to my songs in what might be their second or third or fourth language. So I thought if they can do that for me, maybe I can meet them halfway in their language.
Legend: How much did you find yourself revising the lyric to make it sing better in Spanish?
Clark: It’s wildly different — kind of a full rewrite.
When you’re writing with an artist, Amy, do you think in terms of absorbing their language?
Allen: When I was really getting into songwriting like six years ago, I would hear what an artist wants to talk about and then try to put myself in their brain and write the song from their perspective. But I had this pivotal moment two or three years ago where I realized I was making it so much harder than it needed to be. Why don’t I just, when they’re venting about something, figure out the closest thing I have within me and then write in a parallel line with them? Sabrina is a special case because I have so much chemistry with her.
Legend: It seems like y’all had fun. My daughter is really into Sabrina right now, so I hear her in the car a lot.
Allen: We can hit the ball back and forth, and it’s unlocked something for her to become the best version of herself. My dream job is not having to sit there and come up with the funniest line. It’s allowing a chemistry to develop where those lines are just second nature.
Smith: It’s coming from the relationship that you guys have created with each other.
Legend: I love that.
Allen: It took me a long time as a songwriter to get there with an artist.
4. ‘The vision is clear’
Chappell, Sabrina, Charli XCX: Artists who’ve been working for a long time finally made it happen in a big way this year. Is this a story about artist development? Should the music industry be patting itself on the back?
Legend: I don’t feel like that’s what’s happening.
Clark: Can they reach their backs with those wads of cash in their hands? Is that possible?
Legend: What’s happening with labels is they’re not really in charge anymore. They’re not the gatekeepers as much as they used to be. The audience has so much power.
Smith: Social media is a huge part of this. And I feel like it’s a balance: There are situations where the creation of the art is pinnacle, and there are situations where that’s really, really not the case. We all know what it’s like to feel that straitjacket of opinions about what’s gonna make a hit record.
Nigro: Every artist says they don’t care. But there are artists that want to appease everybody and there are artists that really just do whatever the hell they want to do. I think the truth is that the artists have the power, but if they’re not sure about what they want, then they can easily get wrapped up in the major-label —
Smith: Rigmarole.
Nigro: It’s easy to get lost in that. Everyone wants to be successful.
Seems worth pointing out that Sabrina broke through with her sixth studio album.
Clark: That’s her sixth album?!
What does that tell you about a career in pop?
Clark: It’s telling me I got a shot [laughs]. I mean, theoretically, if you do something a lot, you get better. A doctor on their sixth surgery is better than a doctor who’s on their first. For some reason, music is the only place where people are like, “No, that first surgery was the best.”
Legend: But sometimes it’s true — sometimes the first one is the best one.
Clark: And sometimes you pierce somebody’s trachea.
Willow, your debut single came out when you were 10 years old. Do you feel connected now to that earliest instance of your musical life?
Smith: What I’ll say is that the message of my music has always been to love yourself and to love others and to live loud with all of your gusto. So “Whip My Hair” definitely doesn’t go against anything that I stand for now — it actually fits the journey that I’ve had. I look back at my first album and I’m like, I definitely wouldn’t do that now. But like Annie said, the more you do something, the more you refine it.
Legend: And it can take a while to figure out your voice. I’m thinking about the six albums for Sabrina, because now it feels like, OK, she found it. Not saying the other ones weren’t great, but they felt a little more unsettled as far as who she was as an artist. Then I hear these songs and they sound like this is her personality. The vision is clear.
Allen: Also, the world needs to be ready. There’s so many dominoes that need to fall for something like “Good Luck, Babe!” or “Please Please Please” to have the impact we want it to have.
Nigro: We wrote “Good Luck, Babe!” while we were writing Chappell’s album. But if we’d put it out when the album came out, I don’t think it would have done what it did.
Smith: Timing is so important.
Nigro: And I feel like Sabrina needed “Nonsense” to happen for the next iteration to take place.
Allen: It was all stepping stones.
5. ‘I wish I made this song’
Present company excluded, what’s a song or an album that you loved this year?
Legend: Tyler, the Creator’s album. I love his mom talking through every track and the storytelling and the personal journey.
Smith: Esperanza Spalding and Milton Nascimento put an album out, and I just sat in my room with the lights off and was like, I need to ingest this into every cell of my body.
Nigro: The first time I heard “Million Dollar Baby,” I was like, Oh man, I wish I made this song.
Allen: I loved this new Adrianne Lenker album that came out this year. She’s defying every rule that I as a pop writer feel is floating around.
Clark: I’ve been listening to the new MJ Lenderman record, “Manning Fireworks.” It’s so creative and clever, but it doesn’t lose its heart in the cleverness.
’Tis the season for holiday music. You’ve made a Christmas album, John, and you’re on a Christmas tour as we speak.
Legend: Call me Father Christmas.
Have any of the rest of you tried to write a Christmas song?
Nigro: Every year, I call up the artists that I work with and I say, “Hey, let’s write a Christmas song,” and they’re like, “Yeah, sure.” And then we never do.
Legend: I said that every year for 14 years until I finally made one.
Clark: I wrote a Christmas song — sort of. It’s on my last record, and it’s called “… At the Holiday Party.” It’s sad and depressing.
Allen: That definitely counts.
Smith: If I ever made a Christmas song, I feel like it would have to be from the dark side. Or maybe like a pagan perspective.
Clark: You should absolutely write that.
Are Christmas songs hard to write?
Legend: The thing about Christmas songs that endure is that they endure. So there’s a lot of pressure on any new song to make it stand up to all the ones that have lasted for 50 years. And they’ve lasted for 50 years for a reason — people still love them. To try to make your new thing stand up to that canon is quite a challenge.
Clark: Eat s—, Bing Crosby.
