\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p><\/div> \n\t(In fairness, it\u2019s possible Dua may have cast a vote for someone else besiees Patti and had it disqualified. The Times noted that it was putting an asterisk next to anyone who had died since they began collecting ballots, but also that the paper was just leaving out any mention of anyone submitted who didn\u2019t qualify as a living American songwriter. In other words, they weren\u2019t going to embarrass any of the celebs by noting that they\u2019d voted for dead people or Brits. Or Canadians; the Times disallowed Canadians Joni Mitchell and Neil Young from contention, even though they have spent a lot more time being citizens of California, going back to their moves south in the mid-\u201960s, than they did up north.)<\/p>\n \n\tIf Ms. Lipa had the shortest list, with just one, Natalie Merchant had the longest, with 38. Merchant, clearly, is dying to make us all a playlist. We\u2019ll take it.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \n\tOther fun stuff of note: Artists were not shy about casting votes for their musical partners (Aimee Mann putting in a bad for Ted Leo, her counterpart in the side project the Both), or even husbands (Mann again, with Michael Penn). There were threesongwriters on the list of solicited contributors who voted for themselves: Rickie Lee Jones, Jermaine Dupri and Jeff Tweedy. <\/p>\n \n\tRecent comradeship could also count for a lot when it came to David Byrne casting his vote for Olivia Rodrigo, along with more expected figures like Simon and Wonder.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \n\tFans of musical theater may be wanting to shed a tear here. Not only did no one from that world make it onto the Times\u2019 final list (it would\u2019ve been interesting to see if they would have allowed Sondheim in, if he\u2019d lived longer), there were few theater songwriters who even made it into the 36 \u201cinsider\u201d ballots. Desmond Child did vote for Stephen Schwartz and the team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Justin Vernon and Merchant both put in a vote for Anais Mitchell, though that could be for her solo work as much as \u201cHadestown.\u201d You have to wonder if theater is being taken into consideration at all when Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the song score of the century so far, \u201cHamilton,\u201d made it onto only one list, Merchant\u2019s. Meanwhile, Miranda was invited by the Times to contribute his own list, and though he only put in three names, he at least saved one of them for a theater writer, going with Dolly Parton, Nas and the highly deserving John Kander (of Kander\/Ebb \u201cChicago\u201d and \u201cCabaret\u201d fame).<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \n\tSome artists have better memories than others. Usually, with \u201cliving\u201d being part of the qualification, you don\u2019t have to go that far back in time\u2026 with rare exceptions. Kudos to Jeff Parker, of Tortoise, for putting in a vote for Bobbie Gentry, who is still around but released her last album in 1971. A tortoise, like an elephant, never forgets.<\/p>\n \n\tThe thinkpieces that are inevitably being generated by the Times\u2019 list are valuable. Some have wondered: If someone spends their entire career only doing co-writes \u2014 as is more common than not with pop in the 2020s \u2014 are there ways to verify and trust that they are the key writers in their room? And how fine is the line now between great songwriting and great producing, when so many tracks actually begin and end with a team in a studio, leaving the idea of a solitary figure with pen and paper nearly as antiquated as a DAT demo? That thought arose when Jay-Z, one of the Times\u2019 top 30, was asked about the songwriting prowess of his wife, and he pivoted toward talking about what a brilliant producer she was \u2026 almost implying that it might be a higher aspiration. Figuring out where these lines are drawn won\u2019t get any easier if the Times revisits this topic in 2076.<\/p>\n \n\tThey may not. One reason why I think so many people are taking this list so personally is that the Times so rarely does this sort of thing\u2026 although, in the age of listicles, they\u2019ll probably indulge more. Rock fans get angry at Rolling Stone for their 500-greatest lists, but that\u2019s tempered by the knowledge that a current rundown is probably a redrawing of something that was already done 15 or 20 years ago, and will be adjusted yet again. The Grey Lady putting its imprimatur on this sort of thing is a little more unexpected, and thus takes on maybe a little more import \u2014 regardless of whether they were motivated by elevating songwriting as an art or coming up with an idea for a call they thought elusive interviewee Taylor Swift would take.<\/p>\n \n\tAnyway, with the staff having taken more than a year to get this project together, the Times at least can\u2019t be accused of not doing due diligence. Or of not putting a tremendous emount of thought and energy into balance\u2026 even with, as with Newman, you could wish the balance were leavened with a bit of aesthetic common sense.<\/p>\n \n\tOK, just one<\/em> more question: Why the \u201cSchoolhouse Rock\u201d typeface?<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source variety.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWho\u2019s Madeline?\u201d is still the year\u2019s preeminent pop-music question. But coming up close behind that: \u201cWhere the eff is Randy Newman on the New York Times\u2019 list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters?\u201d Or, you can fill in that blank with some other name of your chagrined choosing, like Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Billy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2395385,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[361831,352937,406902,338957],"class_list":["post-2395384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-new-york-times","tag-patti-smith","tag-randy-newman","tag-tom-waits"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Whos-Missing-From-the-New-York-Times-Greatest-Songwriters-List.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2395384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2395384"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2395384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2395386,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2395384\/revisions\/2395386"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2395385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2395384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2395384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2395384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/themes\/pmc-variety-2020\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
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