Song: The World's Best Songwriters on Creating the Music that Moves Us

In these interviews conducted by various scribes for American Songwriter magazine, we learn such vitals as that Dierks Bentley would still write songs even if it weren’t his “job,” and how Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips descries the differences between a song and a performance and also how audiences do the same (Coyne also notes how Elton John’s elegant recording of “Bennie and the Jets” differs in important ways from his performances of the song today). Sheryl Crow is asked if she’s religious (she’s “spiritual,” she says), but Public Enemy’s Chuck D isn’t. Chuck does, however, deliver excellent background on a few of his songs to produce one of the meatier colloquies herein. Songsmiths as diverse as Lyle Lovett, Ray Charles, Beck, Burt Bacharach, Roger Miller, Fountains of Wayne, and Kenny Chesney make this a broad if not particularly deep survey of how current pop music is devised and an excellent acquisition for pop-music collections. Mike Tribby
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Founded in 1984, American Songwriter Magazine is a nationally distributed magazine that features interviews with some of America’s top songwriters in its mission to ”explore both the art and industry of songwriting.”