Word: goffin
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...comedy club in her hometown of Burleson, Texas, before an Idol audition started her on the road to fame, but it's rarely noted that Clarkson already lived in Hollywood (she was only in Burleson because her apartment burned down), or that, as a demo singer for Gerry Goffin, the ex-husband of Carole King and co-writer of Up on the Roof and (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, Clarkson received high-level on-the-job instruction in songwriting and recording techniques. She even had the business sense to pass on two bad pre-Idol record deals...
...singer-songwriter, before performers were routinely called artists, before the unit of music was an album-groups relied on songwriters and producers to give them hit singles. The Drifters had Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller producing their hits, and a gang of young pros in the Brill Building (Goffin and King, Pomus and Shuman) writing them. The Seasons were lucky to align with producer Bob Crewe, who had written such hits as "Silhouettes" and "Tallahassee Lassie." They were even more fortunate that Bob Gaudio joined the Seasons in the late '50s-not as another voice, but as the group...
...Remember" (1925) Ella Fitzgerald (1958) on "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook." Berlin's dirge of romantic betrayal - the we-had-sex-now-you're-gone mode reworked by Goffin and King in "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" - gets a beautiful, post-virginal reading by Fitzgerald. Compare this with Billie Holiday's version: she loved, she lost, she doesn't give a shit...
...They got three particularly inventive pieces from Pomus and his new writing partner Mort Shuman: "This Magic Moment," "Save the Last Dance for Me" and the can-never-be-played-too-often "Sweets for My Sweet." L&S also encouraged the young songwriters in Broadway?s Brill Building - Gerry Goffin and Carole King ("When My Little Girl Is Smiling"), Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil ("On Broadway"), who were all in their late teens or early 20s -to write plangent pop ballads. These were the Broadway songs that Broadway couldn?t bring itself to write...
...What they got from Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Neil Diamond and others was a repertoire that any "real" band would envy, rivaling that of any '60s pop stars. It wasn't heavy, but brother was it tuneful - and fun. What's more, the made-up combo more often than not sang the hell out of their hits; eventually, they demanded more control over their destiny (exit Kirshner) and began to play and write their own songs, some of them quite decent. They woke up, but for a short while the dream continued anyway...