Heard But Not Seen

by Anna Ayres-Brown

I won’t lie; I was pretty excited when I heard both Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez were releasing new records following their breakup in 2015. I’ve never been a huge fan of Bieber or Gomez, but it’s almost impossible to ignore their on-and-off relationship, given the media attention they receive. For better or worse, they are icons of our generation—a portrait the press likes to paint of undying love. With headlines like “Two Sides to Every Story” and “Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez Open Up,” the coverage of their albums piqued my interest. I was eager to hear how these two different artists would choose to represent their own emotional experience of the same falling out.

When the records came out, I wasn’t disappointed. They each brought a new artistic and emotional maturity to their work, making me feel the relief of an old friend who doesn’t have to pick a side. Impressed by both albums, I spent a little time looking through the credits, where I was met by a startling surprise. Listed as the co-writers of both Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” and Selena Gomez’s “Good for You” are Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter, an up-and-coming songwriting duo. Since then, I have learned that Michaels and Tranter actually wrote a large portion of the songs I heard on the radio last fall. Since 2015, they’ve composed singles for artists including Jason Derulo, Britney Spears, Gwen Stefani, Nick Jonas, and Demi Lovato.

I don’t think of myself as a naïve music listener. I learned a long time ago not to expect artists to write all of their music and I know the ease with which artists can list themselves as a co-songwriter on their records (Gomez and Bieber are listed as co-writers on each of their respective tracks). Still, I don’t think I understood the scope of these behind-the-scenes writers’ control over the music industry before learning that the same creative team was behind the conception and telling of both sides of the duo’s story.

Michaels and Tranter are just two writers in a much larger group of songwriters/ producers who run the pop industry. Their portfolio may sound vast, but the two millennial composers are quite inexperienced compared to writers like Max Martin, who has been reinventing the songwriting game for the past decade. You may have never heard of him before, but Martin is actually the songwriter with the third most #1 singles on the charts (after only Paul McCartney and John Lennon). If you think of any song that’s been overplayed on the radio until you can’t stand to listen to it, odds are Max Martin had a role in writing it. But how could the same person have written Britney Spears’s “Baby One More Time” and The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face”? This is the important question we are left asking. Does churning out so many hits undermine one’s musical legitimacy?

These mass songwriters like Michaels, Tranter, and Martin are forced to face this issue all the time. Nostalgic music listeners too easily idealize the age of Rock and Roll, refusing to recognize authenticity in these composers’ style of writing. What these critics overlook, however, is the fact that these big-business writers are actually building upon the same style and habits of other songwriters. For example, writing songs quickly is nothing new. Sure, everyone likes to believe that great work takes time and patience, but iconic songs like R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” were written in less than a day. To think that time and artistic struggle always accompany great work is false and limits what creative processes we deem acceptable.

Likewise, songwriters like Carole King manufactured hits for other artists long before writers like Max Martin began sweeping the charts. Before Tapestry, Carole King wrote back-to-back hits for other singers like “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” and “Natural Woman,” that still hold a place in the American R&B canon. For decades, songwriters penned tunes for varying artists besides themselves and if anything, this ability was seen as a skill. Today, songwriters are further building on this skill, not only writing for different artists, but even across varying genres.

In a way, you can think of writers like Michaels, Tranter, and Martin as the fiction authors of music. While some singer-songwriters’ discographies act as musical memoirs of their lives, Michael’s and Tranter’s “Sorry” and “Good for You” are fictional works, their personal narrative of the breakup between two outside characters (Bieber and Gomez). Of course, Bieber and Gomez are not fictional—they are real people, real artists, who definitely have a say in the creation of their music. Still, these songwriters challenge our assumptions of what makes authentic art. They are pushing records to be more and more like short stories that listeners can place themselves within, constructing varying narratives with which the public can empathize. If we, as listeners, can recognize and enjoy the perspective of Justin Bieber or Selena Gomez, why can’t a songwriter do the same?