1.
Taylor Swift co-wrote “This Is What You Came For” with Calvin Harris, which he released as a single with Rihanna in 2016. The original songwriting credits were given to Harris and an unknown writer named Nils Sjöberg. Rolling Stone later confirmed that it was Swift’s songwriting alias, as she wanted to keep her credit secret.
Harris eventually became frustrated that the spotlight was on Swift’s songwriting credit rather than his own, and he vocalized this after they broke up in 2016. “I wrote the music, produced the song, arranged it, and cut the vocals, though. And, initially, she wanted it kept secret, hence the pseudonym,” Harris tweeted. “Hurtful to me at this point that her and her team would go so far out of their way to try and make ME look bad at this stage, though.”
You can listen to “This Is What You Came For” here.
2.
Missy Elliott is responsible for writing a plethora of major hits for singers in the 2000s, like “So Gone” for Monica, “Oops (Oh My)” for Tweet, and “My Love Is Like…Wo” for Mýa. “Oops (Oh My)” by Tweet was always rumored to be about masturbation, but in 2021, Elliott cleared the air and let her fans know it’s actually about Tweet’s self-love for her Black skin. She tweeted: “This song was never ’bout masturbation, it was always about her appreciating her dark skin (self-love) when she looked in the mirror 🙂. It was listeners who thought it was about sex and just ran with it — we just let the consumer’s mind create what they wanted.”
In 2018, Elliott tweeted about her experience writing “My Love Is Like…Wo” for Mýa: “I remember I had 10 shots of Patrón writing the lyrics. I played it for Mýa and we was dancing ’round the studio having a ball. In this music video, SHE DID DAT. The choreography was lit 🙌🏾🔥.”
You can listen to “So Gone” here, “My Love Is Like…Wo” here, and “Oops (Oh My)” here.
3.
Pharrell helped write “Hollaback Girl” with Gwen Stefani for her 2004 album, Love. Angel. Music. Baby. Stefani told Billboard in 2019, “I was being bullied by someone and was being called a cheerleader, which was a bad thing! Growing up, that was not cool. I told Pharrell we should write a song about that.”
Stefani continued, “He always had this little keyboard that he writes everything on, and he programs stuff into it. He goes, ‘This beat?’ and he played ‘Hollaback Girl.’ I was like, ‘You had that in there all these hours, and you never played that until now? Why didn’t you play that the first time I walked in here?!'”
You can listen to “Hollaback Girl” here.
4.
Pharrell also co-wrote “Boys” for Britney Spears’ 2001 album, Britney with Chad Hugo of The Neptunes. The hit also appeared on the Austin Powers in Goldmember movie soundtrack in 2002.
Pharrell is responsible for writing major hits for artists like Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Kendrick Lamar, Mariah Carey, and Frank Ocean (among others). He’s a songwriting machine, and has continued to crank out hit after hit for over 25 years — check out his full songwriting credits here.
5.
Linda Perry (from 4 Non Blondes) wrote “Beautiful” for Christina Aguilera’s 2002 album, Stripped, and “Get the Party Started” for Pink’s 2001 album, Missundaztood.
Perry told Rolling Stone in 2019, “[Christina Aguilera] stood there in my studio with the lyrics in her hands and then said to this friend she brought along, ‘Don’t look at me,’ in that little whispery voice. I knew I was going to keep that on the record, and I knew she was the right person for the song. I realized, ‘Oh, she’s insecure. She’s one of those beautiful people who’s got everything but is super insecure. Okay, this song is hers.'”
And when it came to writing “Get the Party Started” for Pink, Linda Perry recalled: “I sent it to Madonna and she passed, but a week later, Alecia [Pink] called. She left me this message how she would come find me if I didn’t call her back. I said, ‘I think you have the wrong Linda Perry.’ She said, ‘Is this the Linda Perry who sang ‘Dear Mr. President’ in 4 Non Blondes? Well, I have the right person.’ I told her, ‘Well, I’ve got something I wrote last week,’ and sent it to her. I guess she sent it to L.A. Reid and they said, ‘Okay we have our first single.'”
You can listen to “Beautiful” here and “Get the Party Started” here.
6.
Prince wrote “Manic Monday” for the Bangles’ 1986 album, Different Light.
Susanna Hoffs, lead singer of the Bangles, told NPR that Prince wrote “Manic Monday” for the band because he was such a big fan of their music. He invited the Bangles to his studio to listen to a demo, and the Bangles “hovered around the cassette machine — ’cause back then, it was tape — and [they] were smitten with the song.” Hoffs admitted: “I wish I had had a chance in the decades after to tell him: ‘Thank you for the song.’ It’s still fun to sing, every time.”
You can listen to the Bangles’ version here and Prince’s version here.
7.
Harry Styles wrote “Just a Little Bit of Your Heart” for Ariana Grande’s 2014 album, My Everything. Grande revealed in an interview with MTV in 2014 that Styles “was just visiting the studio, and [producers] Savan and Johan were like, ‘Hey, do you wanna write a song for Ariana?’ and he was like, ‘Oh, sure!’ He went into the other room and they were writing for a while.”
Grande continued, “I remember when I heard it, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a really strong verse, that’s really beautiful!’ and then at the chorus I was, like, crying! I’m really excited, obviously for his fans to hear it as well, ’cause they were very excited when they heard [about the collaboration].”
You can listen to “Just a Little Bit of Your Heart” here.
8.
Lenny Kravitz co-wrote “Justify My Love” with Ingrid Chavez for Madonna’s 1990 greatest hits album, The Immaculate Collection.
In a 2020 interview with Yahoo! Entertainment, Kravitz revealed he wrote the song after he met Madonna at a club in Europe in 1990. He recorded a bunch of demos after his first music tour, Let Love Rule, and believed it was a better fit for Madonna to sing than for him.
You can listen to “Justify My Love” here.
9.
Yoko Ono actually co-wrote “Imagine” for John Lennon’s 1971 album Imagine, but Lennon didn’t give her songwriting credit. Ono finally received songwriting credit for “Imagine” at NMPA’s Centennial Annual Meeting in 2017, once it was learned that Lennon pulled the majority of the lyrics from her 1964 poetry book Grapefruit.
In a BBC interview from 1980, Lennon said, “[‘Imagine’] should be credited as a Lennon-Ono song because a lot of it came from Yoko. But in those days, I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution. But it was right out of Grapefruit, her book.”
You can listen to “Imagine” here.
10.
Carole King (along with Gerry Goffin) wrote major hits for famous artists in the ’60s, like “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” for Aretha Franklin and “Pleasant Valley Sunday” for The Monkees. King has written hundreds of hits for famous singers spanning over six decades, becoming one of the most successful songwriters in pop music history. Her songs have been recorded by other performers such as Céline Dion, James Taylor, the Beatles, Dusty Springfield, the Shirelles, and many more.
King also rewrote her 1971 hit “Where You Lead” for the Gilmore Girls theme song in 2000. She originally co-wrote it with Toni Stern for her 1971 album Tapestry, but later rerecorded it with her daughter, Louise Goffin, for the TV show’s theme song. In concert, King revealed, “After I recorded [‘Where You Lead’] for the Tapestry album, we women decided that we didn’t actually need to follow our men anymore. Then, it got a new lease on life.”
You can listen to “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” here, “Pleasant Valley Sunday” here, and “Where You Lead” here.
11.
Bruno Mars helped write “All I Ask” with Adele for her 2015 album, 25.
Bruno Mars told a radio show in 2016, “As soon as we hit a couple chords that [Adele] liked, we started rolling, and that’s where we got that song from. There was a moment when she was singing in the booth — and I’m not exaggerating at all — and the water was vibrating. Like, you know that scene in Jurassic Park [where] the water starts jiggling? She’s got some pipes on her, and she’s just a superstar.”
You can listen to “All I Ask” here.
12.
Alicia Keys, along with Swizz Beatz, wrote “Million Dollar Bill” for Whitney Houston’s 2009 album, I Look to You. Keys talked about collaborating with Houston in a Rolling Stone interview shortly after the legendary singer died: “She was a woman from the streets of Newark — she had that energy and brashness, that laughter and silliness. She’d crack a joke at anything.”
“When we made ‘Million Dollar Bill’ in 2009, she was doing a hundred thousand jokes,” Keys said. “I had to reel the session in, like, ‘Okay, if we keep joking like this, we are never going to get anything done!’ I guess something in my spirit recognized something in her spirit, and we connected.”
You can listen to “Million Dollar Bill” here.
13.
Kelly Clarkson wrote “Tell Me a Lie” for One Direction’s 2011 album, Up All Night.
In 2012, Kelly Clarkson revealed to the Daily Star: “Giving away my songs is not something I do lightly. I’m such a writer’s snob. But I like the story of [One Direction] and how they came together as a group. They’ve worked so well in the US, as well as the UK, because people love a story. Plus, they have this innocence about them that attracts people.'”
You can listen to “Tell Me a Lie” here.
14.
Christina Milian wrote “Play” for Jennifer Lopez’s 2001 album, J.Lo, and “Baby” for Justin Bieber’s 2010 album, My World 2.0.
In 2019, Milian appeared on Talk Stoop and recalled: “A lot of the songs I wrote early on were songs I wrote for myself. So for people like Jennifer Lopez, [‘Play’] was a song I originally wrote for myself. When we were in the studio and recorded it, she hadn’t added the ‘Play my motherfucking song!’ [lyric] yet. I remember I heard it on the radio, and everyone was talking about how she cursed on the song, but I loved that she did that.”
You can listen to “Play” here and “Baby” here.
15.
Lauryn Hill wrote “A Rose Is Still a Rose” for Aretha Franklin’s 1998 album, A Rose Is Still a Rose. When Rolling Stone asked Hill what it was like to write a song for Franklin back in 1998, she said, “It’s amazing to have Aretha singing words that you wrote. When I recorded with her in Detroit, I went into the vocal booth after she came out, and it smelled like church, like paper fans with wooden sticks. Like it came out of her pores.”
You can listen to “A Rose Is Still a Rose” here.
16.
John Lennon helped write “Fame” with David Bowie for Bowie’s 1975 album, Young Americans. In 2003, Bowie told Performing Songwriter magazine, “[John and I] had been talking about management, and it kind of came out of that. He was telling me, ‘You’re being shafted by your present manager,’ and that was basically the line. John was the guy who opened me up to the idea that all management is crap, and that there’s no such thing as good management in rock ‘n’ roll.”
Bowie continued, “It was at John’s instigation that I really did without managers and started getting people in to do specific jobs for me, rather than signing myself away to one guy forever and have him take a piece of everything that I earn.”
You can listen to “Fame” here.
17.
And Mariah Carey wrote Faith Hill’s “Where Are You Christmas?” for the How the Grinch Stole Christmas soundtrack in 2000. Carey originally wrote the song to perform herself, but Faith Hill recorded the Christmas classic for the movie instead, possibly because of a legal battle between Carey and her ex-husband/music executive Tommy Mottola.
Mariah Carey wrote almost all of her own discography (except for the covers) — she even wrote the Mixed-ish theme song, “In the Mix,” which she recorded with her children, Roc and Roe.
You can listen to “Where Are You Christmas?” here and “In the Mix” here.