Songwriters Hall of Fame Class of 2025: George Clinton, Mike Love, Rodney Jerkins & More Share Stories Behind Era-Defining Hits

Recorded by Idina Menzel, Kristin Chenoweth for the Original Broadway Cast Recording; Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande for Wicked: The Soundtrack

“This is a song that flowed pretty easily. The events were so clear here, and I knew the characters so well by the time I was approaching this song that it pretty much came out the way it was and never changed. That low end riff, motif—I thought sounded like power, something coming up from the ground and coming into somebody. So I knew I was going to start with that, and I had the first line of the main part of the song—‘Something has changed within me.’ And then the rest of it flows as storytelling. One thing that happened musically is when Idina Menzel was cast and we got together for me to teach her the song it was she who said that the last verse when she sings, ‘So if you care to find me, look to the western skies,’ that it would stay up high because she was going to be flying at that point. In the original that verse was closer to the tune of the first two verses, up and down, and Idina felt like she needed to be high and stay high. I was just concerned with her ability to do that eight times a week and she reassured me she could. Which is all to say, when it’s a song for musical theater that is such a major part of the storytelling there is a lot of collaboration involved. Winnie Holzman [Wicked’s book writer] and Marc Platt, the producer—we spent a year basically working out the outline of the show and then figuring out which parts of the story would be told through music. Of course a lot changed but the basic structure of the show never changed. The end of the first act was always going to be when Elphaba flies for the first time and the parting of the two witches, if you will. I had written at least four other songs for the show before ‘Defying Gravity.’ There was the opening, there was what was then called ‘Making Good,’ which became ‘The Wizard and I,’ there was the love duet ‘As Long As You’re Mine’ and there was ‘One Short Day.’ I think ‘Popular’ got written pretty early too, but with ‘Defying Gravity’ it then wasn’t too long before we said, we know what this should be. Of course I have favorite songs, and I will never talk about them, but I must say playing the opening riff of ‘Defying Gravity’ is very satisfying and visceral. There is an amazing thing about music that it speaks on a level really below consciousness and it transcends time. There’s something about how it resonates both metaphorically and literally that is extraordinary.”

Co-written with Walter Morrison and Garry Shider
Recorded by Funkadelic

“We were on that whole Mothership thing from about 1975 and in ‘78 Bootsy [Collins] had a record out, The Brides [of Funkenstein] had a record out, everyone was doing their thing. And with all the different styles of music we were doing, we felt like we could do what Motown did with all the different levels of R&B and pop and psychedelic. By the time we got to Detroit we had missed the Motown train, the British invasion had already started, but we got there just in time to be able to merge all those sounds. We got the name ‘One Nation Under a Groove’ from a fan, a friend of ours in Washington, D.C. There was a concert and she was waiting for us to come out and she said it was a sea of Afros, it looked like one nation under a groove. So I had to go back and come up with a song and a concept that fit it. And we got the song real easy. We were celebrating these new keyboards that Yamaha had just put out with all these new features, and we had two of the best keyboardists in the world—Bernie Worrell and [Walter] Junie Morrison. We were on such a roll, and I just went in and pretty much riffed off the top, ‘Ready or not, here we come…’ And the concept of the group on roller skates in fatigues—that’s when fatigues were really cheap at the Army Navy Store—the and the whole One Nation look hit so fast we didn’t even have time to catch up.”

Co-written with Charlie Handsome, Jacob Kasher and John Byron
Recorded by Morgan Wallen

At 2:43, the shortest hit Gorley’s ever written “just took on a life of its own. Everybody on the planet was trying to come to Nashville to write for Morgan when the album [One Thing At A Time] was being made. We set out to push the envelope; we weren’t trying to write safe, easy down-the-middle radio songs. We booked three days, we wanted to just camp out and try stuff, and we’d written two or three songs before we wrote ‘Last Night.’ It was the end of the second day and we had the recorder going, and Charlie was messing around with different riffs. When he stumbled onto the one that’s exactly how the song starts, you could see everybody spark up a little bit. I liked that it was repetitive. It didn’t sound like a normal country riff, and all of us started yelling stuff out. ‘Last Night’ just honestly felt like the thing to say over that groove. We had the flow of the chorus, and we wanted to find a way to flip the title and see if we could make it mean something else. Last night this happened, and it’s going to happen again. Then it felt like it had a touch of Nashville in there. Once we all got back together the next day… we all started rapping back and forth, Beastie Boys style, and the music and words felt like they went together really well. And it didn’t get old. That groove, two days of that same loop playing, which never changes cords, then we knew there was some kind of magic in there. Morgan sang it perfectly. He embellished it, made it his own but stayed true to melodies. When I heard it the first time I do remember thinking, ‘This one is going to go crazy.’”

Co-written with Brandy, Japhe Tejeda, Fred Jerkins III & LaShawn Daniels
Recorded by Brandy and Monica

“It all started in my dad’s living room. He had one of those electric pianos and I was messing around and I hit the harp sound and I started thinking, ‘What if I took a harp sound and approached it from a rhythmic standpoint, with arpeggios?’ My dad heard it from upstairs and he ran down with a tape recorder. I didn’t know what I was playing, to be honest, but I played how I felt. I was already working on Brandy’s album, we were already five or six songs in, and everybody was focused on, ‘Where’s the hit?’ We had the demo, and Brandy sang the whole thing and it sounded great. And then Paris Davis, her A&R at the time who I respect so much, he was the one who said, ‘This is so good but I think it would be so much better if it was a duet.’ And he said, with Monica. So we got Monica on the song and they both killed it and then we mixed it five different times because now we had to please Brandy’s side, which was Craig Kallman, and Monica’s side, which was Clive Davis. The rest is history. I remember when it came out it was like No. [23] on Billboard and then it just jumped to No. 1 and it just stayed there. I remember Brandy calling me when we got to the tenth week and she was in tears on the phone saying, ‘Do you understand what this means?’ And I’m only 21 years old when it came out. I said I guess I know what it means, but I was just having a lot of fun.”

Co-written with John Phillips, Scott McKenzie and Terry Melcher
Recorded by The Beach Boys

A call from Roger Donaldson, director of the 1988 film Cocktail, which starred Tom Cruise as a New York bartender who takes his mixology talents to the Caribbean, launched one of the Beach Boys’ most popular songs and a testament to their longevity. “He called and said, ‘There’s this scene where he goes from New York to Jamaica, what do you think?’ Our friend Terry Melcher, who produced the song—he was the producer for Paul Revere & the Raiders and the Byrds as well– he was good friends with John Phillips and so John wrote the melody of the verse, and I wrote the chorus—’Aruba, Jamaica…’—and then I wrote the second verse and then Terry came in with the ‘oooh I want to take you to Kokomo. We’ll get there fast and then we’ll take it slow.’ So it was a true collaboration and a song that gives you the feel of the Caribbean, including the steel drums. We were just doing it by assignment but when I brought it in the director said, ‘This is the best song you’ve had since “Good Vibrations.”’ I was thinking, ‘Really?’ And sure enough, it went to No. 1 and also sure enough, it’s the biggest sing-along at our shows. And we actually got stacks of letters from grade school teachers who said their kids weren’t interested in geography until they heard that song.”

Co-written with Mike d’Abo
Recorded by The Foundations

“We’d done ‘Baby Now That I’ve Found You’ with The Foundations. About a year before, the lead singer for Manfred Mann, Mike d’Abo, had my girlfriend and I for dinner and while they were in the kitchen he said, ‘I’ve got the beginning of a song.’ He played me the first few bars. I didn’t like the title, I never thought we could call it that, but by the time the girls came up with a meal an hour or so later, we’d finished the song. I’d had a hit with a group called The Paper Dolls in England and they were troublesome and were turning down everything. In that sense for this one, they did me the best favor they could’ve done. I was desperate for something to do for The Foundations. Mike was going to play piano and we added a trumpet to the lineup. The day before [recording] I was still trying to get rid of the word ‘Buttercup’ because I thought it was so stupid. We laid the backing track, and we put the vocal on at about 11 o’clock at night and they were going to have a motorbike take the master straight to the studio. I’d promised the record company we’d have it done by the following morning. And when we played it back—in those days you didn’t necessarily wear a headset when you played the backing track back. They had a speaker near the mic and they had a backing track but the engineers messed it up, there was so much of the backing track on the vocal track that you couldn’t hear the vocal. So now it’s 2 o’clock in the morning and we brought the singer Colin Young back, he was in his pajamas and his robe and bedroom slippers, and he did it in a couple of takes, that was it. I mixed it one time, which is very unusual for me, and everybody loved it.”