Barry Manilow had it all wrong.
"I write the songs that make the whole world sing," Manilow sung on his chart-topping 1976 song. "I write the songs of love and special things, I write the songs that make the young girls cry."
First of all, that song is apparently about God and Manilow didn't write it himself.
As for God, he has arrived, at least on the pop music scene, except most people outside the music industry have never heard of him. He's bigger than Adele, bigger than Taylor Swift and bigger than Justin Bieber.
Max Martin has now written and produced 21 number-one hits on the Billboard Hot 100, his latest being The Weeknd's smash Can't Feel My Face. His previous three chart-topping hits were for Taylor Swift - Shake It Off, Blank Space and Bad Blood. He wrote eight of Katy Perry's 10 number-one hits. You might be familiar with his first number one - Baby One More Time, the song that launched the career of Britney Spears.
According to Billboard, the 44-year-old Swedish pop music mastermind is now only two behind George Martin (no relation) as the producer with the most number-one hits in music history, almost all of those with the Beatles. Max Martin now only looks up to Lennon and McCartney as the writer of the most number one hits.
Since 2008, Martin has been behind an amazing 19 number-one pop hits.
Where it gets even scarier is the other work he's done. Last summer, when Swift's Bad Blood topped the charts, Spin magazine put together a list of 20 memorable songs Martin wrote and produced that didn't make it to number one. The list included:
I Want It That Way by the Backstreet Boys (in fact, he wrote and produced all of their major hits);
Oops I Did It Again by Britney Spears;
Bon Jovi's It's My Life;
Since U Been Gone by Kelly Clarkson;
Pink's U + Ur Hand;
Usher's DJ Got Us Fallin' In Love;
Taio Cruz's Dynamite;
Jessie J's Domino.
Not on the list was Ellie Goulding's Love Me Like You Do from the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack that reached Billboard's number three in both the U.S. and Canada.
In other words, anyone listening to pop music over the last 20 years has been listening to Max Martin.
As John Seabrook chronicles in his excellent book, The Song Machine: Inside The Hit Factory, Martin grew up on a steady diet of ABBA and 80s pop, failing as the lead singer of a glam metal band before trying his hand at writing and producing. He is the crest of a Swedish wave of writers and producers behind an incredible one quarter of all of the hit records on the Billboard 100 during 2014.
Martin's approach is simple, if you appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into making pop music, or formulaic, if you despise most or all of the songs named above. Melody and rhythm are everything, the chorus must deliver the emotional release built by the verses, multiple hooks are needed throughout each song, lyrics only function to serve the sound of the song, meaning that the sound of the words, the number of syllables and how they're articulated are all more important than the actual words or their emotional significance. The final product must be a seamless blend of the bitter and the sweet, darkness and light, major and minor, to stand up to endless listenings.
Seabrook calls it "melodic math."
Martin also works as a part of a team, much the same way a squad of writers works on a TV show or a group of engineers develop a new car. He is not the singer-songwriter of old who comes to the studio with a bag of cassette demos. He arrives with ideas for songs - beats, rhythms, hooks, chord progressions, even mere sounds - on a computer and then meticulously mashes them into shape with input from others.
As Dr. Luke, one of Martin's most successful collaborators, told Seabrook, Martin even enjoys what's known as "comping," which is the painful process of listening to dozens of vocal takes over and over, syllable by syllable, and then digitally stitching each of the best ones into one perfect, glossy vocal.
"I put the words and the melodies together," Manilow sang in that cheesy 1970s classic. "I am music and I write the songs."
Today and for the foreseeable future of contemporary hits pop music, that man is Max Martin.
