“It's super-bright and super-pop, but also has these minor chords, so there's a sense of tension in it.” He also believes there’s a certain contradictory quality to classic Martin songs like. He’s like an artist in his own right.” Anders B points out that Martin’s early songs tend to have “these big orchestral swells” in their production – it's literally larger than life, like the Backstreet Boys song ”. He says this makes them especially well-suited to musical theatre “because in this setting, you always want a song that has somewhere to go, and a lot of his songs just do that naturally”.Īnders B of Danish pop group Alphabeat, who hails Martin's music as a major inspiration, says his “early stuff is like Abba – you can just tell it's his melody and vocal arrangement. So, even if the Martin hit-making approach is not quite a formula, what are some of the secrets of his success? Sherman observes that Martin’s songs “tend to get bigger as they go on”, beginning with “a first verse and chorus that are a little smaller” before a crescendo. That’s the catchiest part of the song,’” she recalled.
“He was basically like, ‘The pre-chorus should be the chorus. New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde revealed in 2017 that Martin had described her 2012 breakthrough hit Royals as an example of “incorrect” songwriting. “But he's been going on his gut for 25 years, and it's hard to argue with his track record.”Īt the same time, we know that Martin likes to adhere to certain self-prescribed songwriting rules. “He goes a lot on the feel of a song, which seems very subjective to me,” Sherman adds.
He's always talking about melody and striving to find that thing that makes it magical.” Sherman says that though Martin sometimes gives off the impression that his songwriting is “some kind of mathematical process”, the thing he says most is: “It just doesn't feel right.” The verse is a hook, then the chorus is another hook. “It's almost the same thing with Max Martin songs. “My day job is musical director on Sesame Street, and what makes a song great for kids is a lot of repetition and what I like to call ‘earworms’ – hooks, things that reel people in,” Sherman says. Sherman has spent a considerable amount of time analysing and reconstructing Martin's songs for & Juliet, but says it’s impossible to offer a “convenient one-liner” for what makes them so brilliant. Baby One More Time has been reimagined as a power ballad, while Can’t Feel My Face is performed as a mash-up with Ariana Grande’s Problem. Together, they’ve “taken Max’s songs apart and put them back together again”, which Sherman concedes is a “strange concept” given how “perfect” the original versions remain. Sherman likens the Swede, who rarely gives interviews and maintains a low public profile, to “the Yoda of pop songwriting”.
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Titled & Juliet, it imagines what might have happened next if the heroine hadn't killed herself at the end of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.īill Sherman, & Juliet’s music supervisor, orchestrator and arranger, tells BBC Culture that collaborating with Martin has been “a daily masterclass in how to write and construct pop songs”. Martin has become such a one-man hit factory over the past two-and-a-half decades that 30 of his songs have now been baked into a new jukebox musical officially opening in London’s West End tonight. Last year he co-wrote Ariana Grande’s UK garage-influenced hit No Tears Left to Cry this year he’s co-written two ubiquitous bops by Ed Sheeran, I Don’t Care (a duet with Justin Bieber) and Beautiful People (which features Khalid). The private and rather enigmatic man, whose real name is Karl Martin Sandberg, hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down. When Taylor Swift was making her first proper pop album, 2014’s 1989, after starting her career as a country artist, she recruited Martin as her main collaborator. Baby One More Time, Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way), 00s pop-rock bangers (Kelly Clarkson’s Since U Been Gone, P!nk’s So What) and sleek neo-disco tracks from this decade (The Weeknd’s Can’t Feel My Face, Justin Timberlake’s Can’t Stop the Feeling!). The 48-year-old’s incomparable catalogue spans 90s teen-pop classics (Britney Spears’.
Since breaking through in the late Nineties, the Swedish songwriter-producer has co-written 22 Billboard Hot 100 number one hits – more than anyone, bar John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
Even if you don’t recognise the name Max Martin, you’ll definitely know his music.
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