I feel it coming the weeknd lenght
Plus he’d been in Paris working with Daft Punk. Abel had also worked on the basics of the song he’d written with Benny. Abel is a close collaborator with Max, and they had already recorded most of the two songs that were to appear on the album. “Abel is really hands-on and super-creative, and always working, and when I came into this record, there already were quite a few song ideas. On the phone from Los Angeles, McKinney confirmed that he played a central role in the making of Stargate, even as he was at pains to make sure that Tesfaye and the other contributors were given their due.
At his side throughout most of the album’s making was Martin ‘Doc’ McKinney, who also acted as executive-producer, and who has a co-writing and co-production credit on 11 of the 18 songs. First and foremost there is The Weeknd himself, aka Abel Tesfaye, who is not only the album’s executive producer, but also is credited as a co-writer on all songs and as a co-producer on thirteen. This is almost certainly due to the two creative people who were at the heart of its making. By contrast, Starboy sounds remarkably coherent, like it was all cut from the same cloth. There also are between two and five producers per song, including well-known names such as Daft Punk, Diplo, Max Martin, Labrinth, and Benny Blanco.Ī downside of this modern way of working is that quite a few pop/R&B albums with long lists of writers and producers end up as a disparate patchwork.
Not one song on the 18-song album is credited to less than five writers, and a quite amazing 40 song writers are credited on the album in total. Meanwhile, the entire process is pulled together by a handful of producers, who sometimes, but not always, are the original beatmakers.Ī scan of the vinyl version of The Weeknd’s StarboyĪ typical example of the ever-lengthening lists of song writers is The Weeknd’s third album and worldwide megahit, Starboy. A sign of the times is that topline writers now form an entire subsection of the music industry. At some stage in the process the artist, or a topline writer, will add melody and lyrics. This is passed on to someone else who adds another musical bit, and so on. These days the most common approach to writing pop, R&B, and hip-hop tracks is that someone comes up with a ‘beat,’ usually a combination of a drum pattern with some characteristic, hooky musical ingredient, which can be a sample, a chord sequence, or a melody. The reason is that DAWs allow users to send each other files and work on them at the press of a button, with a crucial bit of help from that other bit of modern technology, the Internet. Strangely, the total opposite has happened, in the pop/R&B genre at least, where songs are credited to ever-lengthening lists of song writers. The 1990s saw the rise of the DAW, which seemed tailor-made to create whole swatches of one-man bands and should have heralded an era of bedroom songwriters flooding the world with each song written, recorded and arranged by a single individual. This led to longer song writing credits as both the creators of the original sample and of the new work had to be credited. The introduction of drum machines and samplers in the 1980s allowed non-musicians to write music, and to sample and/or reconstruct existing songs. However, it appears that with each development in music technology this number has gone up. As a general rule, songs were written by one or two people. Once upon a time-well, it does seem like an alternate universe these days-people wrote songs with pen & paper, and a guitar or a piano. FAMOUSLY MEDIA SHY, MCKINNEY LIFTS THE LID ON HIS WORKING METHODS IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW ONE OF HIS MAIN ACHIEVEMENTS WAS CO-WRITING AND CO-PRODUCING THE WEEKND’S STARBOY ALBUM. CANADIAN PRODUCER AND GUITARIST ‘DOC’ MCKINNEY HAS WORKED WITH MANY BIG NAMES.