Blank Space: What Kind of Genius Is Max Martin?
And yet Martin is known to insist that the artists he works with sing his songs exactly the way he sings them on the demos. In a sense, Spears, Perry, and Swift are all singing covers of Max Martin recordings. They are also among the few people in the world who have actually heard the originals
.. Perhaps the greatest advantage that Sandberg and his Swedish colleagues enjoyed was their relative freedom from the racial underpinnings of the long-established American distinction between R. & B. and pop.
.. A white American songwriter composing R. & B. tunes was not likely to get very far on the balkanized pop-music scene in the U.S., but a Swedish writer, free of the racist legacy of the R. & B./pop dichotomy, could create music that combined both, and that is just what Martin has done. The resulting hybrid, one could argue, has become the mainstream sound on Top Forty radio today.
.. According to Marie Ledin, the managing director of the Polar Music Prize, Sweden’s musical Nobel, Swedish songwriters and producers were partly responsible for a quarter of all Billboard Top Ten hits in 2014, an astonishing accomplishment for a country of fewer than ten million people.
.. one can argue that this very freedom from having to make sense lyrically has allowed the Swedes to soar to such melodic heights.