Writers
Many of the best works in this diverse category were written by a loosely affiliated group of songwriter-producer teams — mostly duos — that enjoyed immense success and who collectively wrote some of the biggest hits of the period. Many in this group were close friends and/or (in the cases of Goffin-King, Mann-Weil and Greenwich-Barry) married couples, as well as creative and business associates — and both individually and as duos, they often worked together and with other writers in a wide variety of combinations. Some (Carole King, Burt Bacharach, Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond, Boyce and Hart) recorded and had hits with their own music.
- Burt Bacharach and Hal David
- Bert Berns
- Sonny Bono
- Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
- Neil Diamond
- Andy Kim
- Giant, Baum & Kaye
- Gerry Goffin and Carole King
- Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry
- Marvin Hamlisch
- Hugo & Luigi
- John Kander and Fred Ebb
- Artie Kornfeld
- Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller
- Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil
- Shadow Morton
- Laura Nyro
- Claus Ogerman
- Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman
- Tony Powers
- Beverly Ross
- Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield
- Paul Simon as Jerry Landis
- Phil Spector
- Eddie Snyder
Other famous musicians who were headquartered in The Brill Building:
- Bobby Darin
- The Drifters
- Connie Francis
- Lesley Gore
- Ben E. King
- Darlene Love
- Liza Minnelli
- Tony Orlando
- Gene Pitney
- The Ronettes
- The Shangri-Las
- The Shirelles
- Frankie Valli
Among the hundreds of hits written by this group are "Yakety Yak" (Leiber-Stoller), "Save the Last Dance for Me" (Pomus-Shuman), "The Look of Love" (Bacharach-David), "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" (Sedaka-Greenfield), "Devil in Disguise" (Giant-Baum-Kaye), "The Loco-Motion" (Goffin-King), "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" (Mann-Weil) and "River Deep, Mountain High" (Spector-Greenwich-Barry).
Read more about this topic: Brill Building
Famous quotes containing the word writers:
“If in the opinion of the Tsars authors were to be the servants of the state, in the opinion of the radical critics writers were to be the servants of the masses. The two lines of thought were bound to meet and join forces when at last, in our times, a new kind of regime the synthesis of a Hegelian triad, combined the idea of the masses with the idea of the state.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
“They’re fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.”
—Lillian Hellman (1905–1984)