Apparently Dan and Glenn had 4 hours to write and submit the song!
Imagine throwing together a song in 4 hours and then finding out that people loved the song so much that they tracked you online 25 year later.
Charles Mingus was onstage with his band when he was told that Lester Young had died. He called a short minute break and while his band went and got themselves a drink, wrote and arranged (for an 8-piece band) "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat"[1] in tribute. They came back on stage and played it immediately.
Keith Jarrett wrote all the music for a tour of Japan on the plane there. That became the album "Personal Mountains"[2]. Apparently he literally had all the meal trays around him open with scores on them and was scribbling away the whole way.
True. I know a couple people who work with soundtracks professionally for TV, and the crazy thing is that "writing songs fast" is a totally different skill in itself, so it's not enough to be an amazing player with decades of experience, or even an amazing songwriter, it's a different superpower that impresses other musicians too.
Those super-fast soundtrack/jingle composers, session musicians and professional songwriters have this "little bag of tricks" in their heads that they use to move fast and iterate. They know intricacies of the styles they work with, like chord progressions, rhythms, song structures, arrangement conventions and cliche lines. Then, the chord progression often "suggests" a melody (meaning: some notes sound more natural over different chords), and melodies often also "suggests" some lyrics. And they also know the rules well enough to be able to break them.
Naturally, to make something "beautiful" takes more than "speed" and "familiarity with the genre". But it is really cool to see people able to do things fast. I wonder if we could apply this to coding... I guess it's not too different from people able to do game jams, or hackatons.
I recall reading that Bernie Taupin and Elton John first met when they separately answered an ad for a company that wrote jingles and music for commercials. Apparently the two were partnered together at the company and would crank out a high volume of content every day. If true, this gives insight into their prolific output during the late sixties and early seventies.
1) Clear your evening.
2) Do not Google, but rather jump straight to your favorite media platform, and locate a 2012 film named: “searching for sugar man.”
3) Watch alone because it’s impossible to watch without crying tears of joy