Giving Credit

It's interesting the places we find inspiration. I woke up this morning with pretty much zero idea what I was going to write about today. Of course, I had a general idea, it is Tuesday after all, so there was a high probability my post was going to be about music. It is #threetunetuesday after all, which is a great initiative started by @ablaze.

Despite that, I was still at a loss. I sometimes feel like I have covered just about every song that has any sort of meaning to me, and probably even twice for some of those. Then, by some divine intervention, on the way into work, the topic was handed to me like a gift from the gods. So here we are!

You might wonder what the photo above has to do with any of this. The truth is, probably nothing. At least not in a direct way. You see, the other night was senior night for my nieces volleyball team. Since she is a senior herself, she had the opportunity to be escorted on the court by her mother and step father. It was a really sweet moment.

I didn't take the photo though. Full disclosure, I was busy using @mrsbozz's phone to take video of the moment, so @mrsbozz had my phone taking photos of the ceremony. I put this disclaimer at the end of all my posts, but credit for the opening photo goes fully to my wife.

As does the above photo, and that's where the tie in comes. During the drive in to work this morning, a song came on the radio and it was sung by two quite famous people. The problem is, I know for a fact it was actually written by someone else. That got me thinking about all the songs out there that are written by someone else, but maybe never recorded by the original artist. If it was recorded by the original artist, it never saw the success that the original version did.

I'm not going to share a video of the song here, but the one I am referring to is "We've Got Tonite" by Bob Seger. It was later recorded by Kenny Rogers and Sheena Easton and that is the version I heard this morning.

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While I don't really consider myself a Hannah Montana fan, I am a Miley Cyrus fan and I have enjoyed watching her career evolve over the years. If you can't get past some of her older stuff and dance stuff from her "crazier period", I highly encourage you to check out her newer stuff. She has definitely matured into a pretty amazing artist.

What a lot of people don't know, is that Jessie J actually wrote the song. I saw an article a bit ago that indicated Jessie J was able to pay her rent for three years off the royalties from the song. Pretty impressive right?

While I am sure there are countless songs out there that unknown artists wrote, I think it's kind of cool when a well known artist writes a song but chooses to give it away (for whatever reason). That makes it a little more special if you know what I mean.

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Like "Party in the US" was written by one pop diva, but sung by another, the same can be said for "Breakaway" by Kelly Clarkson. Hot off her win on American Idol, I don't think song writing was at the top of her list. If it was, her contract with the record label didn't allow for it. She has been pretty vocal about the fact that she was beholden to a lot of things she didn't necessarily agree with after winning American Idol. It was all part of the deal though, so she had to go along with it.

Anyway, Breakaway was actually written by none other than Avril Lavigne. Given the massive success of the song (mainly due to being included in The Princess Diaries 2), I wonder how mad Avril is that she didn't record the song herself. Despite that, she is probably still getting some wicked royalties from every time it gets used in pretty much anything.

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As common as this phenomenon is in pop music, it happens literally all the time in country music. More often than not, you have singers cutting their teeth as songwriters, then by some miracle they get noticed at a honky tonk in Nashville, and things blow up from there.

"Good Directions" is a song that was made famous by Billy Currington, but it was actually written by Luke Bryan before he rose to the superstardom where he now resides. In fact, I would guess the crowd at a Luke Bryan concert would probably be ten times bigger than the crowd at a Billy Currington show. I've actually seen Luke Bryan in concert and it was a massive show in a massive venue.

Cole Swindell is another artist who is now famous in his own right, but before that he was writing songs for bands like Florida Georgia Line. It's just interesting to see how careers can catapult forward or stay stationary based on a single song.

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All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or @mrsbozz unless otherwise sourced