There is a moment in The Obituary of Tunde Johnson, a Groundhog Day-esque queer drama, where the battered protagonist lies on the burnished white beach, the sand flattened under his weight, his back pressed against a secret lover, or rather, a lover who is keeping him a secret. Lalah Hathaway’s rendition of He Needs Me, as if an extension of the character’s subconscious, pours into the space between them. The stanzas are infused with melancholia: “He needs me, he doesn’t know it but he needs me. And so, no matter where he goes, though he doesn’t care, he knows that I’m there.”
On the other side of the glass screen, another is rendered still in his seat, unable to peel his eyes off the flat-panel display, disillusioned, awash in a flood of emotion. Shame, guilt, and rage swirl inside. In that brief instance, he feels seen, called out even, by a whiskey-soaked voice, strings of words cruising on a melody. A song is just a song until you give meaning to it. It wields the power not only to elevate fiction but also to compel you to contemplate reality. It is not manufactured but born in a space where truth is met with trust.
Madonna once spoke about the intimate experience of songwriting. “It’s kind of like sitting down with a stranger and telling them every secret of your soul…you have to be not afraid to make a fool of yourself.” It is often a solitary undertaking, with only a handful of people privy to the process, being the first to gaze at a fresh wound or one newly healed. The queen of pop herself has a musical confidante, Patrick Leonard, whose understanding, despite their differences in approach to music, has helped shape the sound unique to the star.
Their relationship is complementary: where Leonard is technical, Madonna is instinctual. She would sift through the intricacies of his compositions and break them down to the bare essentials. Together, they have made magic, co-writing and co-producing evergreens, Like a Prayer included. But while opposites do attract, the pair does possess qualities crucial to creative endeavours such as this. Their blue-collar work ethics, which Leonard attributed to their shared Michigan roots, have allowed them to trim the noise and get down to the nitty-gritty of music making.
From familiarity indeed comes the freedom to just be. It does away with pleasantries and opens up a space for vulnerability. It is especially essential for someone as impressionable as the 14-year-old Billie Eilish who was thrust into public consciousness upon the release of Ocean Eyes. That is where Finneas O’Connell comes in. Having him in her corner, despite her record label proposing that she work with seasoned songwriter-producers, not only gave her a sense of security but also the music a kind of perspective that’s rooted in authenticity.
Having come a long way since their SoundCloud days, the sister-brother duo has written nearly all of their songs themselves, with O’Connell also wearing the producer hat. Their clashing sensibilities, not entirely dissimilar from Madonna and Leonard’s, have resulted in something novel. Her dark unpredictability peppered throughout his conventional structures. It is, at its heart, the premise of every nineties chick flick—the buttoned-up older brother and the emo baby sister. It is also what makes Eilish and O’Connell the best music collaborators of our time.
That being said, nothing lasts forever. Though the familial bond between Eilish and O’Connell promises an enduring partnership, history has shown us that success has a way of getting to, especially, mercurial artists. The Beatles’ John Lennon and Paul McCartney reached their breaking point soon after the passing of band manager Brian Epstein; Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Roger Waters were caught in a public feud since the latter split; Burt Bacharach and Hal David were entangled in a legal battle over their ill-received musical movie Lost Horizon. It happens to the best of them.
Closer to home, the bountiful collaboration between queen of jazz Datuk Sheila Majid and producer Roslan Aziz came to a bitter end when the couple divorced in 2000. The writing was, in retrospect, on the wall. Her album, Ku Mohon, was released a year earlier and he was notably absent from the credits. It was certainly telling given that Roslan had been Sheila’s musical comrade since she debuted in 1985. It is arguably one of the most important musical alliances to grace the scene as the two carved a space for a genre unfamiliar to the mainstream palate at the time.
Successes came in tow with each record they put out. Sheila managed to sell out shows even in her early days and raked up a list of accolades along the way. But Ku Mohon proved that she had no problem standing on her own two feet, co-producing the title, which went on to sweep the seventh edition of Anugerah Industri Muzik. In an interview with the New Straits Times in 2017, the songbird responded to a question about the most unforgettable moment in her career with a razor-sharp answer: “That has got to be the time when I left RAP (Roslan Aziz Productions).”
A similar strain, albeit to a much lesser extent, is now put on the country’s pop princess Datuk Seri Siti Nurhaliza. Upon the launch of Sitism last year, her fans who have amassed a reputation for being defensive over the slightest criticisms made against the singer turned their backs on her and pointed out the decline in the quality of her recent albums, with her musical wingman Aubrey Suwito getting the short end of the stick. The maestro was an easy target, having written songs for the performer, produced her albums, and accompanied her in countless performances.
Aubrey was quick to address the issue in a now-deleted Instagram post, claiming that he had only served as a producer on two of her albums, Transkripsi in 2006 and Fragmen in 2014, despite reports that he was also responsible for others such as Hadiah Daripada Hati (2007), SimetriSiti (2017), and Sitism. In any case, his fingerprints are still all over her records even if he is not. But the fact of the matter is that it is the formulaic compositions, which have become glaring in the modern landscape of music that is brimming with new sounds, that have the fans becoming weary of listening.
Loyalty, while admirable, is only one piece of the puzzle. Some creative partnerships last a lifetime, others are fleeting. It is understandably daunting to branch out in pursuit of newness, having to relearn what you know of the world and bare your inner thoughts to another, but being stuck in a time loop is no way to make an affecting art. Music is a powerful means of communication; it speaks of emotions, hides intentions, and offers meanings. It has foundations, without which it becomes an empty vessel. After all, a song is just a song until you give meaning to it.