15 Famous Musicians Who Were Freakishly Young When They Wrote Their Biggest Hits
Fiyin Olowokandi
6 min read
15 Famous Musicians Who Were Freakishly Young When They Wrote Their Biggest Hits
1. The Hanson brothers — Isaac, Taylor, and Zac — came up with the infectious chorus to their worldwide number one hit “MMMBop” when they were just 13, 11, and 9 years old, respectively.
Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images”The melody of ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ was fully worked out by the time I was about sixteen,” he wrote in his book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present. “It was one of my little party pieces, and when we were later on the lookout for songs for the Beatles, I thought it would be quite good to put words to it.”Listen to the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four” here:
Tim Mosenfelder / Getty ImagesApple is incredibly gifted, so it makes sense that she’d have an easier time than others breaking into the music industry, but her path was almost too easy.
Concerned about what she would do after high school, Apple recorded a three-song demo — including “Never Is a Promise,” composed after her boyfriend became interested in another girl — and made 77 copies of it. She only ever gave out one, though, to a friend who babysat for a music publicist. When the publicist heard the demo, she sent it to an executive at Sony Music, who signed Apple to a record deal!
Listen to Fiona Apple’s “Never Is a Promise” here:
Rb / RedfernsThe school-aged boys’ success was extra remarkable considering they had no contacts or fancy instruments/recording equipment when they made “Tomorrow.” Johns said at the time, we “recorded that at a really cheap studio. It cost about $75. We weren’t in there for more than an hour.”
He then added, sounding very much like a teenager, “The first time we heard ‘Tomorrow’ on the radio, it was really embarrassing. We were in a car with a whole heap of our friends and it came on. We turned it off as quick as we could.”
Listen to Silverchair’s “Tomorrow” here:
Rob Kim / Getty ImagesAmazingly, Lorde was only 12 when she signed with Universal after they saw a video of her performing Duffy’s “Warwick Avenue” at her school talent show.
“The music-making process was very, very casual in the beginning because I was only 12 and didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she told the Daily Beast. “I took singing lessons and started working with songwriters in a very casual setting — trying to find someone and a sound I could click with.” That person ended up being Joel Little, who cowrote all the songs with Lorde on her debut album, Pure Heroine.
Listen to Lorde’s “Royals” here:
Michael Ochs Archives / Getty ImagesLooking back on it, Williams said, “Like a flood, the words just came to me.” He didn’t do anything with the future smash hit, though, until seven years later, after he’d formed a doo-wop group — Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs — and was looking for songs they could sing.
In addition to the Zodiacs’ version (which had quite the resurgence in the late ’80s when it appeared in Dirty Dancing), Williams’s composition has been covered by the Hollies, the Four Seasons, Jackson Browne, and Cyndi Lauper. Not bad for a 15-year-old!
Listen to Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs perform “Stay” in 1967 here:
Dave Etheridge-barnes / Getty ImagesAdele told Blue and Soul that she wrote the song “on the guitar — it’s just four chords pressing one string.” As for the song’s subject matter, she added, “In London — even if I’m having a really shit day — there’s still something I love about the place. So really, yeah, in general it is an ode to the place where I’ve always lived.”
Listen to Adele’s “Hometown Glory” here:
Anna Krajec / Getty ImagesReflecting on fame to the Los Angeles Times in 1996, Vedder said, “Sometimes I think of how far I’ve come from the teenager sitting on the bed in San Diego writing ‘Better Man’ and wondering if anyone would ever even hear it. But then there are times when it just all seems too much.”
Listen to Pearl Jam’s “Better Man” here:
Jc Olivera / WireImageThe show’s executive producer Tim Federle was understandably impressed. “Olivia wrote this emotional, in-depth song in just three days while filming the series and going to school,” he told Playbill.
“It’s basically about Nini and, kind of, her boy troubles,” Rodrigo told TVLine. “She just found out that E.J. really betrayed her and did something really untrustworthy, so she’s just grappling with that, and also looking back on her relationship with Ricky. I think it’s a very relatable concept, at least for me.”
The song ended up the biggest hit from the series, a trend on TikTok, and the impetus to her signing with Interscope. The rest — “Driver’s License” and Sour — is history.
Listen to Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” here:
Ullstein Bild Dtl. / Ullstein Bild via Getty ImagesIncredibly, the 15-year-old Wonder was no musical newbie. He’d already released four studio albums (including his debut at just 12 years old) and scored a chart-topping hit at age 13 with “Fingertips — Part 2.”
Listen to “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” here:
Koh Hasebe / Shinko Music / Getty ImagesBush started writing songs when she was just 11, and recorded demos of them with the help of her older brothers, which eventually found their way to Gilmour. “I was intrigued by this strange voice,” Gilmour told the BBC. “I went to her house, met her parents down in Kent. And she played me, gosh, it must have been 40 or 50 songs on tape. And I thought, I should try and do something.”
Perhaps most remarkable of all is that “The Man With the Child in His Eyes” won the prestigious Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding British Lyric in 1979. Not bad for a 13-year-old!
Listen to Kate Bush’s “The Man With the Child in His Eyes” here:
Rob Verhorst / RedfernsStill, “the Tom Petty song,” as the band referred to it, was too infectious to ignore, and encouraged by producer Gil Norton, they recorded it for their second album, Doolittle.
Reflecting on the track to Spin magazine, Black Francis said he’d been writing songs for a couple of years by the time he wrote this one. “I had good musical encouragement in grade school, but I didn’t follow through on any of the lessons,” he said. “I bought whatever I could get at the used-record store. They wouldn’t necessarily have the hippest punk rock records; it was more like Ten Years After and Led Zeppelin.”
Listen to the Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man” here:
Picture Alliance / Picture Alliance via Getty ImagesGibson started writing songs at a very young age, and in 1983 — when she was only 12 — she submitted a demo of her original composition “I Come From America” to a song contest put on by the famous New York radio station WOR. When she won the contest, her mother converted the family garage into a recording studio for the budding young star.
Listen to Debbie Gibson’s “Only in My Dreams” here:
Rb / RedfernsJones’s “musical talents became apparent at a very early age,” read the liner notes to the band’s debut album. “By the time he entered high school, Booker was already a semi-professional … and while still in high school he worked as a staff musician for Stax Records.”
Booker T. later told NPR how he came to write his famous song, saying, “Well, that happened as something of an accident. We were at the studio as session musicians to play a session for an artist who didn’t show up. So we used the time to record a blues which we called ‘Behave Yourself,’ and I played it on a Hammond M3 organ. And Jim Stewart, the owner, was the engineer, and he really liked it — thought it was great, actually — and wanted to put it out as a record. And so we all agreed on that, and Jim told us that we needed something to record for a B side because we couldn’t have a one-sided record. And one of the tunes that I’d been playing on piano, we tried on Hammond organ so that, you know, the record would have organ on both sides, and that turned out to be ‘Green Onions.'”
Listen to “Green Onions” by Booker T. & the M.G.’s here:
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