Who Are the ‘Big 4’ of Songwriting Duos?

Plenty of songwriters prefer to work alone, crafting hits entirely on their own. Others find their best work comes out of collaboration with another person.

Often, the connection appears innate, as though the talent was there from birth and only needed the right circumstances to be revealed to the world.

“I stumbled into songwriting,” Keith Richards explained to Rolling Stone in 2002, “so did Mick [Jagger]. You know the story: Andrew Oldham locked us in the kitchen and forced us to do it. You either find you’ve got it or not.” (The “story” is that the Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham did indeed lock Richards and Jagger away until they came up with 1964’s “As Tears Go By.”)

Not everyone has the exact same talent, but this is where really interesting things can happen. Bernie Taupin and Elton John found that they created their best work when Taupin wrote the words first, followed by John composing the music.

“I think the lyrics themselves dictated the melody ultimately,” Taupin said to Vulture in 2023. “But he likes it that way and we’ve done it for decades. It’s definitely the way I like to work, but at the same time, I don’t mind if he jerry-rigs things after I’ve written it. If he says, ‘That doesn’t quite work there,’ or ‘This is a little too long,’ we edit something out.”

Below, we’re taking a look at the “Big 4” of songwriting duos.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Let’s begin with the obvious: Paul McCartney and John Lennon, arguably the most successful songwriting partnership in music history. Much has been written over the years about their collaboration — how and why it worked so well — though to attempt to distill it down to one explanation is futile. Lennon and McCartney demonstrated a yin/yang dynamic, the former sharp, witty and a bit cynical, the latter more romantic, sensitive and sweet. Or as Lennon put it himself in 1980: “[Paul] provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes.” Neither had any formal music training when they began writing songs together, instead relying on instinct and the push and pull of their two opposing personalities. Unlike other songwriting duos that featured one lyricist and one composer, both Lennon and McCartney wrote lyrics and music.

This isn’t to say the pair didn’t have their disagreements, and it should also be noted that although many Beatles songs were credited to “Lennon-McCartney,” that didn’t mean their contributions were always 50/50. However well they worked together, a sense of competitiveness remained. “It bugged [Lennon] that Paul could write those sweet melodies like ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Hey Jude,'” Dan Richter, a former aide to Lennon, told The Telegraph in 2023. “He couldn’t do that. He was just too acerbic or too intelligent.”

But the numbers really do speak for themselves. Between 1962 and 1970, roughly 180 songs were jointly credited to Lennon and McCartney, many of them historical hits. For decades after their creative partnership ended, the two have served as the ultimate role model for collaborative songwriting. McCartney said it simply on his McCartney: A Life in Lyrics podcast in 2023: “That interplay was miraculous.”

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, aka the Glimmer Twins, a lethal, provocative and electrifying combination.

To understand these two, one must look all the way backward to when they first met as kids in London. They knew one another peripherally — both were fans of American blues music — but each were equally convinced no one else within miles of them had similar interests. “This is a true story – we met at the train station,” Jagger recounted to Rolling Stone in 1995. “And I had these rhythm and blues records, which were very prized possessions because they weren’t available in England then. And [Richards] said, ‘Oh, yeah, these are really interesting.’ That kind of did it. That’s how it started, really.”

It was off to the races from there. The story goes that in their very early days, the Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham locked Jagger and Richards in a room together and told them not to come out until they’d written a song. They did — “As Tears Go By” — and continued on to write well over 100 songs, which is to say nothing of their work together as producers in the studio. Like Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards were (and are) both strong personalities, each teeming with both lyrical and musical talent, both heavily influenced by those aforementioned blues records in their own ways. But there was a balance to be struck.

“The thing in leadership is, you can have times when one person is more at the center than the other, but there ca’’t be too much arguing about it all the time,” Jagger explained in 1995. “Because if you’re always at loggerheads, you just have to go, ‘Ok, if I can’t have a say in this and this, then fuck it. What am I doing here?'”

If you looked through the Rolling Stones’ catalog hoping to discern which man wrote which songs, you’d find it difficult. “Every song we’ve got have pieces of each other in it,” Richards said to Rolling Stone in 2015.

Elton John and Bernie Taupin

Elton John and Bernie Taupin are the quintessential example of respective talents merging to create one singular artistic picture.

For Taupin, narrative was everything. “I always wanted to be a storyteller,” he told Q With Tom Power in 2023, explaining that American country songs like Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” sounded like the holy grail to him. “When I heard that song, I went, ‘Wow. You can write stories and have people sing them too.’ And that was always my mantra all the way through my life: I wanted to be a storyteller. I didn’t understand the process of songwriting or what really a lyricist was. I didn’t like to be referred to as a poet and I loathe it still to this day, you know. I just always wanted to be a storyteller.”

Thus, the perfect foil was John, a gifted pianist, composer and live performer. The two first met in 1967 and within just a couple of years were writing song after song together. “When I first started writing with Bernie it was exactly the same as it is now; I would get a lyric, I would go away and write the melody and play it to him. That’s never changed,” John explained to Jimmy Kimmel in 2016. (The one and only time John came to Taupin with the music first was with 1976’s “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.”) “We’ve been writing 49 years together, this year…and I don’t try to analyze it, but it’s strange but it works.”

Don Henley and Glenn Frey

Don Henley and Glenn Frey first got to know one another when they were both members of Linda Ronstadt’s backing band, but it didn’t take very long for the two of them to go off and form their own group, Eagles.

Even before that, Henley and Frey knew they worked well together. “In those days, we didn’t have enough money to put people in separate rooms, so Glenn and Don were rooming together, and they each discovered the other could sing and was a great songwriter,” Ronstadt told Billboard in 2016, the year Frey passed away. “Glenn used to call Don his secret weapon.”

But like Taupin and John above, they also found that their differences made them even more effective creative partners. “[Frey]’s much more disciplined,” Henley once explained to American Songwriter. “I sort of just wait for it to come to me. He likes to block out a certain amount of time every day and sit down and go ‘okay, we’re writing.’ Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. … Lyrics and songs usually come to me when I’m doing something else, like loading the dishwasher or gardening or riding the horses.”

Perhaps even more importantly, constructive feedback was always part of the equation. What makes a good collaborator? “Somebody with enthusiasm,” Henley answered American Songwriter, “somebody who is willing to carefully criticize and examine themselves, that’s where most people fall down on the job. Most people don’t take criticism very well from others or themselves. Glenn and I are very willing to criticize ourselves.”