The final inductee into the 2024 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame class is the sort of artist for whom the Musical Excellence category was designed.
Norman Whitfield is not a performer, and not a name most people would recognize, but his fingerprints are all over some of the greatest songs ever recorded. As a writer and producer, he played a key role in developing the Motown sound.
There was a time, prior to 1964, when ‘My Girl’ didn’t exist. That collection of notes, arranged in that order… it hadn’t been thought of yet. Or if it had, it hadn’t been recorded either on paper or tape. And then Smokey Robinson sat down and pieced it all together into the song we all know and love.
I’m often baffled by the thought that there must be a finite set of melodies out there, and it seems to me that the world’s songwriters should have used them up by now. I mean, how many notes are there in the scale? 12? And how many different ways can they be arranged to form a melody? OK, that’s a huge number. But how many of those sound like something other than noise? Probably a much smaller number.
Meet Me In Montauk 