Why pop singers from Sabrina Carpenter to Harry Styles want Amy Allen as songwriter
Amy Allen, who has written top 10 pop hits for Harry Styles, Halsey and Tate McRae, talks about how her art mirrors life
As a songwriting student at Boston’s Berklee College of Music in the mid-2010s, Amy Allen had a teacher whose ideas about lyrics included the conviction that words must not be improperly stressed.
Among the instructor’s object lessons: Katy Perry’s 2013 single “Unconditionally”, in which Perry puts the emphasis on that word’s fourth syllable – “un-con-di-tion-al-ly” – in order to ride the song’s throbbing groove.
“This teacher said, ‘You should never do that’,” Allen recalls. “But I was like, I think people love when you do that because it’s weird and funny and hooky. It makes you remember the song more because it’s not correct.”
Turns out Allen was right about being wrong: nine years after she graduated from Berklee to become a professional songwriter in Los Angeles, Allen, 32, has built a career penning idiosyncratic pop hits that people – many millions of them – cannot stop listening to.
