Sam Hollander has written songs for Panic! At The Disco (his work on “High Hopes” landed him on PvNew’s 2019 Hitmakers list), Katy Perry, Weezer, Def Leppard, blink-182, Ringo Starr and Carole King, among many other noteworthy artists, but it was his experience with One Direction that helped form his outlook on making hits. In his new book, “21-Hit Wonder: Flopping My Way to the Top of the Charts” (due out Nov. 7), Hollander recalls the boy band’s ventures into pop-rock on their 2012 album “Take Me Home,” and shares his song-placement nightmares, failures and false-starts in this exclusive excerpt.
One (Brief) Direction
One afternoon, during a rare, unforecasted rain soaker, I ducked into Urth Café on Melrose for a quick bite. I’d been in Hollywood less than a year, but this felt like the first real downpour I’d encountered. I sat down at a table, and the space was so crammed that I began unintentionally eavesdropping on two folks sitting behind me. I recognized one of the voices. It was Beka Tischker, an old friend from New York, who was now a power publisher in L.A. Beka was discussing potential collaborations with a Swedish writer. The Swede mentioned his old band, and I whipped my chair around in the most obnoxious intrusion ever.
“Jesus Christ, man, you’re in the Cardigans!” The Swede looked puzzled. “Yes. You remember us?”
Then the consummate record geek kicked in. “Remember you? I saw you guys three times on the ‘Life’ tour. I was the fella in the front row at Tramps, who sang along to every word and probably made you a bit uncomfortable in the process. Actually, I apologize for that.” I really should have apologized. I was like Patton Oswalt in “The Fan.” If someone had suggested I face-paint the Nordic goddess Nina Persson’s smile on my cheeks, I probably would’ve done it.
The Swede, a.k.a. Peter Svensson, and I exchanged numbers and made plans to collaborate, but Beka suggested we consider throwing a track guy into the mix. She recommended her writer, Kool Kojak, who I knew socially but had never worked with. Kojak, a graffiti-painting free spirit, was already one of my favorite personalities in town, so I was really looking forward to it. But I was also a bit mystified. Who was the artist? The Cardigans hadn’t made a record in a decade. When Beka told me it would be a pitch-song thing, the thrill swiftly dissipated. Historically, my few shots in the song-placement game had been mostly laughable. For some reason, all of the creativity and quirk in my collaborations with artists never translated to that approach. They were either too generic or too out there for the masses. I could never find my sweet spot in that formula-driven game, so I avoided it altogether. That’s why this session began to feel all wrong.
The three of us linked a week later at Kojak’s, and we just dove right in. After a solid minute of debate, we decided to take a stab at an idea for One Direction. Every pesky pop songwriter on earth was chasing 1D after “What Makes You Beautiful” exploded, so this seemed somewhat of a pipe dream of an exercise to me, but I guess I was down. I came with a title and concept that I thought would be in the zone for them. The guys seemed to dig it: “Rock Me.” I was shooting for a sexier take on the boy band’s freshly scrubbed brand of fun. It was pretty basic, nostalgic stuff. I think I wrote the bulk of the lyrics in fifteen minutes or so. Peter dug into his own brand of Swedish melodic math. As a Max Martin protégée, he was already like a Stockholm University professor at that shit. Kojak threw down a fun track, and we wrapped up the song demo in a matter of hours. It was like a revved-up Nashville write, except I could see the bluish Pacific Ocean from Kojak’s deck. Later that evening, we had Thai food. Fun fellas. A day well spent.
Then something peculiar happened. Simon Cowell heard it and loved it. Dr. Luke and Max Martin as well. Luke hopped on board to produce. The song got fast-tracked. In an instant, it permeated the track listing for 2013’s hardest record to access. It was kinda like waking up to find a brand new pair of limited edition Nike MAG Back to the Future sneakers gifted under the bed. That One Direction album went on to sell six million copies. “Rock Me” went gold in a bunch of countries.
At that point, I began to rethink my career process altogether. Why was I only collaborating with these soul-sucking artists? It seemed like such a waste of emotional—and fiscal— time. Maybe this pitch-writing approach was truly the ticket for me as well? So I decided to throw out everything I knew and began writing blanket songs for placement with Peter and Kojak every day from scratch. We had very few targets. Just a ton of broad strokes. “Hey, maybe this would work for Selena Gomez?”–type stuff. I think we crafted about twenty tunes. Guess what? They were all wack as fuck. Well, more specifically, my contributions were.
My lyric ideas were all soulless and contrived — totally based on chasing whatever was happening at Top 40 at that exact instant. I couldn’t connect to any of it. I’d never trailed like this before, and the results were disgraceful. The final straw was this hooky melody that Peter sent me to take on a plane trip back east. Peter wanted the chorus to start with the repeated phrase “I gotta gotta goooo. I gotta gotta goo.” He demanded it, actually. There was no negotiation. This was some Iran hostage shit. I made a hundred attempts at this chorus as JetBlue crossed the states, and nothing worked. “I gotta gotta goooooo.” It didn’t sound like a hit. It sounded like yodeling. At the end of the day, I just couldn’t connect to it, so I trashed it on the spot.
As I started losing faith in our short-lived power trio, I got the sense that both Peter and Kojak were beginning to move on from our unit as well. We really had so much fun together, but when none of the slew of tunes we collaborated on over those couple of months ever got a positive response, we all parted creative ways with an unspoken farewell. That was the end of my brief foray into the pitch-song chase.
Bonus Cut: A few years later, Peter successfully flipped “I gotta gotta go” into “You gotta gotta gotta love me harder” for Ariana Grande, and he had a worldwide number one hit. Whenever I hear it today, my self-loathing spikes up a notch. Who’s the lovefool now, bitch?
Excerpted from “21-Hit Wonder: Flopping My Way to the Top of the Charts” copyright © 2022 by Sam Hollander. Reprinted with permission from Matt Holt Books, an imprint of BenBella Books, Inc. All rights reserved.
