From Britney Spears’ …Baby One More Time to Lady Gaga & Ariana Grande’s Rain On Me, many of pop’s biggest hits bear the name Rami Yacoub in their credits. Here, the Grammy-winning songwriting genius talks heavy metal, Max Martin, One Direction and mastering ‘melodic math’…
My music journey started off…
“Playing bass and keyboards when I was about 13 – I had a band with my best friend and I listened to a lot of Iron Maiden, AC/DC and Mötley Crüe. I was writing lyrics with no melody, they were more poems like, ‘love will be your shield on the battlefield’ – in fact, my first song might actually have been called Love On The Battlefield, something corny like that. We did performances at the local play centre and got given two cookies and a soda. Everything was for the cookie.”
Max Martin had a huge impact on my life…
“I met him through a mutual friend when I was looking to spread my wings. Denniz Pop – rest in peace – was the godfather to all of us, and he and Max had done the first Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC records. I really looked up to them. Denniz was going through treatment for cancer, which I didn’t know until I came in, and Max needed somebody to take the load off and work with because Denniz couldn’t be in the studio as much. At that time, my first commercial release, Ain’t That Just The Way by Lutricia McNeal, was No.1 in Sweden, so he was well aware of my song. I played them a lot of tracks that I’d done that tried to do the Cheiron [Studios] sound, and he saw something in me. Two or three weeks after that, we started doing a little tune called ...Baby One More Time.”
Max Martin would sometimes call me at three in the morning about a chord change
Rami Yacoub
Britney Spears’ debut single started…
“A beautiful journey with Max. We did ...Baby One More Time and then kept working on Britney’s album and on Backstreet Boys. It was my first worldwide hit and I didn’t even know it was No.1 in the US until Max told me. I was like, ‘Oh really, when?’ and he said, ‘Three weeks ago!’ That says it all. We were all young kids in this Cheiron bubble. We’d do a Britney record, an *NSYNC record, a Backstreet record and by the time the Backstreet Boys album was over, we’d go back to the next Britney record on a loop. When we were working on Britney, Max would sometimes call me at three in the morning about a chord change and I’d be like, ‘Dude, I don’t understand what you’re talking about, I’m sleeping!’ When I go home, I shut off. If I have a problem with a song, I know it’s going to work itself out.”
A lot of songwriters go from session to session…
“And work with different teams in different studios, which is pretty draining, it’s like dating a different person each day, whereas I’m married to my team under Max’s roof. I come to the same environment and same people I trust. I’ve always believed that strength is in numbers – the more you get to know each other, the better stuff you do.”
Working with One Direction…
“Fuelled a second run for me. I took a five-year break between 2005 and 2010… By that time it had been 12 years going 24/7 and I needed a breather. I wasn’t intentionally going to take five years, it was supposed to be one year! Then I worked with One Direction and Nicki Minaj, which sprung off my career again. It was very, very fun for me to do another boyband that worked. I think we hit the nail with What Makes You Beautiful – I met so many different people, whether it was an eight-year-old or the rapper B.O.B., saying, ‘Dude, I love it!’ It was an undeniable song.”
After my first sessions with 5 Seconds Of Summer...
“Luke [Hemmings] and Ash [Irwin] thought I was a totally negative guy because I was killing everything for three days. I tried to explain, ‘If it’s not good, kill it – we need to nail something great.’ A week after, they totally got it. I won’t give up until we get a great song.”
People always ask how the melodic math behind hits works…
“We never start writing by implementing the melodic math [a codified list of songwriting rules], we just write melodies that come to our head. But when something doesn’t feel right, it’s always good to have it in your pocket. You can pull out that little notebook in your head and say, ‘We’re actually using a lot of the chorus notes in the verse, what if we do this instead?’ Sometimes the chorus doesn’t feel right, but it might not be the chorus’ fault, it might be the pre-chorus not setting it up correctly. Some people write songs by the math, but it feels very forced. The key is if you can write by the math and leave no stone unturned, but it still feels like you wrote it in 15 minutes.”
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