“We’ll spend days, sometimes weeks, challenging the melody. That’s Max Martin’s school,” Kotecha says. There’s a cluster of high-powered songwriters who are based in Sweden, and the grandmaster is Max Martin, the wizard behind hits from Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” and Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” to Katy Perry’s “Part of Me” and Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” Savan Kotecha, the American who co-wrote both of One Direction’s big hits, spent six months in Stockholm developing songs for their new album with Martin disciples Rami Yacoub and Carl Falk - and, later, dodging the thousands of screaming girls who surrounded the studio when the group showed up to record them. They do Swedish-style songwriting: melody first. ( MORE: Seven Things Adults Can Love About One Direction)
And the surprisingly small pool of masterminds whose songwriting and productions dominate the pop charts these days almost always work in groups. Solitary tortured artists with guitars are fine if they’re writing songs for themselves, but for singers who aren’t also songwriters, the TV-style “writers’ room” model simply works better to generate hits. That’s very much in keeping with other big pop records of the moment. But it takes a legion to make a boy band: Take Me Home has an average of just under five songwriters per track. Harry, Niall, Zayne, Louis and Liam are the public face of One Direction, who were assembled for the British version of The X-Factor in 2010 and signed to its judge Simon Cowell’s label Syco in the U.K. Here’s how the dozens of songwriters who worked on Take Me Home did it, in five easy steps. That meant bringing in a crew of experts to stock the new album with potential hits. Artists don’t often release two albums in a year these days, but One Direction’s industry can’t afford for them to wait. It’s the third best-selling album in the country this year, after Adele’s 21 and Taylor Swift’s Red. in March it has since sold over 1.3 million copies in the States and about 10 times that many worldwide. Up All Night, One Direction’s debut, came out in the U.S. It’s aimed straight at the adolescent girls who swooned en masse over last year’s fusillade of compliments “What Makes You Beautiful” and who did it again recently for the politely insistent seduction “Live While We’re Young.” Those girls, as it happens, are just about the last faithful purchasers of CDs left. Follow Direction’s Take Me Home is the year-end, last-chance hope of the record business.