Berklee today is the official alumni publication of Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. It is a forum for contemporary music and musicians.
Issue link: http://berkleetoday.epubxp.com/i/67927
For songwriter Claude Kelly '02, the goal has never been fame or money. He's striving to create songs that give artists and listeners the chills. By Mark Small '73 Claude Kelly's songwriting career is red hot. For pro- ducers and record labels, he's the go-to guy for a great song in almost any popular style. Armed with a driving work ethic, Kelly spends most days in his studio in Manhattan's historic Brill Building writing and demoing new songs. If he's not there, he could be in a studio in Los Angeles, London, or Nashville cowriting with major artists or rising stars that have turned to him for a breakthrough tune. While Kelly has had considerable success writing Lady Gaga and her producer RedOne before either one had gained much traction in the American music business. From there, opportunities started multiplying. By 2007, Kelly had signed a publishing contract with Warner/Chappell. Over the past few years, he has emerged from relative obscurity to cre- ate charting songs with a range of artists. He credits his familiarity with many musical r&b; tunes, his music hardly fits neatly into a stylistic pigeonhole. The lengthy list of artists who have writ- ten with Kelly and recorded his songs includes stars from the pop, rock, country, and hip-hop worlds. He's penned number-one hits for Kelly Clarkson ("My Life Would Suck without You") and Britney Spears ("Circus") as well as tunes that have earned him Grammy nominations ("Grenade" for Bruno Mars, "Pieces of Me" for Ledisi, and "Bittersweet" for Fantasia). Other artists who have sung his songs cover the spectrum, from Michael Jackson, Martina McBride, and Whitney Houston to R. Kelly, the Wanted, and Miley Cyrus. In 2002, after Kelly graduated from Berklee with a degree in music business/management, he wasn't thinking about becoming a songwriter. A great vocalist with solid piano chops, Kelly started work- ing as a session singer pursuing gigs in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. He began offering his ideas for how to improve the songs he'd been hired to sing before deciding to write his own tunes. A piv- otal connection came when he crossed paths with styles to his Jamaican-born mother's practice of keeping radios tuned to jazz, reggae, blues, r&b;, and other stations in the different rooms of his child- hood home in Manhattan. (The radio in his room played hip-hop or alternative rock.) His mother also saw to it that he participated in music early on. Kelly remembers being two years old, sitting on a stack of phone books to reach the keys of the piano, as well as later experiences playing flute and singing with the New York Boys Choir. Kelly's talent for developing catchy melodies and lyrics is complemented by his affable personality and unique ability to help his cowriters give musical life to their feelings and experiences. He's an expert storyteller with an uncanny gift for crafting iconic songs that are personal to the artist and engaging to the public. Those attributes plus the fact that Kelly, a.k.a. "Studio Beast," can walk into a session with an artist he's never met and emerge several hours later with a fully produced song explain why so many people want to work with him. Kelly sandwiched this interview in on a morning when he was working on ideas for Pink and rapper Eve. That's all in a day's work for one of the industry's top tunesmiths. Spring 2012 13