Brill Building

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The Brill Building (built 1930) is an office building located at 1619 Broadway in New York City, just north of Times Square. In the years after World War II it became a centre of activity for the popular music industry, especially music publishing and songwriting.

The Brill Building's name been widely adopted as a shorthand term for a broad and influential stream of American mainstream popular song (strongly influenced by Latin music and rhythm and blues) which enjoyed great commercial success in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. Many significant American and international publishing companies, music agencies and recording labels were based in New York, and although these ventures were naturally spread across many locations, the Brill Building was regarded as probably the most prestigious address in New York for music business professionals. The term "The Brill Building Sound" is somewhat inaccurate, however, since much of the music so categorised actually emanated from other locations -- music historian Ken Emerson nominates buildings at 1650 Broadway and 1697 Broadway as other significant bases of activity in this field.

By 1962 the Brill Building contained 165 music businesses: a musician could find a publisher and printer, cut a demo, promote the record, and cut a deal with radio promoters, all within this one building. The creative culture of the independent music companies of Brill Building and the nearby 1650 Broadway came to define the influential "Brill Building Sound" and the style of popular music songwriting and recording created by its writers and producers.

Carole King described the atmosphere at the 'Brill Building' publishing houses of the period:

"Every day we squeezed into our respective cubby holes with just enough room for a piano, a bench, and maybe a chair for the lyricist if you were lucky. You'd sit there and write and you could hear someone in the next cubby hole composing a song exactly like yours. The pressure in the Brill Building was really terrific - because Donny (Kirshner) would play one songwriter against another. He'd say: 'We need a new smash hit' - and we'd all go back and write a song and the next day we'd each audition for Bobby Vee's producer." —- quoted in The Sociology of Rock by Simon Frith (1978, ISBN 0-09-460220-4).

Many of the best works in this diverse category were written by a loosely affiliated group of songwriter-producer teams -- mostly duos -- that enjoyed immense success and who collectively wrote some of the biggest hits of the period. Many in this group were close friends, as well as being creative and business associates -- and both individually and as a duo, they often worked with each other and with other writers in a wide variety of combinations.

Other famous 'Brill Building' individual songwriters include:

Many of these writers came to prominence while under contract to Aldon Music, a publishing company founded ca. 1958 by aspiring music entrepreneur Don Kirshner and industry veteran Al Nevins. Aldon was not initially located in the Brill Building, but rather, a block away at 1650 Broadway (at 51st St.). In fact, 1650 was built to be a musician's headquarters, so much so that the laws at the time required that the "front" door be placed on the side of the building due to laws restricting musicians from entering buildings from the front. Most so-called 'Brill Building' writers began their careers at 1650, and the building continued to house many record labels throughout the decades.

Among the hundreds of hits written by this group are Lieber and Stoller's "Yakety Yak", Shuman and Pomus' "Save The Last Dance For Me", Bacharach and David's "The Look of Love", Sedaka and Greenfield's "Calendar Girl", King and Goffin's "The Loco-Motion", Mann and Weil's "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" and Spector, Greenwich and Barry's "River Deep Mountain High".

1 Further reading
2 Businesses located 1619 Broadway (Brill Building) and 1650 Broadway
- 2.1 1619 Broadway
- 2.2 1650 Broadway
3 The Brill Building in fiction
4 The Brill Building in popular culture
5 External links

[edit] Further reading

Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson, published by Viking Penguin in 2005 (ISBN 0-670-03456-8)

[edit] Businesses located 1619 Broadway (Brill Building) and 1650 Broadway

[edit] 1619 Broadway

Famous Music
Coed records, Inc.
Mills Music
Southern Music
TM Music

[edit] 1650 Broadway

Aldon Music
Bell Records, Inc.
Buddah Records, Inc.
Gamble Records, Inc.
Scepter/Wand Records
Web IV Music, Inc.

[edit] The Brill Building in fiction

The 1996 movie Grace of My Heart, is in parts a fictionalised account of the life in the Brill Building. Illeana Douglas plays a songwriter loosely based on Carole King.