The Brill Building

The sixties produced some of the greatest music in American pop history and no residence was more popular than a Building in New York City known as The Brill Building.  It was regarded as the most prestigious address in New York for music professionals.

The Brill Building has its musical before WW II with music song writing and publishing.  Brill Building songs were constantly being played on the air and never failed to make the Hit Parade.

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 for a radio promotion all in one building.

Some of the best music written and recorded came from the Brill Building.  Most notable song writers were the married teen couple Carole King/Gerry Goffin, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, Neil Sedaka, Gene Pitney, Neil Diamond, Mike Stoller/Jerry Leiber, husband and wife team Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Burt Bacharach/Hal David, Paul Simon, Phil Spector and many more.

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)

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

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. Some (Carole King, Burt Bacharach, Neil Sedaka, Boyce and Hart) recorded and had hits with their own music.

To listen to the music that came out of the Brill Building Click Here to go to the Brill Building Jukebox Page.