Greatest Living Song Writers

Bob,

My wife is a Taylor Swift fan, so for our anniversary I surprised her with tickets to her concert in Chicago this past weekend. While I'm not a Swifty myself, I've never had anything against Taylor Swift either. I suppose you could say I was agnostic toward her music. However, I came away from that concert impressed, and it got me thinking, who, in your opinion, are the greatest living song writers today? I assume your top 5 would be some order of Taylor Swift, Springsteen, Dave Grohl, Bob Dylan, and 2 Chainz, but what order would you rank them?

Thanks in advance for your reply.

Ian Hunter
Phil Mogg
Keith Richard
Iggy Pop
Bruce Springsteen

The Ingenious Gentleman wrote:Bob,

My wife is a Taylor Swift fan, so for our anniversary I surprised her with tickets to her concert in Chicago this past weekend. While I'm not a Swifty myself, I've never had anything against Taylor Swift either. I suppose you could say I was agnostic toward her music. However, I came away from that concert impressed, and it got me thinking, who, in your opinion, are the greatest living song writers today? I assume your top 5 would be some order of Taylor Swift, Springsteen, Dave Grohl, Bob Dylan, and 2 Chainz, but what order would you rank them?

Thanks in advance for your reply.

good question.. and a very debatable topic, of course. But the greatest living songwriters based on their body of work, I'd go with:

Springsteen
Dylan
Neil Young
Tom Waits
Leonard Cohen
Steve Earle
Kris Kristofferson
James McMurtry

If we're talking younger songwriters (for the sake of argument, let's go with 45 years of age and younger):

Jason Isbell
Josh Ritter
Holly Williams
Ben Nichols
Sturgill Simpson
Taylor Goldsmith

Seeing Taylor Swift got you to thinking about songwriters?