Brill Building

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The Brill Building (built 1930) is located at 1619 Broadway in New York City, just north of Times Square. By 1962 it 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. Its creative culture defined the influential "Brill Building Sound" and style of popular music songwriting and recording.

Carole King described the atmosphere at the Brill Building:

"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 0094602204).

In actuality, Don Kirshner's publishing office 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 muscians from entering buildings from the front. Most Brill Building writers began their careers at 1650, and the building continued to house many record labels throughout the decades.

Famous Brill Building musical partners include:

• Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller
• Carole King and Gerry Goffin
• Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil
• Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich
• Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman
• Hal David and Burt Bacharach
• Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart

Famous Brill Building individual songwriters include:

• Paul Anka
• Jim Croce
• Bobby Darin
• Hal David
• John Denver
• Neil Diamond
• Howard Greenfield
• Billy Joel
• Kris Kristofferson
• Joni Mitchell
• Neil Sedaka
• Carly Simon
• Paul Simon
• James Taylor
• Gene Pitney
• Artie Kornfeld

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 0670034568)

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.

External links

• [Brill Building] at the Songwriters Hall of Fame
• [Brill Building]
• [Spectropop's Brill Building]
• [The Brill Building Songwriters]
• [New York Architecture Images- Brill Building]

 

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