Joel Little’s young daughters feature on a Taylor Swift song
New Zealand’s Joel Little may have been instrumental in the writing and recording of Taylor Swift’s #1 Lover album, but as he told TIO in LA, so were his daughters.
For the uninitiated, Joel Little is one of the world’s top songwriters and producers, having co-written with Taylor Swift on five singles for Lover, and having won a Grammy with Lorde for ‘Royals’ in 2014. Little has also collaborated with Jarryd James, Jonas Brothers, Tove Lo, Khalid, and Imagine Dragons, among others, and most recently took out the Overseas Recognition Global APRA Music Award in LA.
Onstage during the Winners Circle panel for the inaugural Global APRA Music Awards, Little said:
“Both my daughters are singing on ‘Only The Young’, which is in the end credits of the documentary that just came out,” he said.
Emmie and Lila each have backing vocal credits on the song, which was released alongside Swift’s Miss Americana Netflix documentary in January. The track is monumental for Swift as it centres around the 2018 US elections and is her first overtly political song.
Taylor Swift and Joel Little writing ‘Only The Young’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI_dnKT5VyQ
Joel Little features prominently in the Miss Americana documentary due to his contribution to Swift’s Lover album singles ‘Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince’, ‘ME!’ (feat. Brendon Urie), ‘You Need to Calm Down’, and ‘The Man’.
Onstage at The Grammy Museum in LA, Little was discussing songwriting alongside fellow Global APRA Music Awards winners Georgi Kay, Sarah Aarons and Mallrat (aka Grace Shaw).
Joel Little, Georgi Kay, Sarah Aarons and Mallrat (aka Grace Shaw), Poppy Reid
His nine-year-old daughter Emmie also has a songwriting credit on Broods’ 2016-released NZ #1 and ARIA #2 LP Conscious. Onstage during the Winners Circle, Little told the story about how a four-year-old Emmie interrupted the writing process one day.
“She kept on coming up to us and going, ‘Hey dad!, and singing this little melody. I was like ‘Thanks Emmie, sit back down please’. […] But then she’d come back to me again.”
Little said he was impressed his four-year-old was able to sing and remember the melody and paid close attention when she approached him a third time.
“I thought, at this point in the song, if you come in here at the bar, it actually works really well,” he said. “So I said to Georgia, ‘Emmie’s come up with this melody and it’s going to sound crazy but it’s actually pretty good. Georgia said, ‘That works really well with these lyrics I’ve been working on.”
The single, ‘Worth the Fight’, is track 11 on Conscious and landed a sync on TV show Black Ink Crew.
Stream: Broods – ‘Worth The Fight’
This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.