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All of these lists are missing probably the greatest living American songwriter (we'll leave aside my typical possessiveness over that term): Alan Menken.
This man has more hits, earworms, and famous songs than pretty much any other person on this list.
Let me show you. Let me know how many of these songs you can sing a line or two.
Starting with Little Shop of Horrors, he just kept writing hit after hit after hit. He single-handedly launched the Disney Renaissance with The Little Mermaid, and continued it with Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Pocahontas, and Hercules.
His later songs aren't as popular as these, but that's 7 songs that I expect most people to be able to recognize and hum or sing along to.
From Hunchback:
From Hercules:
And we haven't even gotten to Galavant.
Surprised to learn that Alan Menken is straight and has kids, apropos of nothing. I vaguely knew the Disney Renaissance story and that Howard Ashman died of AIDs but didn't realize Menken was hetero.
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The readers' list's inclusion of Lin Manuel Miranda made me realize that the critics may have had a blind spot when it came to people who wrote primarily for the theater. As for Menken, right off the bat I can't count the incidental music he wrote because scoring is not songwriting, and if we include composition in general we have to figure out where people like Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley fit into the list, and I don't think anyone intended to disturb that hornet's nest. Looking at the part of his career he is best known for, we have Little Shop of Horrors plus a half dozen Disney scores. Each of the Disney scores only includes 6 to 8 actual songs (compared with 12 to 18 for a full-fledged musical). One or two will be rerecorded as pop versions so they can be released to radio (at least after The Little Mermaid), one or two will be well-known for novelty value but won't get anywhere near the pop charts.
At this point his catalog is looking a little thin, but nothing is disqualifying yet. The problem comes when you look at who recorded those hits: Peabo Bryson, Celine Dion, Regina Belle, Vanessa Williams, Michael Bolton. All of those hit songs were Adult Contemporary pap that, had they not had any association with Disney movies, would have disappeared from the public consciousness as quickly as the rest of those artists' respective catalogs. This isn't to say he's a bad songwriter, but I wouldn't put him anywhere near the top 30, let alone call him the greatest living American songwriter.
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