Simpsons Songs: Who Writes Them, How Are They Written, and Why Are There So Goddamn Many?
Good burning questions.
The show’s writers do the lyrics—they’re just little poems, and often our songs are parodies written to existing melodies. Then the series’s composer (Alf Clausen for twenty-eight great seasons) writes original music for the songs, thereby covering our (musical) tracks.
Writer Jeff Martin wrote the words and music for our musical parody of A Streetcar Named Desire. (Jeff’s also a talented cartoonist, pianist, singer, and juggler. And, he’s tall and good-looking. He’s one of my best friends and I hate him.)
One reason we like using songs is that they fill up the show: our job as creative artists is to shovel jokes into a twenty-two-minute ditch each week. While any joke on The Simpsons might be rewritten five or six times, songs rarely change and almost never get cut. One exception: “We Love to Smoke,” a Patty and Selma number. It was a funny take-off of Mary Poppins’s “I Love to Laugh,” but hearing Patty and Selma rasp and cough out a song was pretty grating. (You can hear the audio for “We Love to Smoke” on YouTube. You’d cut the song, too.)
It’s an ongoing debate at the show whether the public even likes these musical numbers. Personally, I loved all the original songs on Monty Python’s Flying Circus; however, I generally tune out when I see one on SNL. In the end, songs are probably like jokes: they’re good when they’re good. Even better, you can make extra cash on them. I earn a couple of grand a year on songwriting royalties for “Spider-Pig,” and I’m one of eleven credited writers on the song. I wasn’t even in the room when it was written.