ONE AFTERNOON, Dr. Luke and Cirkut were joined in the beach house by Bonnie McKee, a Prescription Songs lyricist. Dr. Luke doesn’t enjoy writing lyrics—“it’s not fun,” he says—and so people like McKee and J. Kash, another Prescription lyricist, are in high demand.
McKee, who was twenty-nine, had Hollywood heartbreak in her backstory. Like Katy Perry, she was a talented child performer who enjoyed the attention of being onstage. She arrived in Hollywood around the same time as Perry, and got a lucrative record contract on the Warner Bros label. The album Trouble, was released in 2004, when McKee was twenty.
“Things didn’t go as I planned,” she tells me out on the patio of Gottwald’s beach house over the crashing of the waves. “I came out at a weird time, right before Tower Records shut down, and iTunes was just getting going. Plus it was a mature record for a teenager.” As soon as it was clear that the album was a failure—virtually overnight—McKee became damaged goods. “Basically I went from industry darling to no one answering my phone calls. It was brutal. I felt like I was already washed up before I got started.” But although the record stiffed, Warner did not drop her right away; instead, they kept her under contract but wouldn’t commit to another record, leaving her “in purgatory.”
That lasted about a year, until McKee had an idea: “I made a CD of my best songs, and bought a dagger at a smoke shop that had a tiger on the handle, and a jewel for an eye, and went to the CEO of Warner Brothers’ house in the middle of the night and stabbed the CD into a tree right by his front door, and I wrote ‘Platinum Baby!’ in lipstick on his car. The next day was his kid’s first day at school, so there was pandemonium—everyone thought a maniac had come in the middle of the night.” In a way, one had. “Needless to say, I got dropped.”
After that, she says, “I went into a terrible downward spiral for a while, but I put it all into my writing.” She was broke. She was addicted to crystal meth. She was in and out of shitty relationships. Her family wanted her to come home. Meanwhile, her brother Yates was on his way to becoming a writer and an art critic. Her life wasn’t supposed to be going like this.
One day, McKee was selling clothes for money to eat, when she met a singer-songwriter from Santa Barbara named Katy Perry who was similarly broke, and they became friends. “I met her at a thrift store on Melrose called Wasteland. She’d heard of me and I’d kind of heard of her, and we were both in the same purgatory, and we just hit it off. We had this weird simpatico thing, and shared each other’s deep dark secrets.”
In 2008, Katy became world famous; Bonnie got another year older. Katy departed the L.A. party circuit to tour the world, and when she returned she relocated to Santa Barbara, to be nearer her parents. McKee remained behind, “in the trenches of Hollywood,” writing and recording songs “in shithole studios behind Carl’s Jr.” She didn’t get that second chance, much less a third.
Early in 2010, Dr. Luke and Max Martin were in the midst of planning Perry’s follow-up album, Teenage Dream. They needed to prove she was more than a singer of gay-themed novelty songs. They had one of the two tracks that Benny Blanco had come up with that sleep-deprived night he arrived in L.A. And they had a melody that had actually been written by Dr. Luke, not Max Martin.
The song was a breakthrough for Gottwald. Max Martin recalled how it happened. “Benny Blanco did a track,” he said, “and then Luke just started singing”—sounds and nonsense words—“and he had this flow, where everything that came out was great, including the chorus. He was just standing there and screaming, and it just wrote itself.”
What they did not have were words—the part of a song neither Dr. Luke nor Max Martin can handle alone. In thinking back to her own teenage years in L.A., Perry remembered her friend Bonnie McKee. She called and asked if Bonnie would listen to the track and take a shot at the lyrics. “She had just gotten engaged,” McKee says, “and she was in the honeymoon phase of being in love.”
Bonnie and Katy wrote the song five or six times. For Perry, this was annoying, but for McKee, it was a matter of life and death. One version was more in Katy’s wacky vein. It included the line “And the next thing you know/You’re a mom in a minivan.” Max Martin and Dr. Luke rejected it. One version used the metaphor of “trying me on,” as a sort of double entendre for sex. Max and Luke rejected that, too. In Katy Perry: The Teenage Dream, a 2012 book by C. Duthel, McKee explained, “Luke always makes us ‘Benny Proof’ everything. He says that if Benny doesn’t get it, America won’t get it.” Benny didn’t get it.
They looked at each other “with dread,” McKee says, “knowing we had to start all over again. We were both so over it.” But they tried one more time. “I thought about my own adolescent years,” McKee says, “my own first love. I thought about watching Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet and putting on a little mini disco ball light and just dreaming of Leo. I was like, ‘teenager’ . . . that’s such a great word. It packs a lot of emotion and imagery into three syllables.” She added the word “dream” and that was the hook. She went back to the concept “trying me on” and the oft-heard “skin-tight jeans” lines emerged.
“I finished it and I drove up the coast to Santa Barbara,” McKee says, “to pitch it to Luke and Max and Katy, and I got there and sang it and everyone was like, ‘Hell, yeah!” And I went to my hotel and got into the bathtub and I just cried and cried. I was just so relieved.” “Teenage Dream,” the second single from the album of the same name, went to number one and spent two weeks on top.
After that breakthrough in 2010, McKee went on to help Perry write lyrics to five more huge hits, including her best song, “Wide Awake,” written after her short marriage to Russell Brand dissolved. McKee also collaborated on “Dynamite,” with Taio Cruz, and on “Hold It Against Me,” with Britney Spears, both smashes. But McKee still hadn’t realized her own teenage dream.
Now, thanks to Dr. Luke, McKee was getting that illusive second chance. He had signed her to Kemosabe, his label, as an artist, and a Bonnie McKee album was forthcoming. The video for the first single, “American Girl,” had just dropped.
AT THE BEACH HOUSE that day, McKee was wearing her American Girl outfit from the video—cut-off denim short shorts, gray leggings, and a black leather jacket that was partly covered with metallic spikes. Her lengthy mane was a Roman candle of flame-colored streaks. She was coming from an appearance at an L.A. pop station, where she had performed a four-and-a-half minute medley of her six number ones for other artists, mashed together, a stunt she also performs at her own shows.
Dr. Luke greeted McKee warmly in the open-plan kitchen, which looked out at the ocean. A vast array of hot-sauce bottles took up part of the counter. There were children’s toys scattered around, including a nifty-looking car that Luke’s older kid could sit in and drive by twisting the steering wheel. Also present was the somewhat terrifying Irene Richter, his majordomo.
Dr. Luke was sipping a glass of the extremely powerful cold-pressed coffee that he kept in a half-gallon glass jug in the fridge. “I have crazy coffee,” he says. “It’s cold and black. We travel an hour to get this coffee.” He adds, “It’s all I have left,” making reference to the healthy California lifestyle he now pursues, his druggy New York days long behind him. “I can’t even smoke pot anymore. I get paranoid and start worrying about e-mails.”
The video of “American Girl” had gone up on YouTube the day before. Did Dr. Luke release it? Did someone leak it? Did it matter? In Dr. Luke’s world, a “soft launch”—leaking the song on YouTube and hoping it will go viral—was often the best approach. “I just put all these things out there,” he says, “and if something catches, we focus our efforts around that.” His basic strategy is to have no basic strategy.
Katy Perry, Kesha, Taio Cruz, and Adam Lambert, among others, all appear in the video—Dr. Luke called in a lot of favors—lip-synching to McKee’s voice, a clever inversion of the usual arrangement, in which she helped them with their words.
“What’re your views at now?” Dr. Luke asked her.
“Two hundred thousand.” McKee checked again on her phone. “Like, two oh one.”
“Did Katy tweet it?”
“Yes, she tweeted it. Kesha hasn’t tweeted it yet, though.”
“You know what?” Dr. Luke glanced out the windows at the beach, where the shadows were growing longer. “It’s almost better if Kesha doesn’t, and waits a couple days and does it.”
“And you know Katy has thirty million followers and Kesha has, like—”
“Three,” Dr. Luke said sourly.
What was happening with Kesha?
Dr. Luke shrugged, but his shoulders were too tense to elevate much.
“I haven’t heard from her in a while.”
In writing lyrics, McKee adheres to Max Martin’s school of pop songwriting. Words are there to serve the melody. “Max doesn’t really care about the lyrics because he’s Swedish,” she says, “so I have to work around that. I can write something I think is so clever and be proud of that, but if it doesn’t hit the ear right then he doesn’t like it. He’s also really stubborn about syllables. A line has to have a certain number of syllables, and they have to be mirror images of each other—it’s very mathematical. The syllables in the first part of the chorus have to repeat in the second part. Like ‘Cal-i-forn-ia girls un-for-get-ta-ble/Dai-sy Dukes bi-kinis on top’—if you add a syllable, or take it away, it’s a completely different melody to him. I remember I wrote him a song and I was so proud of it, and he was like, ‘Why are the melodies completely different in the first and second verse?’ I was like, ‘What do you mean? It’s the same melody.’ But I had added three or four syllables. He was right, he’s always right, as much as it drives me crazy sometimes, he’s always right.”
But don’t Martin’s strictures make the songs formulaic? I wonder.
McKee doesn’t think so. “Things are changing in pop music and people have caught on to his formulas, to an extent. So you have to break the rules a bit and, as Max says, ‘let art win.’ ” But in general, she adds, “People like hearing songs that sound like something they’ve heard before, that’s reminiscent of their childhood, and of what their parents listened to. I mean, every once in a while something new will happen, like dubstep, where it’s like, ‘This is robot future music!,’ but most people still just want to hear about love and partying.”
On writing for Perry, McKee says, “When we’re writing for her, we sit down and talk to her and find out what’s going on in her life, and try to find out the kernel of truth. I want her to sing about something she cares about, so we talk about her life and what she’s going through, and try to weave it into something powerful and visual.”
How are Max and Luke different as co-writers? I ask. “They are very similar. But Max has that Swedish politeness,” she says.
Dr. Luke turned to Richter. (Before Richter, Dr. Luke had used a jungle survivalist named Barry Silver as his main gatekeeper; he would literally emerge from the wilderness, spend six months organizing Dr. Luke’s affairs, then return to trekking again.) “Can you send an e-mail from me to Larry Rudolph and ask if he can get Britney and Miley to tweet the Bonnie video?” he asked. Rudolph manages both Spears and Cyrus. “Tell him Katy’s already done it twice, and use Jewish guilt. Say, ‘I know they weren’t able to be in the video, so at the very least could they tweet it.’ ”
“How is it Jewish guilt if neither of them are Jewish?” McKee asked.
“Because I’m Jewish.”
“Oh, it’s contagious!”
Should they offer the track for sale or let it spread virally for free? Should they upload “American Girl” to Vevo, the industry’s music-video channel, even though that would cannibalize views from YouTube? It probably didn’t matter, but this kind of stuff obsessed Dr. Luke. If they did a soft launch on iTunes and the song didn’t sell, might that hurt them with program directors, when they took it to radio? So many uncertainties for Dr. Luke to obsess over, and not one really mattered, because it was already clear, twenty-four hours in, that “American Girl” was not going to make Bonnie McKee a pop star. It would get to number sixty-seven on the charts, then quickly fall back. The lyricist wouldn’t be quitting her day job anytime soon.
It was a reminder that for all their talent and experience, even Dr. Luke and Max Martin couldn’t guarantee a hit. Neither are they sure they have one until the public hears the song. Hit making remains a tricky, unpredictable endeavor. Dr. Luke often falls back on the hoary truism that it’s all a matter of “the right artist with the right song at the right time.” Take “Wrecking Ball,” a ballad Dr. Luke and Cirkut created sans Max Martin for Miley Cyrus. It seemed like a certain hit; Doug Morris predicted it would be one of the biggest songs of the year. But Luke wasn’t sure, and he bet against the song, telling Cyrus he would buy her a Numi toilet like his, the state of the art in potty technology (it has a Bluetooth receiver that can stream music from a smart phone), if it went to number one. When “Wrecking Ball” did hit number one, I asked Cyrus for a comment. “Contrary to what he thinks,” she says, “Dr. Luke isn’t always right. Now he has to buy me a ten-thousand-dollar toilet. I’ll be thinking of him every time I go.”
McKee was at the beach house that day to record vocals for another song from her album, “Right Now,” an anthem that Dr. Luke and Cirkut were producing for her. They went upstairs to the studio, and Cirkut played back what they had done so far. Dr. Luke asked her to imagine the song when they put the chorus on it. He explained that he planned to record a sing-along in his garage, next door, to give the song an anthemic feel. His plan was to mix people who could sing with people who couldn’t, so that it sounded more like a stadium sing-along.
“Interesting!” McKee said.
In the production, Luke went on, “I want to go with guitars and be Def Leppard big. You know what I mean?”
“You’re speaking my language!” McKee replied perkily.
She went into the vocal booth, a converted closet concealed behind the paneling, and sang the opening lines of the song about a dozen times. It contained the hook “right now,” twice, embedded in a suet of mixed metaphors. “There is a fire in my heart, right now, ready like a loaded gun, heart is like a battle drum, there isn’t time to fall apart, right now.”
Later Cirkut would painstakingly comp all the takes, comparing them syllable-by-syllable, and stitch them together into the best possible vocal. Comping was so mind-numbingly boring that even Dr. Luke couldn’t tolerate it. However, “Max loves comping,” Luke says. “He’ll do it for hours.”
A DREAM TEAM WROTE and produced the second Katy Perry album, Teenage Dream, including Benny Blanco (now living back in New York and well launched on a major hit-making career of his own), as well as Stargate, Ester Dean, and Tricky Stewart. “Firework,” the smash ballad from the album, was a classic Stargate-Dean collaboration. It had the ectomorphs’ signature rise in the pre, that builds toward Ester’s hook.
Boom boom boom
Even brighter than the moon moon moon.
The lyrical concept came from Perry herself. Russell Brand had pointed out to her the great passage in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in which the narrator expresses his admiration for people like Neal Cassady who “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars,” and Perry turned it into an inspirational pop ballad. (Brand turned out to be one such firework; he texted her that their marriage was over just as the song was exploding across the charts.)
The re-released version of the album contained “Part of Me,” one of Max Martin and Dr. Luke’s best compositions, and perhaps the purest example of their chemistry. Luke had created a track—a solid one, but like all tracks a bit repetitious without a topline. When he and Max got together, Max played Luke a melody that he had come up with; it fit perfectly with the track and, with Bonnie McKee helping out on lyrics, “Part of Me” was written.
Taken as a whole, Teenage Dream was a state-of-the-art pop album, and it showed what a hit factory is capable of when functioning at its peak. But no matter how many hits Dr. Luke had with Katy Perry, it wasn’t the same, economically or reputationally, as having hits with an artist he had signed himself to Kemosabe. Capitol got the record sales, and Capitol was part of Universal, not Sony. If Dr. Luke wanted to take the next step from writer-producer to record mogul—a master of the universe—he would need to use both his musical and his entrepreneurial skills, and create a superstar. That was what Kesha was supposed to be—his very own teenage dream.