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Dedication: Andrea Martin(April 14, 1972 – September 27, 2021)

Seventeen songs for a songwriter most listeners have never heard of, who wrote several records they can sing from memory. Andrea Martin died on 27 September 2021, aged forty-nine.

Andrea Marin was a songwriter’s songwriter. Throughout the ’90s and 2000s she wrote songs for Monica, Toni Braxton, SWV, En Vogue, and more. Here are my favorite classic songs Martin wrote &/or produced.

Andrea Martin (1972–2021)

Andrea Martin belongs to a category the industry does not celebrate properly: the writer whose songs became other people's signatures. She was a fine singer with her own releases, and she was also one of the more reliable hitmakers of the late nineties and 2000s, working with Ivan Matias among others.

Her catalogue includes material for En Vogue, Toni Braxton, SWV, Monica and Melanie Fiona. That is not a session career; that is a decade of American radio.

She was a Grammy winner, and when she died at forty-nine the tributes came overwhelmingly from other writers and singers rather than from the trade press — which tells you where she was most respected.

What to listen for

Start with her own voice. "Let Me Return The Favor" and "Baby Can I Hold You" establish that the songs were not written by someone guessing at how they should be sung.

En Vogue's "Don't Let Go (Love)" closes the playlist and is the most famous thing here by a distance — one of the great vocal-group records of the nineties, and a song whose bridge is doing something harmonically far more ambitious than its radio success suggests.

Toni Braxton's "I Love Me Some Him" is the one that shows her range as a writer: a lyric built entirely on plain, unpoetic language that lands harder than any metaphor would.

SWV's "You're the One" and Monica's "Before You Walk Out of My Life" are the mid-nineties peak.

Melanie Fiona's "It Kills Me" is the later chapter, and "All I Want" with Secondcity and Paul Woolford shows she kept working in dance music long after the R&B industry had reorganised itself around other writers.

Go deeper

Read the credits on the records you already love. Martin's career is the strongest possible argument for doing so — the names on the sleeve are frequently more interesting than the name on the front.

For other writers in the same position, look up Kandi Burruss, Rich Harrison, Ivan Matias and Diane Warren. Between them they wrote a good portion of what people think of as their own memories.

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