The night I met the man who wrote Burn for You

The year is 1998. I'm still a teenager, playing drums and honing my craft.

My friend Chris invites me and my brother to his family home in Frenchs Forest, in the northern suburbs of Sydney. As we arrive, we can hear top-forty pop rock and a brilliant falsetto making its way up the stairwell of an AV Jennings house built maybe some time in the seventies. Chris ushers us downstairs toward the source of it. As I descend, the music gets louder and clearer.

We enter the room and I find myself somewhat starstruck. There before me stand two icons of Australian music: Rick Price and Phil Buckle, leaning over a digital twenty-four track desk. I was wowed by the robotics of the thing — it had memorised the volume changes, and the faders were moving on their own, in sync with where the manual adjustments had been made while the song was recorded.

But what wowed me more than the tech was the credentials in front of me.

Price had taken the southern hemisphere by storm with his clever lyricality, simple and original and soulful melodies, and a voice carved from marble and draped in velvet. And Phil Buckle — touring guitarist and songwriter, of Southern Sons, alongside Jack Jones, Geoff Cain, Virgil Donati and Peter Bowman, who put "Heart in Danger", "Hold Me in Your Arms" and "You Were There" into the Australian top ten.

It's his co-writing with John Farnham I'd been most enamoured of.

(That session became Another Place, released by Epic in July 1999, produced by Buckle and Price. "Where in the World" had come out as a single the previous November. The album credits list it as recorded at The House of Ling — which is what the liner notes call Chris's family home. It's a genuinely strange feeling to look up a discography twenty-eight years later and find the room you were standing in.)

Why Burn for You is different

"Burn for You" is one of the most iconic Australian songs of the nineties, and it's a ballad crafted to fit Farnham's voice like nothing else. Written by Ross Fraser, John Farnham and Phil Buckle. Released in 1990 from Chain Reaction, four years after Whispering Jack. Number five in Australia, and Song of the Year at the 1991 ARIAs.

The lineage here is tighter than it looks from outside. Jack Jones — born Irwin Thomas Whittridge — joined Farnham's backing band in 1990 to record Chain Reaction, and Southern Sons came together out of that circle, with former members of The State. The band then toured extensively with Farnham, and Jones has gone back out with him repeatedly since. So the two men in that basement weren't adjacent to the Farnham story. Buckle co-wrote the song; his bandmate was in the band that recorded the album it came from.

The distinction between the two Farnham songs everyone knows matters, though — and most Australians have it backwards.

"You're the Voice" is not Farnham's song. It was written by Andy Qunta, Keith Reid, Maggie Ryder and Chris Thompson — British writers, prompted by an anti-nuclear demonstration in Hyde Park in 1985. Thompson sang the demo and meant to record it himself, until his publisher advised him protest songs were finished. The demo travelled to Australia through Qunta, who was working with Icehouse.

What Farnham did with it was closer to Whitney Houston taking Dolly Parton's song and making it hers. An act of interpretation so complete that the authorship gets quietly reassigned in the public mind.

"Burn for You" was a different thing. That was Farnham leveraging his own prowess, in a room with collaborators, on a song he had a hand in making. He was 41.

So imagine my reaction to seeing Rolling Stone argue that more of pop should be routing its songwriting through one man.

The case for calling Ed Sheeran

To be fair to the argument, because it's a strong one.

Sheeran heard KATSEYE's "Gnarly" while in Mexico, liked it enough to reach out himself, and wrote them "Animal" — with Johnny McDaid and producers Omer Fedi and Blake Slatkin — for the WILD EP. KATSEYE are extraordinary performers. The coordination, the presence, the physical execution is a specialism that takes years. Nobody watching them thinks this would be better if they'd written it too.

Sheeran's best work for other people is probably "Love Yourself" — credited to Bieber, Benny Blanco and Sheeran, produced by Blanco, 2015. Better than most of what Bieber has released under his own writing.

And the definitive case is Smokey Robinson, who wrote much of Motown for other people while fronting his own group. He wrote and produced "My Guy" for Mary Wells, which went to number one. Then he wrote "My Girl" with his Miracles bandmate Ronald White — at the Apollo, during a package tour, as a response to "My Guy" — and handed it to the Temptations, for whom it became their first US number one and their signature song.

Nobody thinks the Temptations were diminished. The performance is why it survives.

The complication

Then there's Raye, and she's the reason "just get someone else to write it" isn't automatically good advice.

Before her own records she wrote for Beyoncé, Little Mix, Rihanna, David Guetta, John Legend, Ellie Goulding and Charli XCX. She was very good at it. And her label withheld her debut album for years — happy to credit her as a featured artist on other people's hits, unwilling to release hers unless the singles cleared commercial benchmarks first.

She got out, released My 21st Century Blues independently in February 2023, and took six Brit Awards in seven categories in one night in 2024, beating Adele's record.

So the pen-for-hire model is a real career, and it can also be a cage. The difference is whether it's a choice you made or an arrangement made around you.

The two people who settle it

Here's what actually changed my mind about telling non-writers to write.

Bonnie Raitt barely writes. Her most famous recording, "I Can't Make You Love Me", was written by Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin; she heard the demo and knew immediately she wanted to sing it. She has said plainly that she doesn't write many songs.

But she wrote "Nick of Time" — the title track, 1989, written approaching forty, about coming to terms with middle age, after a professional slump and getting sober. The album won Album of the Year.

And then, more than three decades later, she wrote "Just Like That" entirely alone and won Song of the Year at the 2023 Grammys — the first solo songwriter to take that award since 2018. She was 73.

Farnham is the same story with an Australian accent. Famous as the greatest interpreter this country has produced. Then at 41, in a room with Fraser and Buckle, he co-wrote the song that won Song of the Year.

Two performers defined by singing other people's material. Both wrote rarely. Both, when they finally did, produced the thing that won the award.

That's not luck. It's what happens when someone who has spent thirty years inside thousands of songs writes one. They know where the weight goes. They've absorbed more structure than any workshop could teach. Raitt at 73 isn't a beginner who got fortunate — she's the most experienced possible person finally picking up the tool.

Which is the actual argument

Neither of them could have known that at twenty-five.

That's the whole thing. Raitt didn't write "Just Like That" because she decided at seventy to become a songwriter. She wrote it because writing had stayed within reach — occasionally attempted, never abandoned — for fifty years, so when the song arrived she had somewhere to put it and some idea what to do with it.

If you never try, you don't find out what you'd have written at forty-one. The option closes so gradually that nobody notices the day it went.

So the case isn't "everyone should write." It's smaller and more defensible: have a go, keep the door open, and don't decide at twenty that you're not a writer. You don't have the information yet.

Even if nothing ever comes of it

There's a second benefit that doesn't require you to be any good.

Being inside the process changes how you interpret. You learn that the bridge exists because the second verse wasn't working. You learn which lyric was fought over and which fell out in a minute. You learn that the thing you'd have cut is load-bearing. Every song you've ever been handed was assembled by someone making choices, and you can't fully hear those choices until you've had to make some.

I got a small dose of that standing in a basement in Frenchs Forest at seventeen, watching two people I admired argue about a mix. I wasn't writing anything. But I've listened differently ever since.

Practically, it means low stakes. Nothing finished. Voice memos, a page of lines, a chord sequence with no words — kept somewhere you'll find them in a year, which is roughly what Clavet is for, though a notebook does the job perfectly well. The point is that the attempts accumulate instead of evaporating.

So should KATSEYE call Ed Sheeran

Yes. Obviously yes. It produced a good record and there's no shame in the arrangement.

But somewhere in the next ten years one of them will have something to say that nobody can write for them, and the only question that matters is whether they'll have kept enough of a habit to get it down. Robinson wrote "My Girl" in a dressing room at the Apollo. Raitt wrote hers after a slump. Farnham wrote his four years after the album that made him famous. None of those arrived on a schedule.

The performers are the ones who make songs land. That's a real and rare skill and it is entirely sufficient on its own. Just don't let anyone — including yourself — tell you it's the only one you're permitted.

If you want to try it with someone else in the room first, how co-writing actually works is a gentler start than a blank page.

Common questions

Who wrote "Burn for You"?
Ross Fraser, John Farnham and Phil Buckle. Released in 1990 as a single from Chain Reaction, four years after Whispering Jack, it reached number five in Australia and won Song of the Year at the 1991 ARIA Awards. Farnham was 41 — it's one of the few songs he holds a writing credit on.

Who wrote "You're the Voice"?
Andy Qunta, Keith Reid, Maggie Ryder and Chris Thompson — British songwriters, prompted by a 1985 anti-nuclear demonstration in Hyde Park. Thompson sang the demo and intended to record it himself before his publisher talked him out of it. The demo reached Australia via Qunta, who was working with Icehouse.

Do you have to write your own songs to be a real musician?
No. Smokey Robinson built much of Motown writing for other artists, and Farnham's signature song was written by four British songwriters he never met. Interpretation is a distinct craft with its own difficulty. The question is not whether you write, but whether you've ever found out what happens if you try.

Did Bonnie Raitt write her own songs?
Rarely, and both exceptions are famous. She wrote the title track of Nick of Time in 1989, approaching 40, on an album that won Album of the Year. She then wrote "Just Like That" alone and won Song of the Year at the 2023 Grammys, the first solo songwriter to take it since 2018.

Who was in Southern Sons?
Southern Sons formed in 1989 with Jack Jones on vocals and guitar, Phil Buckle on guitar and vocals, Geoff Cain on bass, Virgil Donati on drums and Peter Bowman on keyboards and guitar. They had Australian top ten hits with "Heart in Danger", "Hold Me in Your Arms" and "You Were There", and split in 1996.