As prolific as Steve Cropper no doubt is, the Stax legend doesn’t have a huge backlog of potential charttopping hits laying around. Instead, he’s always worked as an on-demand artist. A deadline, it seems, helps create that spark.
“I’m one of those writers that — I don’t write for myself and I don’t write for my family; I like to have a project,” Cropper tells Bronson Herrmuth. “If somebody called me today and said so and so needs a song and they need it by tomorrow afternoon, I’d go immediately home and get up in the den and I’d get the guitar and I’d write a song.”
That’s how it was back in the old days, when Steve Cropper would get the call for composing or sideman work at the last moment, and that’s still the way he works today. “When we were producing back in the ’60s, the artist would come in and we would be writing up to that time,” Cropper adds. “Sometimes we’d have a few songs, but it wasn’t something we wrote 6 or 8 months ago. It was something we wrote 6 or 8 hours ago — and that’s sort of the way we did it.”
Steve Cropper brings the same die-hard immediacy (both as a composer and as one of music’s most instinctive guitar players) to everything he does today. And he’s just as engaged as ever in the process.
“If an artist is in the session, in the studio doing an album and they’ve got a week to record and they’re short for songs or they didn’t like a couple that they recorded,” Cropper says, “and they called desperate saying, ‘I need a song; I need a song.’ That’s the kind of things you like to get in on.”
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