Songs Songwriting Credits by Luther Vandross

Vandross wrote nothing on this album. All thirteen tracks are other writers' copyrights, and the credit line on every one of them belongs to someone else: Stephen Stills, Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel, Lionel Richie twice, Barbra Streisand and Paul Williams, Holland-Dozier-Holland, McFadden and Whitehead with Jerry Cohen, Rod Temperton, Jerry Peters and Anita Poree, Aretha Franklin and Ted White, Dean Pitchford and Michael Gore, Bacharach and David, Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion. That makes Songs a zero-authorship record for an artist who had co-written most of his own catalog since Never Too Much, and the four Grammy nominations it earned were all performance or album categories, none for writing. His contribution here is interpretation, arrangement input and co-production, which the credits document and the authorship math does not reward.