MBW’s Key Songs In The Life Of… is a series in which we ask influential music industry figures about the tracks that have — so far — defined their journey and their existence. In the hot seat this time is Scott Cutler, co-CEO of Pulse Music Group. The Key Songs… series is supported by Sony Music Publishing.

Scott Cutler has a bone to pick with us when we drop in at PULSE’s Los Angeles HQ.

Making a long list of songs that have shaped your life is especially serious business, when you’re in the business of writing, publishing, and recording seriously good songs.

Being asked to pick just seven songs? Maddening. Cutler’s desk is strewn with pages of tracks that didn’t make the cut.

Song names with lines drawn through them, others highlighted, underlined, and struck out with notes accompanying them; the extensive longlist chiselled down to the songs that follow below. Not quite seven, but rather seven key phases of Cutler’s life and the sevenish tracks that soundtracked them.

“I don’t even know if I’m following the rules,” he laughs.

“I was in my headphones for like the whole week. I just kept deleting them. I had them all over the place,” explains Pulse Music Group’s CO-CEO of the process.

“My wife was laughing. She thinks it’s part of my OCD, but I don’t think it is. This is part of my love of songs. I started listening to songs deep, right away, like every word.”

It’s this deep analysis of songs that helped Cutler become a hit songwriter and build one of the most respected independent music publishing companies in the business.

Led by fellow Co-CEO Josh Abraham, PULSE clients have contributed to songs that have accumulated more than 100 billion streams via No.1 hits like Miley Cyrus’ Flowers, Harry Styles’ As It Was and Watermelon Sugar, and more.

PULSE has also been enjoying significant recent success with Tommy Richman’s viral hit Million Dollar Baby – a track that has now surpassed 1.2 billion streams on Spotify alone.

But as we discover during our conversation about the key songs that have shaped Cutler’s life and career, this company wasn’t built on algorithms or trend-chasing. It’s built on a lifelong love of songwriting.

“When it comes to songwriting talent, you recognize the people who have something special, you sign them, and you do everything you can to encourage opportunities and put them in the right environments.”

Scott Cutler

Despite painful omissions like John Lennon’s Jealous Guy, and tracks by Billy Joel, The Beatles, Paul McCartney, and even Elliot Smith (“a life-changer for me”), Cutler’s selections offer profound insight into his journey as a songwriter and publisher.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned,” Cutler reflects, “it’s that this is not an algorithmic exercise. When it comes to songwriting talent, you recognize the people who have something special, you sign them, and you do everything you can to encourage opportunities and put them in the right environments.

“But you have to let it happen organically – we’re confident it’s going to happen with the right person, we just don’t know what day it’s going to happen.”

That philosophy has defined Pulse Music Group’s creative positioning in the music business.

“We’ve always been very art-oriented. Josh and I like art, so we’ve always thought of the company as an art gallery,” he explains.

“An art gallery is a two-way street. If you’re an artist, you want to be at the best galleries, and as a gallery, you want the best artists. So you’re both communicating your taste in picking each other.”

For Cutler, it all began with a certain Rolling Stones ballad and a realization that would lead to writing hits recorded by Brenda Russell, Natalie Imbruglia, and more…

1) The Rolling Stones, Angie (1973) / Eagles, Desperado (1973)

I was a very young kid, about seven, and I instantly knew that music was going to be what I did. I wasn’t a sports kid. The first song I learned on the guitar was Angie. I don’t know why I gravitated toward that song, but I did.

I think I picked it because it was melancholy. For some reason, that felt right, like that’s what a song was designed to do.

That same year, I heard Desperado by the Eagles, and I realized that lyrics could go on a journey that wasn’t simple. I was like, “Wow, man, this is saying everything”. It was poetry, but it was emotional. I was just a very quiet, keep-to-myself kid, and those were my first two songs.

I still listen to Desperado now, and I think if I narrowed it down to 10 songs, that song could still be there. It just covers everything. I think somewhere in there, it was like, “Okay, this is kind of what I’m about.”

Josh [Abraham] listens to music as a producer, focusing on genre. For me, it was always about lyrics; how to communicate to another person. We weren’t a big communication family, so I would figure it out when I listened to songs.

2) Carole King, Will You Love Me Tomorrow (1971)

In college, I decided songwriting was really important to me. I was going to be a songwriter, and I went to school in Arizona where there was no real music scene. I went to the library, and there was just one book on songwriting. It wasn’t like my LA school.

I found a book that explained the Brill Building, and  that whole era of songwriting. I don’t know why, but I was obsessed with it. I would go from Carole King through that whole era and start listening to those songs and trying to understand them; these classic songs that songwriters wrote for other people as a profession.

If I had to pick a song from that era, Will You Love Me Tomorrow by Carole King was probably the most impactful. But what’s crazy is that my first publishing deal, within six months of arriving in LA, was with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, who were Brill Building writers who wrote You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.

My first collaborations were with people like Gerry Goffin, and I was hanging out with these songwriting legends. I remember in college just fantasizing about it. I had this whole vision in my mind about how they wrote songs. They’d go in this room, there’s probably a white piano, it’s probably really magical. And then one day, I’m sitting in a room with them.

My first year of writing was with that whole group of people. They were a little older at that point. I think they were looking for some young writer to inspire them, and they were going to inspire me.

I learned how to write songs. It was a rigorous experience. The first line of the song kind of tells you exactly what is going to happen. That was a very big part of that era. You hit it right at the top. It’s not a throwaway line.

3) Brenda Russell, Get Here (1988)

My first hit was a song called Piano in the Dark by Brenda Russell.

There was this little club where really good artists would play a couple of songs, and I remember Brenda would play this song, Get Here, and the whole room would go quiet. It was very much to do with the heart.

And to spend time with her was to realize, “I don’t want to just have a hit, I actually want to make art.”

That was very formative, and I never really looked back. I always wanted everything to be art, and the commerce part is really cool too, but that happens as a byproduct; we don’t focus on it.

4) Kate Bush, This Woman’s Work (1989) / Sinead O’Connor, Nothing Compares 2 U (1990)

The next thing that happened was that I started collaborating with a writer named Anne Preven, who was my writing partner from that moment on until I stopped writing. We ended up writing a big song called Torn [recorded by Natalie Imbruglia].

I was trying to figure out what songs led us to that song, because Torn, for a lot of people, is really a big song in their lives. But what was big for me was not that song, it was the songs that we were listening to at the time.

This Woman’s Work by Kate Bush. I heard it and started bawling. I remember sitting in my studio, listening to it, and the low end came in, like the cellos, and she was singing. It’s about giving birth and regret and the future. It was just overwhelming.

Everything I was listening to, and we were both listening to at that time, were female artists.

And then, Nothing Compares 2 U by Sinead O’Connor, I mean, I could talk about that whole Sinead album. It was very honest.

She was not afraid, and it’s still a stunning moment, hard to compare to any other moment: a Prince lyric performed by her, and the video, the whole thing was just incredible.

Alison Moyet’s It Won’t Be Long was another song we were kind of mimicking. It wasn’t important to do that song specifically, but the lyrics were cool. It was very British, and she told everything very specifically in that song.

It was all females during that period. It was Annie Lennox, it was all of them. I don’t know why that became a period for me. Maybe it’s because Anne and I were trying to write songs for her to sing. But Torn came out of it.

5) Nirvana, Heart Shaped Box (1991) / Alice In Chains, Would? (1992) / Smashing Pumpkins, Today (1993)

Grunge changed everything for me. Pre-grunge was everything I just talked about, and then within a couple years, it was Alice In Chains’ Would?, which is still mind-boggling to me.

I can’t say Smells Like Teen Spirit, because it’s too on the nose, but I listened to it 100 times in a row! It was like a fucked-up Beatles song or something. If I had to pick a few, it would be Would? by Alice In Chains, maybe Today by Smashing Pumpkins, and I’d go to Heart Shaped Box by Nirvana instead of Smells Like Teen Spirit.

It was like The Beatles – people would say when The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, music changed. When I was hanging out with the Carole King group, they said when they saw The Beatles play, they knew their time was up. It’s not going to be the same tomorrow as it was today. Music just completely shifted.

When the grunge scene came in, that was the same feeling. And when we were making music, it just became an inspiring point of view. I remember exactly where I was when I heard Smells Like Teen Spirit. I was sitting in my friend’s studio when it came on. We rushed to the record store. It was so game-changing.

But I also had that feeling with Alice In Chains and Smashing Pumpkins – they were all kind of playing on the same level for me. There were other bands, but they didn’t hit me the same way. I think those three groups spawned people like Alanis Morissette, bringing that sound into pop music and having bigger success than the original bands.

6) Radiohead, Paranoid Android (1997) / Jane’s Addiction, Three Days (1990)

OK Computer was a completely life-changing album for me. And Jane’s Addiction was also important. I think they go together, so I would choose Paranoid Android and Three Days.

They were dystopian landscapes. There was something else going on, and it was progressive, maybe. I wanted that to be me somehow. I wanted to figure out how to do that.

I bought OK Computer when I was in a band in the ’90s. The bass player did not want to hear OK Computer. He knew it was going to be great. He didn’t want to hear it while we were on the road. He didn’t want to be influenced. It was really weird.

So I listened to it alone. I bought it the day it came out, and I just kept thinking, “This is incredible.” I remember going to the hotel the next day and writing a whole album with my partner with whatever this feeling was that just kind of came over us.

It was the first time that I felt like I couldn’t write those songs myself. I felt like I understood songs like [Radiohead’s] High & Dry where it’s like verse, B section, chorus. There was something I could follow. And then I got to Jane’s Addiction and OK Computer, and I was like, “This is not just about the song, it’s the whole thing.” It’s not any section leading to another section, it’s just the whole feeling.

It’s like a Quentin Tarantino movie – there’s the name of the restaurant, cigarettes, smoke, everything’s very specific. He looks like he just made up a world. That’s what that was, and it was my first time experiencing it.

7) Elton John, Someone Saved My Life Tonight (1975) / Jeff Buckley, Hallelujah (1994)

I went through a very difficult process of what I think the two best songs were that I go back to a lot. It had to be an Elton John song, and there had to be Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, but the Jeff Buckley version, which is a masterwork.

If I had to pick one Elton song, it would be Someone Saved My Life Tonight. It tells a very specific story. It’s poetic, both sad and triumphant. He’s going to make a mistake, and he has to get out of it. The build is incredible.

I could also say Goodbye Yellow Brick Road or pick 100 Elton songs, but I decided that Someone Saved My Life Tonight was the hill I was going to die on.

And then Hallelujah. Leonard Cohen’s line “The fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift” – that line describes the fourth chord, the fifth chord, the minor chord, the major chord. He wrote about the chords in the song! Right away, you win the Academy Award of songwriting.

It wasn’t his version that caught me, it was Jeff Buckley’s. There was something about Jeff. I had a couple Jeff Buckley songs I was playing around with [for this interview], but I just think that’s a master class in guitar tone, voice, and interpretation. The fact that he heard Leonard Cohen’s version and decided to do what he did was like art to me; he interpreted it through a totally different lens. It’s unrecognizable from the original.

I remember exactly where I was when I first heard Jeff Buckley play. I was in my studio with my band rehearsing, and he was friends with our drummer. He came in, grabbed our guitarist Rusty’s guitar, went to the mic and played a song – and he was just better than everybody and everything.

After that, I went to see him play at Tower Records for about 20 people. The next night, he played in a place called Moonpark for 200 people, and the whole place was just hushed whispers. It was a holy moment.

At Sony Music Publishing (SMP), we believe every voice matters. We are the #1 global music publisher, advancing the artistry of the world’s greatest songwriters and composers for over 25 years. We keep songwriters at the forefront of everything we do, and design our suite of services to amplify opportunities, build connections, and defend their rights. Our roster benefits from an international team committed to providing support at every career stage. From classic catalogues to contemporary hitmakers, history is always being written. We are a part of the Sony family of global companies. Learn more about SMP here.Music Business Worldwide