Claude Kelly, who has helped craft Grammy-nominated singles for Bruno Mars, Tamia and Ledisi, earned his first publishing deal as a songwriter in 2007. Around the same time, he started to notice dispiriting new constraints in R&B writing sessions. The genre was paring down rapidly to keep pace with hip-hop, deemphasizing melodic complexity and embracing the austere loops and rhythmic
This article originally appeared on www.rollingstone.com: How American R&B Songwriters Found a New Home in K-Pop