10 Stars Who Secretly Wrote Hit Songs for Other Singers

You have no idea how many famous songs are quietly written behind the scenes by totally different superstars. In the music industry, it’s surprisingly common for a major artist to write a song and then hand it off to somebody else to record. Sometimes those tracks become even bigger hits than anything the songwriter performs themselves!

That’s exactly what happened with the songs on this list. From Ed Sheeran and Harry Styles to Dolly Parton and Sia, these stars all secretly penned massive hits for other singers. You probably never realized who was behind these songs when they first hit the radio—but you definitely will now.

Related: Ten Singers Who Absolutely Detest One of Their Hit Songs

10 Ed Sheeran, “Little Things”

Back when he was just a teenager, singer Ed Sheeran wrote a song called “Little Things” along with a friend of his named Fiona Bevan. For a few years after that, the song was lost to time, and Sheeran became a superstar performer thanks to plenty of his own hit tracks. But after a while, Bevan rediscovered the song, mused over its origin, and sent it to Sheeran. Ed thought that it was pretty good, and so he played it one day for the boy band One Direction. Sure enough, the group of guys absolutely loved it. They enjoyed it so much, in fact, that they claimed it for their 2012 album Take Me Home. And just like that, years later, it saw the light of day!

After 1D picked up the song and put it on their album, Sheeran mused to a media outlet about how he had written the song so many years earlier, while not even thinking that it could one day be used by a boy band to rocket to fame. He was also happy about how the group used the acoustic sound of the track to develop a slightly different persona for themselves, too. “I think they just wanted to try something different,” Sheeran said. “I think they did the same formula with the last single—it sounded like a One Direction song—and now I think they want to switch it up a bit.” Switch it up, they did… with a song that nobody had any idea was written by a separate superstar.^[1]

9 Jessie J, “Party in the USA”

Jessie J may have a pop music career of her own, having recorded major singles such as “Bang Bang” with other singers and performers like Nicki Minaj and Ariana Grande. But before all that happened, Jessie J was making most of her money—okay, all of her money—through songwriting! The most famous track she penned? Miley Cyrus’s hit single “Party in the USA.”

The song did so well that Jessie J earned herself a really nice cut of royalties for writing it. As Miley recorded it, and then started performing it live, and then took it to the radio for major international airplay, Jessie J enjoyed the significant royalties from it. “‘Party In The USA’ paid my rent for, like, three years,” Jessie J told Glamour UK back in 2015. “Actually, it was way longer than that. That’s where I get most of my money. I write songs. I’m a singer. I love endorsements and stuff, but that’s all added on.” Not bad.^[2]

8 Harry Styles, “Just a Little Bit of Your Heart”

Harry Styles knows a thing or two about penning romantic ballads. The former One Direction standout loves to belt out ballads more than anything else he does on stage or in the studio. And so when it came time for another singer to belt out her own ballad, Harry was right there and ready to write! The singer was Ariana Grande, and the song was “Just a Little Bit of Your Heart.” Harry had decided to visit Grande while she was in the recording studio. Once there, producers Savan Kotecha and Johan Carlsson asked Harry if he’d be down to write a song for her. Just like that! Harry quickly helped put together a track that made it onto her 2014 album My Everything.

Recalling how that all went down—and how it happened so quickly, too—Grande told MTV about it: “[Harry] went into the other room and they were writing for a while and I remember when I heard it I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a really strong verse, that’s really beautiful.’ And then the pre, I was like, ‘wow, that’s a really beautiful pre, that’s a really strong pre!’ And then the chorus, I was, like, crying!” It really was that quick—Harry gave Ariana a hit single for her album in very short order.^[3]

7 Ne-Yo, “Irreplaceable”

By now, Beyoncé’s hit song “Irreplaceable” is a pop culture staple. Just hearing the title alone can get your brain singing the chorus to yourself, and it’ll be stuck in your head rolling around for the rest of the day. (Sorry about that.) But did you know that it was R&B crooner Ne-Yo who initially wrote the track? And not only that, but he at first wanted to keep it for himself to record and perform, rather than farm it out to Beyoncé?

Speaking about it in 2011, Ne-Yo admitted that he regrets giving up the song to another singer, even if it did become a hit. “I honestly wrote that song for myself,” Ne-Yo told Choice FM when they asked him about Queen Bey’s hit. “However, a man singing it comes across a little bit misogynistic, a little bit mean.” So, he gave the song up.

And while he regrets losing out on the track on his own, Ne-Yo also learned quite a bit from the entire process. “That song actually taught me a very interesting lesson,” he mused. “Men and women don’t actually think that much differently in the grand scheme of things.”^[4]

6 Ke$ha, “Till The World Ends”

Ke$ha may have risen to national (and international) public consciousness with her hit single “Tik Tok,” but she was recording tracks long before that. She was also writing tracks, too. And many of the songs that she penned wound up in the hands of other artists who made them famous! Among her many songwriting credits include tracks for artists like The Veronicas and the K-pop group Girls’ Generation, both going down in the mid-2000s. But did you know she also wrote for pop superstar Britney Spears?

The track “Till The World Ends,” which appeared on Spears’ 2011 album Femme Fatale, was a Ke$ha-written track. Obviously, it takes teams of people to make pop stars happen. Plenty of producers work behind the scenes to engineer and perfect the sound of every single song. But as it turned out, Kesha helped give Britney Spears’ mid-career run another boost by offering up a catchy and powerful track to turn heads.^[5]

5 Sia, “Pretty Hurts”

Sia wrote the song “Pretty Hurts” with the intention of having it recorded by Katy Perry. The only problem was that Katy didn’t check her email! So, Sia penned the song with the high hopes that it would one day become a hit. But when she didn’t hear from Katy, she turned around and sent the song to Rihanna. Sadly, Rihanna’s manager also sat on the song for a very long time—for eight months, to be exact—without doing anything with it. Frustrated by that, Sia turned around and shared the track with Beyoncé’s management team. Immediately, they loved it. Unlike Katy and Rihanna before them, Beyoncé closed the deal.

That left Katy pretty mad in the end! After Beyoncé’s version began to rise up the charts, Katy contacted Sia with a message: “I’m pretty hurt you never sent me this song.” Seeing the humor in that comment, and realizing that Katy must not have known that she actually was Sia’s first choice for the song, the songwriter-turned-singer responded with three little words: “check your email.” Good advice, that. Better to check the inbox than miss out on a potentially career-changing opportunity.^[6]

4 Avril Lavigne, “Breakaway”

Kelly Clarkson may be forever and inextricably tied to the hit “Breakaway,” but she wasn’t the one who wrote it. It wasn’t a bunch of faceless, nameless producers, either: it was actually Avril Lavigne! The Canadian pop-punk singer might not seem like a likely source of a power ballad like that, but she wrote the track along with two songwriters while reflecting on her difficult youth. Avril wanted to capture that with words and put it down to music, and bam! We’d say she did a pretty darn good job—even if the track eventually went to Kelly to record and release.

Speaking about Avril’s songwriting abilities to the outlet Songwriter Universe back in 2012, Bridget Benenate—who co-wrote the song with Avril—explained: “Avril talked about her life and what things were important to her – she was the inspiration for the song.” That’s amazing. It’s quite the shock to learn that the girl who was made famous by the goofy and lighthearted single “Sk8er Boi” had so much of an inner life as to write “Breakaway” and turn it into such a hit. We bet Kelly Clarkson feels quite a bit of gratitude for that one.^[7]

3 Bruno Mars, “Forget You”

Cee Lo Green was thrust into mainstream pop success when his acerbic pop track “Forget You” was released in 2010. The song is about a spurned guy who is mad at being passed over by a girl, and it was an immediate hit. But it wasn’t created and developed by Cee Lo Green alone. In fact, Cee Lo was actually just the recipient of some very good luck bestowed upon him by a much bigger superstar singer: Bruno Mars!

In 2011, Bruno revealed during an appearance on the Graham Norton Show over in the UK that he was indeed the writer of “Forget You” before giving it to Cee Lo to record. Oh, and the song had a much more risqué title at first: “F**k You.” Yeah, THAT! Obviously, you can’t really get radio airplay with a song that goes by that title. So Bruno cleaned it up a bit, shipped it off to Cee Lo Green to record, and the rest is history.^[8]

2 Dolly Parton, “I Will Always Love You”

We will forever link “I Will Always Love You” with the incredible singer Whitney Houston, as well as the use of the song in the 1992 movie The Bodyguard. But the original song is actually several decades older than that—and it wasn’t written by Whitney, a bunch of producers, or even a team of R&B artists who knew they’d find a singer to really belt it out. It was first written by Dolly Parton! When she penned the powerful ballad in 1974, Dolly was broken up over having to leave her mentor Porter Wagoner’s show and strike out on her own. So she wrote the track to explain to him through music just what he’d meant to her career and life.

“I said, ‘Porter, sit down. I’ve written something I think you need to hear,’” Dolly told the newspaper The Tennessean in 2015. “I started singing ‘I Will Always Love You,’ and he started crying. When I finished, he said, ‘Well, hell! If you feel that strong about it, just go on—providing I get to produce that record because that’s the best song you ever wrote.’” Wagoner certainly wasn’t wrong about that… even if it took the rest of the world another 18 years to fully appreciate it when Whitney made it her own.^[9]

1 Sia, “Diamonds”

Sia has already appeared on this list for giving Beyoncé a track that she’d originally meant for Katy Perry, and now here she pops up again! The Australian singer was such a prolific songwriter in her spare time that she actually wrote another massive hit for another separate artist: “Diamonds” for Rihanna! And to make things even more impressive, there’s this fact, too: Sia wrote “Diamonds” in only 14 minutes. Talk about a sudden flurry of inspiration!

In 2018, prolific pop music producing duo Tor Erik Hermansen and Mikkel Storleer Eriksen spoke to Entertainment Weekly about recording that song for Rihanna. They revealed that the Barbadian singer loved Sia’s lyrics so much, as well as adoring how Sia sounded when she sang the track as a demo, that Rihanna spent days making sure to get the inflection and attitude just right. “Rihanna really went to work on that song because she wanted to capture that character that Sia has in her voice,” Hermansen told EW at the time. “It was very important for her to capture that feeling, and she did it so well that Sia thought it was her [own voice on the song].” Pretty impressive on both counts.^[10]