Dan Wilson

Dan Wilson, born in 1961 and a product of the Minneapolis scene, has been called the songwriter other songwriters look up to, and the résumé backs it up. He was in the Minneapolis band Trip Shakespeare before fronting Semisonic, and he wrote "Closing Time" for them, a song that earned him a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Song.

Then he started writing for, and with, everybody else. He co-wrote "Not Ready to Make Nice" with The Chicks, which won Song of the Year at the Grammys in 2007, and "Someone Like You" with Adele, whose 21 won him Album of the Year as a producer in 2012. He co-wrote and produced "Treacherous" with Taylor Swift for Red, and produced her re-recording of it in 2021. With Chris Stapleton he wrote "White Horse", which won the Grammy for Best Country Song in 2024 and the CMA award for Song of the Year; with Jon Batiste he wrote "It Never Went Away" for the documentary American Symphony, which got an Academy Award nomination and won a Grammy in 2025. Pink, Weezer, Mitski, Laufey and John Legend are on the long list of collaborators too.

His own records have come in between: the Sugar E.P. in 2003, the album Free Life in 2007, and Re-Covered in 2017, where he sings songs he wrote for other artists.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.