Paste Magazine recently published its list of 100 greatest living songwriters. Most of the people you would expect to be there are there - Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Randy Newman. There are a few people I wouldn't have thought of, myself - James Brown, T-Bone Burnett, Cat Stevens (not sure about him), and a whole bunch of writers I've never heard of. For people who are noble and high-minded, that last group would be the point of the list in the first place. After all, what fan of great songwriting wouldn't want to find out about a bunch of great songwriters he/she had not yet heard of?

But of course for most of us, that isn't the point at all. Lists like this do two things for most of us. They give us a chance to prove how hip we are when they agree with our personal choices. And they give us something to complain about when they leave out our personal favorites. It's even better when the list's deviance from our (OK, my) personal taste reveals some perverse hidden bias.

So, who'd Paste leave out? My short list - Stephen Sondheim, Craig Wiseman and Brad Paisley. Sondheim is a Broadway composer/lyricist (West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music) who by any classic songwriting standard is head and shoulders above the rest of the list. Wiseman is a commercial Nashville songwriter, who goes to an office every day to write songs that are sold to people like Tim McGraw and Kenny Chesney, who then make huge hits out of them. Paisley writes country music, too, although primarily for himself.

Why didn't they make the list? My guess is that they're too far from the singer/songwriter mold that passes for normal in the rock/pop world. They don't reveal much about themselves in their songs; they're not confessional in the way that so much modern music is. They're not afraid to write for money. So perhaps they're not even visible as songwriters to the people who voted.

But that was the way it was for years. Nobody really wanted to hear about the deep secrets in George Gershwin's heart, or Cole Porter's trouble getting a girl. (Actually, that's a bad example.) The top songwriters were expected to write songs for characters in shows and movies to sing, or for 'boy singers' and 'girl singers' in big bands.

Of course, it's Paste's list, not mine. All I'm saying is, they could have asked.

Tom Heany