Marc Blatte has spent a lifetime wandering through the American imagination. Born and raised in New York City, he has been a tenement superintendent, plumber, disco keyboard player, Grammy-nominated songwriter, record producer, advertising composer, and novelist. Along the way, he has danced with Sherry Lansing at the Waldorf, kibbitzed with Joseph Heller in Bridgehampton, served as a class parent alongside Susan Sarandon, and watched The Honeymooners with Bruce Springsteen, who would later record one of Blatte’s songs, “When She Was My Girl,” on his album Only the Strong Survive.
A graduate of Kenyon College and SUNY Purchase, Blatte studied under two remarkable mentors: bestselling novelist Evan Hunter, better known to millions of readers as Ed McBain, and Michael Hammond, the conductor, composer, educator, and future Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. As a senior, Blatte won a statewide composition competition judged by legendary composers Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter. When Hammond suggested that he continue his studies in France with Olivier Messiaen, one of the twentieth century’s most influential composers, Blatte replied that he was headed to New York “to write the hits and shop at Barney’s.” And he did.
His prolific career as a songwriter has earned him a Grammy nomination for the Four Tops’ number-one hit “When She Was My Girl,” later immortalized as a clue in The New York Times crossword puzzle. He received ASCAP’s Most Performed Country Music Award for “Read My Lips” and was one of the writers of “Hands Across America” at the request of Kenny Rogers, Quincy Jones, and Lionel Richie, which led to him earning the Ralph Peer Lifetime Achievement Award. Blatte’s music has appeared in popular culture everywhere from The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live to recent episodes of Nurse Jackie and Bloodline.
As an advertising composer, under the creative and production direction of Jeanne Neary Look, he wrote music and lyrics for over fifty national campaigns for brands like Pepsi, Chrysler, Oldsmobile, Texaco, Goodyear, and Major League Baseball, earning multiple Clio Awards, including Best Music in Advertising. Notably, one of those campaigns was developed under the future publishing phenomenon James Patterson.
His debut novel, Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed, was published by Schaffner Press in 2009 and received enthusiastic praise from major newspapers and acclaimed authors, including Ken Bruen, John Burdett, and Ken Kalfus. NPR’s Linda Wertheimer featured Blatte in a national interview, and the novel later became a clue on Jeopardy! The book has been optioned for film multiple times by notable filmmakers, including Fred Berner and Ray De Felitta.
In 2022, Bruce Springsteen recorded “When She Was My Girl” on his album Only the Strong Survive, describing its songwriters as “modern masters of popular songwriting.” That same year, Blatte’s band, The Distant Thunder, released a critically acclaimed album on Deko/Warner Records, where Blatte co-wrote, produced, and performed the instrumentation, except for one song, which featured a collaboration with legendary musician Eric Weissberg, whose “Dueling Banjos” has become one of the most recognizable pieces of music in film history.
Over the course of a career spanning literature, music, film, advertising, and popular culture, Marc Blatte has built a body of work distinguished by wit, intelligence, irreverence, and a uniquely American voice. His stories are populated by dreamers, hustlers, believers, skeptics, and outsiders—people searching for meaning in a world that rarely gives up its secrets easily.
