Alumni Julian Bunetta '01 and John Ryan '10 Propel One Direction to No. 1

Julian Bunetta '01 and John Ryan '10 had a hand in shaping the songs and sounds on the last three record-breaking albums from the English-Irish pop group, One Direction, with another album in the works.

Curtis Killian

August 9, 2015

Jamie Scott, Julian Bunetta '01, and John Ryan '10 at the 2014 BMI London Awards, being honored for their song "Story of My Life."

Providing songwriting and production for three of the last four studio albums from One Direction(Opens in a new window), Berklee alumni Julian Bunetta '01(Opens in a new window) and John Ryan '10(Opens in a new window) have helped the English-Irish boy band become the only group to debut at No. 1 with its first four albums on the Billboard 200 chart.

"Hopefully this one will be the fifth," Bunetta says over the phone from a California studio where he's hard at work on the imminent, eagerly awaited follow-up to the band's last chart-topping album, Four, despite recent news of a long-planned hiatus for the group.

Bunetta, a promising drummer who studied with jazz drummer-percussionist and prolific session player Joe Porcaro (Frank Sinatra, Toto, Madonna), came to Berklee to study composition and production. But after obtaining a publishing deal with Warner/Chappell Music, he decided to remain in Los Angeles to launch his career, one which now includes fellow producer and singer/songwriter John Ryan, who graduated Berklee in 2010 with a degree in contemporary writing and production.

The following is an excerpt of the phone call with Bunetta.

On Landing His First Deal

I was intending to go to Berklee again the next year but when I came home for the summer I was looking for ways to make money, and I had a beat that was being cut by an artist, so I was introduced to Judy Stakee at Warner/Chappell Publishing. My dad [producer/drummer Peter Bunetta] knew her and worked with her before, and I was just playing her my beats and demos to see if I could produce any tracks for her songwriters for her demos. And she heard my music and she immediately offered me a publishing deal, so I chose to take the publishing deal and I didn't come back to Berklee.

I figured the best way to get songwriting experience was to write with professional songwriters, so I did that for a bunch of years and got several cuts, and kept working as a producer, and working every genre. My first cuts were country music, and I worked with a lot of hip-hop artists, and then I was doing pop stuff and rock bands, and scoring commercials, and doing whatever I could do to get better.

Watch the video for "Drag Me Down," written by Bunetta, Ryan, and Jamie Scott. The record-breaking song became the most-streamed track in a single day on Spotify, with nearly 5 million global streams upon its release:

Working with One Direction

An opportunity came around to write for One Direction because I worked on the first season of X Factor in the U.S. and one of the people who worked on the music team was Tyler Brown, A&R at Syco Music—Simon Cowell's record label that One Direction is signed to—and after working together for the show Tyler asked me if I wanted to write any songs for One Direction. And at the time they had released one album, and in everybody's mind they were just a teeny-bopper band off a TV show in the U.K., but they sold a lot of records.

So I thought it was a good opportunity to work. Tyler scheduled me to write with a guy named Jamie Scott(Opens in a new window) [British singer/songwriter and producer] for two days. It was myself, John Ryan, and Jamie Scott. The first day we wrote a song called "C'mon C'mon" and the second day we wrote a song called "She's Not Afraid" [both appear on their second album Take Me Home]. We worked on the productions of them...sent them, and everybody liked them.

We cut those two tunes, and we met the band, and we all hit it off really well and they asked me to produce two other outside songs, which I did, and then I wrote one more. So[...]when the third album came around, the original writing and production team that had done most of the first and second albums, they decided to go to other ventures or other life things. The band wanted to start writing, so they asked if I wanted to write with them. I took that opportunity and the rest is history.

The reason I said yes and I wanted to write with them [is] I thought they were just awesome guys to hang out with and I thought it would be a lot of fun, and it was just another opportunity to make something great, and I was given a platform for people to be able to hear the music if we did make something great—it was a platform for as many people as possible to be able to hear that music.

It's just like getting up to bat, you get those moments where you practice and practice, and you find yourself the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded, and all the practice ends up in hitting a home run.