Brilliant resources

As a regular feature, I’ll post here resources I’ve found useful along the way.

Chances are, when you hit town in Nashville you will need to do some fine-tuning of your writing if you want to be considered viable here. When your songs have to go toe-to-toe up against pro writers who are actively writing every day, and when those songs are to be heard by people in the business who literally hear hundreds of songs each week, it’s going to take some serious chops on your part for those songs to be heard. As a writer you gotta be fighting fit.

Add to that your need to get to know the lay of land, who’s who, how does the business work, etc and you can see you’ll be putting real hours in, delving into all the resources you can get your hands on.

The single best resource I’ve found so far, bar none, is Deanna Walker’s Monday night class at Vanderbilt, The Blair Hit Songwriters Series. This adult ed class meets all semester long, fall and spring. The format is simple: nearly every night accomplished pros come and share their insights on songwriting and the music business. They field questions and sometimes they’ll play a song or two, and sometimes they’ll critique songs students bring in. Memorable guests I’ve learned a great deal from include Craig Wiseman, Roger Murrah, Kathy Mattea, Bonnie Baker, Melanie Howard, Mary Gauthier, Rick Beresford, Pat Pattison and Cliff Audretch.

This is an opportunity to hear the real deal, to meet people actively involved in the business, to get brilliant insights into the songwriting business. It also invariably affirms my love of the field – I am often struck by the integrity of the publishers and writers who visit the class. This is in stark contrast to the general jadedness of the business at large.

On occasion, Deanna Walker will cover various technical aspects of writing, and will critique students' songs. She has a finely developed, nuanced sense of melodic and harmonic structure; her input is very constructive.

The class runs somewhere under $300 per semester and is worth every penny.

writers nights 1

Went to another writers night last night. I've got several objectives when I go out to hear other writers. One is to hear good songs, the ones that fire me up and knock me out with their fresh approach, miles of heart, clear vision, or dazzling way with the craft.

Another is to find my peeps, to get to know who the writers are out there hitting the streets, working their way up, so I can find some co-writers and buddies.

Also, there's getting my ear to the ground, listening for what trends are taking off, what elements people are weaving into their tunes to give them some kick. I like stuff that feels real (this eliminates virtually any contemporary country song about a beach for me BTW), that feels smart but not head-y, and that seems like the words and music feel good to sing.

So far I've found two writers in town I'd never heard of who knock my socks off. I'm curious to see how their careers progress. One is Craig Monday, who writes simple, straightahead powderkegs, all based on his family and his small town Tennessee upbringing. There's enough craft, storytelling, and good old gothic New South writing to keep most campers happy. His song "Last Words", where the verses are strings of last lines people said before they died, is unspeakably good. I just stand there and shake my head, completely overcome by emotion, when he sings it.

Last night I got to see my other new fave, John Russell. I don't know whether John's been cast into a novelty song ghetto - I hope not. The first thing you notice about his songs is that they are funny, real, and rural. Beyond that, they're beautifully put together. Both these guys inspire me to take things up several notches.

song business

• 
  I just stumbled across a helpful summary of the business side of how songs make it to the radio, how songwriters get paid, what publishers do - all that good stuff, written in plain English by a songwriter. It's at the Biz.
  
  Scroll down a bit till you find the post from Monday, August 15, 2005. (The first post is a bit of scree, after apparently Mr. Biz sat through one too many pisspoor club shows...)
  

over the rainbow

Yesterday, poking through a reference book on American songwriters, I came across the checkered journey Arlen and Harburg's song, Over the Rainbow, had on its way to becoming part of the fabric of our culture.

Harold Arlen was under pressure to write a lush "picture song" and he fretted over it mightily, with not much to show for his worries. One day the main theme of the melody came to him all of a piece. He added a bridge the next day and delightedly brought it to his lyricist. E.Y. Harburg didn't like it; he thought it was too grand for a Kansas girl to sing and too different from the simpler style of the film's other songs.

Looking for an advocate for his new melody, Arlen turned to Ira Gershwin who gave him a thumbs up. This was enough to set Harburg to work crafting the the lyrics. When it was done, the publisher didn't like it. He hated the octave leap on the word "somewhere" (too hard to sing, he thought), and he thought the middle section was far too simplistic for the rest of the song. Nonetheless, the song was made part of the score. It was the first song Judy Garland heard from the project and she loved it. This apparently didn't hold much sway. The song was cut from the movie three separate times!

Fortunately, each time it was cut, associate producer Arthur Freed stormed the front office and demanded it be put back in. He and Arlen never quit fighting for the song, and Over the Rainbow went on to win an Oscar for Best Song in 1939.

downsides, part 1

• As you might guess, there are downsides to writing songs for country radio.
  
  One is, nearly everybody thinks country music is awful these days. This one doesn't bother me so much. Because I've listened to country since I was a kid, I can truthfully report that nearly everybody has always thought country music is awful. It's always had the honor of being one of the most disliked genres, bar none.
  
  More seriously, the odds are against you making it as a writer. Let's look at the rough numbers. First, who else is trying to get cuts besides you? Estimates are that there are over 800 writers in Nashville who've had #1 hits. 3000+ who've had top 10 hits. 8000+ who've had album cuts. Plus the untold hordes who, like me, want to break through and get a staff-writing deal, working our ways up the ladder to getting cuts of our own. The serious writers are writing several songs a week. That would make a whole lotta people with a whole hellofa lot of songs they'd like to get cut.
  
  Next, look at the recording opportunities this pool of writers is aiming for. Doing a quick scan of Billboard's top 75 country albums of 2005 , we can knock a bunch of albums out of the running right away because they're greatest hits packages which typically feature only one new song. Then,scratch another third because they're spoken word,or because the artist is also a writer and either writes all his/her material OR is working with the most successful writers in town. So let's just say that there were roughly 55 top releases last year that accepted outside material, each album having ten tracks. That brings us to 550 cuts last year for outside writers.
  
  Now it's great to get an album cut, it helps you get noticed and you make some dough with every CD sold. Be aware, though, that the money from airplay works out to - very roughly - ten times the money from album sales. All those songwriters buying houses do it with hit songs on the radio, not with album cuts. So if it's going to take a hit on the radio to break through to a life of luxury or even just home ownership, let's take a peek at the number one hits of 2005. Looks like maybe three of these hits were co-written by the artist and their hit co-writers. So we are now down to 16 songs penned by outside writers.
  
  So roughly 11,500 songwriters in Nashville, writing upwards of 3 songs a week fifty weeks out of the year, are generating 172,500+ songs a year, vying for those 550 album slots and those even more precious 16 singles slots that became number ones. These numbers are fairly fast and sloppy, but they point in a general way to the uphill climb the writer has.
  
  They also give a hint of the tsunami of material anyone working in the business is beseiged with daily. With that in mind, I figure most people who are in a position to say "yes" to me in any career-advancing capacity are surrounded by a nearly impenetrable wall of people whose job it is to say no; surely that's the only way the decision makers could ever actually get anything done.

introduction

What's it take to make it as a hit writer on Music Row? Well, that's what I aim to find out.

I am actively pursuing writing country soungs for radio in Nashville. Looking around I find almost nothing in the land of Blog about the country music business. I hope this will become one jumping-off place for those of us working at writing songs other people love to sing, as well as for folks who love a great song.

I plan to write about the various leads, opportunities, dead ends, resources, squirrels, sharks and angels I meet along the way. If you find something useful here, let me know. I also hope to chart my progress knocking on doors and making connections.

I'm usually the straightforward, tell it like it is type. It goes against my grain to use a handle in lieu of my name, but here I'll do just that so that I can speak freely when I think something (or someone) is pure crap, or pure gold for that matter. I've got my blinders and shortcomings, as much as the next artistic knucklehead, you'll see that's true soon enough. But it makes my toes curl the way in this town even people I respect often make their living off the wannabes. Sure, some of those wannabes will be tomorrow's hit writers, but the vast majority will soon be dim memories of long past mortgage payments in return for a song critique or a demo session...

And I find that when people are talking up a teacher, a publisher, a demo house, a club, anything remotely connected with a few bucks - they often have a financial interest of some kind. Kinda makes you want to go take a shower when they're done.

I won't be brown-nosing here since nobody knows whose nose is writing this blog. If somebody is doing something good that I'd like to tell you about, you can know I'm just calling 'em as I see 'em.