American Songwriter » Michael Kosser

Street Smarts: Songwriting U

Michael Kosser — Mon, 02 May 2011 10:00:16 +0000

Don’t look now, but across the country there are scores of universities offering programs in the music business. And many of these schools offer songwriting instruction as part of the deal. In the face of a shrinking record industry, does this make any sense? I can almost hear the laughter from those who are in the habit of reading this column. “Where’s he going? He teaches songwriting too!” Right you are. Puts me in a position to speak from the inside – well, sort of. First of all, the reason colleges and universities have started these programs is because they draw students. In case you’ve forgotten, money drives almost everything these days, and music business programs would not survive unless they were successful. And apparently many of them are. There are hundreds of thousands of kids around the country who would love to make their living making music, but they don’t know how to get started, and here’s this university telling them they can help. This is American Songwriter, after all, so let me restrict my comments to the songwriting business, if I can. In the Nashville area, there are at least three universities with full-blown music business programs. Because they are all in or near Nashville, they are well connected to the music business in Nashville, and students from these schools often get entry-level jobs on Music Row. But songwriting is a different story. When you find your way into a publishing company to play your songs, the people who listen do not care where your degree comes from, or, for that matter, whether you have a degree in music or anything else. They care about the quality of your songs and whatever talents that might make you a successful singer-songwriter. Can songwriting be taught? Tricky question. There are song forms, rhyme schemes, chord progressions, tricks of phrasing, melody, rhythm, lyric, but most of us learn the craft by listening to songs on the radio, playing them with a band or writing them alone in a small room somewhere. Then there are the social skills involved in co-writing, or the endless quest for that great song idea, and most important, the critical faculty that tells you when your song is finished or if it just doesn’t measure up. The critical faculty can make you look your co-writer in the eye and say, “This song is going nowhere, let’s have lunch and start all over again.” We learn these things by writing song after song, alone or with co-writers. The better the co-writer, the greater the learning possibilities. The teacher can inspire. The teacher can help put the creative process in motion. But in the end, the pupil learns to write good songs by writing a lot of songs. At the bottom of this page it says I am the director of the Cumberland University Songwriters Institute. But I never intend to offer a degree in songwriting. I give my students enough information about the business so they know there is a real world of songwriting out there, and here is how to pursue it. But I want them to get a degree in something that will help them earn a living while they are pursuing a music career. I don’t believe in starving artists. I want my students to have a life – a life that does not need to be validated by having hits on the radio or lucrative concert tours. Who knows if there will even be hits on the radio ten years from now? Please understand that I do not discourage my students from pursuing a music career. On the contrary, I take them – all of them – to Music Row where they meet publishers, songpluggers, studio people, record people – people who have had successful careers and can tell you what it takes to have one. Some of the students get a chance to play their songs for these professionals in their offices, and the professionals respond as they do to all the others who play them songs. They don’t play down to my students just because they’re students. They strip the romance and glitter away, and my students love it because they get to experience Music Row as it really is, not as the media tells us it is. But I can’t help but wonder, except for the schools located in music centers like Nashville, New York or Los Angeles, how are all those colleges and universities around the country able to offer their students a live industry experience? Do they take their students on long field trips? Do their instructors and professors have the background to convey that experience? Or do they teach out of a textbook? I’m not trying to be snide. It might be a failure of my own imagination. Maybe those schools have marvelous programs. I do believe that a good songwriting teacher can lead his students in the right direction. If I didn’t believe that, I would not be teaching. A good songwriting teacher can shape a student’s attitude, and help show a student the myriad influences of multiple genres. Any career songwriter is going to have to learn a whole lot more than any teacher can offer. A teacher can inspire a student, but to become a successful songwriter involves leaping into the business with both feet, and that requires the kind of guts you can’t get from an academic degree.

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Street Smarts: A Different World

Michael Kosser — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 12:29:41 +0000

Song publishing was once a simple, straightforward process: Listen to the songs your songwriters have written. Demo the best of them. Pitch them to the appropriate producers and artists. Rejoice when one of the songs gets recorded. Rejoice again when the song is selected to be a single. Rejoice yet again as the song climbs the charts. Rejoice again when the mechanical and performance royalties come rolling in. Those were the good old days. Not surprisingly, life at the publishing companies today is different. Just ask Terry Wakefield, senior vice president of creative at the mighty Sony/ATV Music Publishing organization. Terry commands as much respect as any song man on Music Row. As with all aspects of the music business, technology has changed everything – for better or for worse. Technology has made songplugging a beautiful thing if you have great connections with the artists. If a big artist is on the road and he’s planning to record as soon as he comes off the current tour, it’s never been easier to run new songs by him/her. Just send the artist an MP3. He or she will download the songs on the bus and have time to listen at his/her leisure. The ease and portability of music in the digital age is a plus. “I still take my four or five songs to pitch meetings,” Wakefield says, “but I also have an iPad loaded with tons of songs, so if our conversation brings a song to mind, I’ve got it right there to play.” Gone are the days of a songplugger walking into an A&R pitch meeting loaded down with demos. You can bring a whole year’s catalogue with you and come up with just the right song, at the right moment. But the biggest change, Wakefield says, is the role publishers play in the careers of their songwriters. “We have to wear managerial hats for our writers,” he says, “so not only will they write with the right writers, but with the right artists.” In the old days – creatively speaking – songwriters were much more independent. They’d simply write by themselves or choose co-writers and write the best they could. These days, it’s important for songwriters to network with other writers that bring professionalism and experience to the table. Those are the writers a plugger wants his writers to write with. The songplugger also wants his writers writing with artists who like to cut their own songs – artists who don’t just sit in the room dreaming of Grammys while the co-writer toils with the muse. Publishers can’t have their talented songwriters wasting time on co-writes that don’t have power behind them. Publishers are also extremely concerned about future revenue streams. We all know that record companies have been struggling with shrinking sales while publishers have continued to prosper on their performing income, but the industry consensus is that shrinking ad revenues at radio stations will mean tough negotiations between broadcasters and ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. That could mean a drop in performance income to go with the sharp drops we’ve experienced in record sales, says Wakefield. There are new revenue streams coming all the time, thanks largely to the Internet, but, he says, “It’ll take some time before the Internet makes up for the revenue we’re losing in our more traditional areas.” Inevitably the publishing industry will find a way to monetize and prosper off the many commercial websites using published music on the Internet. There are tens of thousands of commercial Internet sites, from YouTube to the tiniest streaming audio station, and every one of them that uses music from the performing rights organization catalogues must pay license fees. It’s up to the industry to find them, and gradually they will figure out how to do it. Now, I know, there are readers here who hate the music industry because it dares to prosecute people who steal their music. But I believe it is right that songwriters and publishers get paid for the music they have created and nurtured and right now the industry is heading toward a tipping point. They must find a way to replace lost revenues or the music industry as we know it will disappear. Before the industry truly finds a way to flourish in the digital age, publishing companies could face some problems. In the old days, Nashville’s biggest and best publishing companies were owned and operated locally by individuals who loved publishing and understood that it was a cyclical business. Today, many Nashville publishing companies answer to tough executives in New York and London who are obsessed with the bottom line in each of their divisions. If the execs see a shrinking bottom line in Nashville, their solution might well be downsizing, relying more on catalog and less on new music, or some other counterintuitive measure that would sacrifice long-term success for short-term profitability. I believe that many of these publishing companies will continue to survive and even thrive. And they will continue to build songwriting careers. Yours could be one of them. For years I’ve been writing about the specifics in this column. I’ll make a general point right now. Professional songwriting is a profession. You have to learn the craft, and you have to learn the business. You can’t treat it like a hobby. Creating a career in almost anything worthwhile involves finding your way inside, meeting people, and convincing them that you’ve got something they need. Skill is important. Understanding the product is important (and don’t get mad because I use the word product). Persistence is important, and the ability to project the right attitude is important. The music publishing business may be changing. The music itself changes. But the qualities that dictate success pretty much stay the same.

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Street Smarts: The Patsy Cline Trilogy

Michael Kosser — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 17:46:22 +0000

I’ve said this before: There are hits, and there are hits. Hundreds of country songwriters can boast of at least one song that made its way to the top of the country charts, and in October or November, garnered an ASCAP or BMI award that they hung proudly on the wall of their office. Listeners all over America heard that song and assumed they were hearing a genuine hit song that was receiving repeated airplay all over America, because America wanted to hear that song… repeatedly. The truth is that many country “hits” (and pop hits too) are strictly “radio hits,” songs that are played on the radio because music directors or consultants believe it fits their listeners’ need for background music that neither stimulates nor offends them. These tunes may have considerable merit, but usually they are with us for a couple of dozen weeks and then disappear, with an occasional reappearance on the radio as an oldie, or as a filler on a vintage compilation album. But then there are hits, some of which become classics, legends. A career songwriter is lucky to have one of these, because if he or she is just a bit wise, that hit can keep him or her in necessities and goodies for the rest of their lives. You can get a hint about a song like that the first time around because it will probably cause a huge spike in the sales of a CD during the time it is playing on the radio. If it is a super-hit, that spike may last through the life of the CD and even push that artist up to the next sales level for years to come, especially if it is followed by another super-hit. Another way to judge a super-hit is by the effect it has on an artist’s booking price. There have been artists who had multiple Number 1 hits who never were able to command high booking prices. In the old days super-hits became standards because other artists – dozens of other artists or hundreds of other artists – also recorded the song. That doesn’t happen much (at all?) today, but there are still songs that become modern classics. But what makes a song a classic? I guess I’m reluctant to analyze a song and try to isolate the qualities that made it legendary, because songs are so subjective. The very popularity that makes a song like “Old Man River,” or “Moon River,” so ubiquitous for so long can also, after years and years of exposure, make it seem like a cliché and then folks start to make fun of it. But I do want to discuss three other songs, released as singles one after another, all classics. They are “I Fall To Pieces,” “Crazy,” and “She’s Got You.” They are the Patsy Cline Trilogy. These songs were not Patsy’s first hits; in fact, “I Fall To Pieces” hit the country charts four years after her first hit, “Walkin’ After Midnight.” In between those two, Patsy had very little record activity. Written by Hank Cochran and Harlan Howard, “I Fall To Pieces” was a Billboard Number 1 country record (Top 12 pop) that stayed on the country charts for 39 weeks, an almost unheard of feat of longevity for that time. Its enormous popularity paved the way for her next two classics. The third record of this trilogy, “She’s Got You” – also Billboard Number 1 country (Top 14 pop) – was written by Cochran alone. Both of these records were huge sellers for Patsy and helped establish her as the definitive female country and pop torch singer of her time. Both songs were melodically and lyrically extremely powerful, and Owen Bradley’s production was flawless in fitting these recordings into both country and pop radio. Both songs are undisputed classics that can be found on pop and country oldies playlists as well as countless record compilations. But the gem of this trilogy is the second of the three, Willie Nelson’s “Crazy,” one of the great songs of any genre over the past 50 years. “Crazy” was a Number 1 country and Top 10 pop in 1962. Acquired by Tree International in 1969 as part of the Pamper publishing catalog, for decades “Crazy” was Tree’s top-earning copyright, and Tree was (with Acuff-Rose) one of Nashville’s two greatest publishing companies. What was it that made “Crazy” such a great song? We can talk about its beautifully simple lyrics, it’s rangy yet singable melody, and Willie’s unique (for the time) chord sensibilities. We could sing the praises of Floyd Cramer and The Jordanaires for their incredible performances on the record and of course we could rave about Patsy’s very special treatment of the song. The Jordanaires’ Gordon Stoker remembers that Patsy and Owen Bradley had a major argument in the studio over how to record the song. “I think the reason she did such a super job is she was about half mad [when she did her vocal] on that song,” he says. We can always speculate what it was that made a song a legendary hit. But in the end, the only certainty is that the folks loved it, and continued to love it year after year. I can only suggest that people acquire a copy, listen to it, and listen to it again. Slip it in your computer or CD player, get comfortable, and just let that opening piano riff into your soul. We might not know what makes a song a classic, but after the fact, we often know one when we hear it.

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Street Smarts: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Michael Kosser — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:52:33 +0000

We all have a pile of songs that we’ve written over the years. Some are forgettable. Some are truly memorable and then some become indelible treasures, songs with a place in the American songbook, songs that decades after creation are still playing on the air, or on the internet somewhere in the world 24 hours a day. If you have just one song like this, it can change your life forever. Let me tell you about Ronnie Wilkins. Ronnie was raised in a small town in North Carolina, with an intense desire to write hit songs but also a longing to live a laid back and low-key lifestyle. He achieved the first part in Nashville, and just a few years later moved to California, where he still resides, living as he wants to live, and not really missing the music business. Back in the ‘60s, he and his co-writer John Hurley were living in Nashville and writing for Music Row’s hottest publisher, Tree International. At the time the pop world was still able to listen to Nashville songs without stereotyping them in advance. Consequently, Wilkins and Hurley had a succession of pop hits, capped by the timeless classic, “Son Of A Preacher Man.” As a teenager in the early ‘60s, Wilkins came to Nashville with a tape in hand and started writing with a talented singer-songwriter named John Hurley. By 1967 they had had enough songwriting success to make them a highly respected writing duo in the pop world. Trade magazines were running articles praising the soulful creativity of this rising hit-making team, and their publisher Tree thought of them in the same breath as Roger Miller, Curly Putman and Bill Anderson, to mention just a few talents whose songs graced the growing Tree catalog. Lightning struck when these two kids met Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a fascinating place that was becoming one of the hottest pop and soul recording centers in the nation. “I was playing organ on an Aretha Franklin session,” Ronnie remembers. “We were in the control room when [Wexler] asked me and John, ‘Why don’t you guys write a song for Aretha?’” Producers often say stuff like that to hot writers, more as a courtesy than a real request. But Wexler was serious, and Hurley and Wilkins knew it. “A few days went by and John and I were in our writing room and were trying to come up with something,” Ronnie recalls. “We were thinking of Aretha, and her father was a preacher and both of my grandfathers were preachers. I said, ‘She’s the daughter of a preacher man and you might say I’m the son of a preacher man,’ and that’s how we came up with the title. It took us half an hour, maybe 45 minutes, to write the song.” Wexler loved the song. Two or three weeks later, he cut it with Aretha, and at the time he thought it didn’t fit the album they were doing. It was too gospel-sounding for her, but he was planning to record Dusty Springfield in Memphis. In early 1968, Springfield recorded “Son Of A Preacher Man” and toward the end of the year it was released on the LP Dusty in Memphis, and it became the song that defined Wilkins’ songwriting career. It was a Top 10 pop hit in the United States and Number 1 in England and all over Europe. Dozens of Hurley-Wilkins songs were recorded by artists like Waylon Jennings, Elton John, The Everly Brothers, John Denver, Wayne Newton, Natalie Merchant, Foo Fighters, Tanya Tucker and hundreds of other artists from all over the world. Their songs were making Hurley and Wilkins a lot of money. They moved from Nashville to California to work on a pop album Hurley was doing for RCA, and then over time Wilkins began to drift away from his songwriting career. But his songs continued to take care of him. In fact, some of the songs – especially “Son Of A Preacher Man” and the anthemic “Love Of The Common People” – were so timeless that as the years passed their earnings from airplay and sales continued to increase. Send a classic out into the world and you can never tell what adventures will ensue. “Son Of A Preacher Man” was featured in the Quentin Tarantino classic Pulp Fiction. That earned Wilkins a substantial one-time sync fee, but the movie also went on to become a worldwide best-selling DVD, and spawned a top-selling classic soundtrack. “‘Preacher Man’ is the premier song in the movie, and that brought the song back stronger than ever,” says Ronnie. Worldwide, the soundtrack sold millions of copies. The south coast of California may be an expensive place to live but thanks to his magical song catalog, Ronnie was up for it. The song muse had almost disappeared from Ronnie’s life, but life was good for a man who saw the Southern California lifestyle as a rare privilege. Then, in the late ‘90s, a popular rap group, Cypress Hill, sampled “Son Of A Preacher Man,” and wrote a song called “Hits From The Bong” around that sample. “I was getting my royalty statements from Sony and BMI,” recalls Ronnie. “They had page after page of [royalties from] ‘Hits From The Bong’ and I didn’t even know what that was. So I called Sony and they explained about sampling. Next thing I know it was Number 1 on the hip-hop charts, Number 1 on the rap charts. The album sold over five million copies just in the States, and I don’t know how many overseas. I read an article that said ‘Hits From The Bong’ was the standard song for college students and preppy teens.” Ronnie may not greet every dawn with a new songwriting inspiration, but when we sat down to write this past August, I learned quickly that he’s still got the chops to pull off a hit song. He may never write another great classic, but then again he might, because he still has those days when something inside of him pushes him to his piano, and demands that he start that ineffable process of blending melody, lyric, rhythm and phrasing into song. His fingers find the keys, his mind hits on a phrase, and the process begins anew.

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Street Smarts: One-Stop Star-Making

Michael Kosser — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:00:43 +0000

A few months back, a great Nashville record executive announced he was leaving his job as head of the Nashville office of one of the world’s premier record companies. He was the essence of power in the industry. He had built many of the biggest star brands in country music. He could survive anything. And then he pulled out. I’m not going to call him and ask why he left. But I’m certain he hasn’t lost his passion for either the music or the business in music business. He will turn up again. My guess is he will be running a new kind of company, freed from the limitations of the old label model. It is foolish for songwriters and publishers to pretend they can go on doing business the same way we did it before. I know professional songwriters today who continue to write every day with their songwriting buddies. They turn out some very good songs and it’s still possible to get a Tim McGraw cut, or a Blake Shelton cut, or a Reba McEntire cut without writing with the artist. But make no mistake, the wonderful old model of writers sitting in their lairs writing great songs for the public, demoing those songs and handing them to their songpluggers for an even playing field song contest with a major cut being the prize for the legitimate winners – that old model is going away faster than you can say, well, “that old model is going away.” The major publishers, as I have said before, are looking for young singer-songwriters. Sometimes they will sign a veteran, non-singing songwriter if that veteran has a great recent track record. The major record labels are also looking for young singer-songwriters. If you have a good look, can sing some and are not a confessed songwriter, the label will make you into one, legitimately or otherwise. So if the old record model is going away, what’s going to replace it? Here is my guess. You may recall that I have talked about so-called “360” record deals, where the labels not only make money off record sales, they make money off all the artists’ income streams, like concerts, merchandise sales, publishing income and songwriting income. Industry reaction to the “360” deal has been largely negative. People make it into a morality issue. The label is greedy, they say. They want a piece of the artist’s very soul. Blah blah blah. But here I have to sympathize with the labels. They are fighting for their corporate lives. And they have a point. Labels do two things well. First, they can take a total unknown and, by shipping and promoting recordings to radio stations, they can make that person a known brand within a few months. Also, once they have made that newcomer a familiar voice on the radio, they know how to get product out to where people will buy it. Let us not forget that at little Sun Records, Elvis Presley was a regional artist capable of a country hit here and there. Then Elvis moved over to RCA and, yes, “Heartbreak Hotel” was a great record and, yes, Elvis had this great look, charisma and sound, but it was the power and credibility of RCA that made radio believe in the music and the charisma. The labels may have made mistakes over the years, but it is not their fault that the Internet has made plastic an obsolete sales product. The labels are saying, “We are the people who make you a star, we are the reason you play big auditoriums and sell a million T-shirts, why shouldn’t we participate in all those revenue streams that we made possible?” When an old-line record company tries to do this, it seems like a cheat. But suppose instead of a record company, you start a management company that just happens to promote their artists like a record company does? Managers have traditionally taken 15 to 20 percent of all their artists’ revenue streams and the industry considers that a legitimate share. What a plus it would be for the artists if the management company did it all – publishing, promoting, recording – a one-stop hit-making company. Well, there are those who would argue that a manager is a necessary tool to protect the artist from the excesses of publishers and labels, and that putting all under one roof would give them too much power. But most successful artists have a music attorney who can protect them against management excesses. I’m not saying one-stop star-making is perfect, or even better. I’m saying it’s possible that the next big thing in the music business is the one-stop star-maker. In fact, it’s probably already out there, I just don’t know it because Cumberland University is my ivory tower. These new management-cum-record labels (and publishers) will have to be very sharp in keeping up with all the new Internet ideas that are eating into the role of radio as the exposure medium for their artists. But they will. And in the end, the record companies will not have gone away, they will simply have a broader role in star-building. Should new artists work with these new companies? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s a business decision they will be making, not a moral decision.

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Street Smarts: Watch Out! They’re Out To Get You!

Michael Kosser — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:00:58 +0000

If you write enough hits in your life, sooner or later somebody will accuse you of plagiarism. Just an hour before I started writing this, I got a call from a friend of mine who has written some huge hits. Seems he’s been exchanging e-mails with some fool who claims that my friend and his co-writer had stolen one of his biggest hits from a friend of his. The crux of the e-mails went something like this: “Yeah, Ol’ Hoot (fictitious name) told me that he brought his song to your co-writer back in 19-- and your co-writer brought it to you and the two of you finished it up, the year before Barney Bigstar (fictitious name) went into the studio and cut it.” “Uh-huh,” said my buddy. “Well, we actually wrote the song two years before you say we did and the copyright date backs us up. Furthermore, my co-writer and I are honorable enough men that false accusations like this really bother us.” “Yeah, well, Ol’ Hoot’s been dead for a long time and I’m just trying to do the right thing for his family.” “I’ll bet you are. Why don’t you do the right thing by not getting them dragged into a lawsuit featuring libel and slander. I don’t know where you got this nonsense, but you haven’t a clue about how the song was really written. I thought I ought to tell you that our lawyers are really good!” Why do they do it? One of the great things about American Songwriter magazine is that it serves a very diverse audience. Many of its readers are professionals who have made a fair-to-good living at their craft. Many are amateurs who are making a really strong, good faith effort to become professionals. Many are amateurs with benign dreams of writing a hit, but without the drive and confidence necessary to find their way into the industry. Then there are the angry would-be tunesmiths. They write a few songs, collect a few rejections, and conclude that there is a conspiracy created solely to keep them away from glory. Or maybe they don’t write anything—rather, they’re the wise guys who know that the cards are stacked against them, so there’s just no sense really trying—an easy way to quit without moving a muscle. I can remember so many of these songwriters—and singers—talking about their one chance—the one time they were signed by a record label, or the one time some big star almost cut their song. “Well,” they say, their voices dripping with self-pity, “the head of the record label didn’t like the record so he told the promotion staff to take it off the scores of stations that were playing it and tell the program directors to give the airplay to another of the label’s artists.” Or, “Yes, so-and-so cut my song and they promised it was gonna be the first single, but they changed their minds and it never even made the album.” Oh, the heartbreaks, they could make the angels weep! Hey, all successful songwriters and singers have stories like that. The difference is, instead of forever weeping over them and then quitting, the successful ones shrug off the pain and try again. I know that some of you reading this today resent the fact that you have not had the songwriting success that you deserve, and you are not about to blame that lack of success on yourself. But if you’ve never really tried—and tried and tried—who else is there to blame but yourself? Put it all in perspective. Every time I talk to a songwriting class, there are always a few who stand up the first day and ask, “How do I get my songs heard?” I tell them they’ve got their agenda backwards. The first thing you do is work to write really good songs. Don’t write a handful of songs then look for a publisher in the vain hope that one of your songs will get that publisher to take you under his or her wing and lead you to glory. Yes, it is a little bit like a lottery, but you don’t even get a ticket to the lottery until you can write a really good song. Oh yes, I know, it’s fashionable to say that the songs on the radio aren’t very good. Maybe I say it myself, sometimes. But if we really believe that, maybe we should make a stronger commitment to help make the songs on the radio better. I don’t know what to say to the folks who believe that there is somebody out there manning the gates of Music Row to keep them out. I’ve known so many people who came to Nashville without knowing a soul and found success from a mix of talent and a stubborn refusal to stay discouraged. It seems I can’t say it too many times: You have to be present to win. To put it as bluntly as I can, you have to take the risk that somebody, someday, is going to say to you, “You have no talent at all. What are you doing here?” Every successful songwriter took that risk, and many of them heard those words, or words like them. I have sympathy for people so timid that they cannot bear those blows to their fragile egos. It’s too bad, because it is possible to grow a thick skin and understand that failure only happens when you stop trying. But I have no sympathy for people who massage their own egos by making up or believing rumors that this writer stole a song from some poor soul back in Peoria, or that singer got his/her record deal by doing unspeakable things, or, the big one, “It’s not what you do, it’s who you know!” You know what? That last one has a germ of truth to it, so it’s your job to get to know somebody. There it is. Go out and get to know somebody. All the rest of us did.

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Liz Rose: Co-Writer to the Stars

Michael Kosser — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 12:00:57 +0000

Nashville is a co-writing town, which usually means that with every new superstar/songwriter who turns the music world on its ear, there comes at least one nonperforming songwriter. Clint Black had his Hayden Nicholas. Garth Brooks had his Kim Williams. Alan Jackson had his Jim McBride. Taylor Swift has her Liz Rose. When Swift found success as a teenager singing songs of adolescent angst and celebration, her co-writer, amazingly enough, was a middle-aged mother with a 30-year-old son and two daughters of Swift’s generation. Liz Rose understood what was going on in her young co-writer’s head. Liz moved to Tennessee from Irving, Texas, in 1994. “I was an independent songplugger, then I started an independent songplugging company and then started a publishing company called King Lizard Music,” Rose recalls. She benefited from her association with a group of female Nashville publishers and songpluggers known as “Chicks with Hits.” “I’m still part of Chicks with Hits,” she says. “They’re a great organization.” Soon, she began writing with a couple of writers in her publishing company. “We’d just be hanging out and we’d write a song.” Then, her company closed, and one of her writers caught the attention of Jody Williams, a publishing veteran, who, at the time, had his own company, Jody Williams Music. “Jody was thinking about signing one of my writers, and he called me and said, ‘You know, I have a list of these songs and some of my favorites are the things that you wrote with her. Have you ever thought about being a writer?’ He had to convince me to write for him. So he bought the King Lizard catalog, signed me as a new writer and hired me to pitch the catalog. Then, after about a year of me writing and pitching, he said, ‘You know, you just need to be writing full time.’ “And it took me like five or six years,” she adds. “I think it wasn’t until I had the Gary Allan single that I could really say I was a songwriter.” The song was “Songs About Rain.” “Jody talked me into being a writer. I just started writing. I wrote every day, twice a day, three times a day, anybody that wanted to write I would write [with them]. I wrote a lot. And I learned a lot. When I didn’t know what I was doing, people were very patient with me: Stephanie Smith and Pam Rose, Pat McLaughlin—fantastic writers. Because I don’t sing and play, I don’t have a sound per se, where you walk in and I have to write it my way. So I can write with anybody. One of my friends says I have the best career ‘cause I get to write with Taylor Swift and Mary Gauthier.” During those early years with Jody Williams, her songs were recorded by Tim McGraw, Billy Gilman, Trisha Yearwood, Bonnie Raitt and Gary Allan. Those cuts were enough to sustain her writing career, and then Taylor Swift happened to her. “She was barely 14 and she had a development deal on RCA,” Rose says. “RCA had this really cool thing down in their basement they called ROG Café. I went over there and did one of their rounds and it’s so funny because I don’t sing, but I got up and did a couple of songs, kind of struggled through ‘em. I did a song that I wrote with Mark Narmore called ‘Nothing Will,’ and Taylor came up to me afterwards and introduced herself and told me that she loved the song. ‘Would you write [with me] sometime?’ I said, ‘Sure’ and we wrote a song called ‘Never Mind,’ and I remember writing with her and thinking, why am I here? She was so fast and we had fun, and I remember we turned it in and someone said, ‘You know, this is really good but do you think you could get her to write something a little more country?’ And I said, ‘You’re not going to get her to do anything she doesn’t feel; this kid knows exactly what she’s doing.’ “I think she ended up just writing with me because I didn’t change what she was doing. I tried to make it better and mold it and hone it, and hang on there and write it down; that’s why it worked with us. I really respected and got what she was trying to do and I didn’t want to make her write in the Nashville cookie-cutter songwriting mold. “I remember her coming in and saying, ‘I wanna write a song called ‘When You Think Tim McGraw,’ and the first thing that went through my mind was, ‘OK, we’re gonna write this song, and you don’t have a record deal, and nobody else is gonna cut it.’” Rose recalls. “I said, ‘OK! I’m not gonna argue!’” Enter Nathan Chapman. “Nathan has a little shack studio behind our publishing company and he was making all my demos,” says Rose. After Swift and Rose would write a song, they would bring it to Chapman, and the result was a rather distinctive sound that was not easily categorized. It would be up to the label to convince country radio that Taylor Swift would fit the format. “Tim McGraw,” “Pictures To Burn,” and “Teardrops on My Guitar” were all big hits for Rose off Taylor’s first album. “I was so proud of her,” Rose recalls. “It’s so great to watch her grow up and with such grace and handle everything so well and she’s not changed a bit.” As for her own success, Rose takes it all in stride. “I’m just so thankful that I can pay my bills and put my kids through college. I don’t walk around and go, ‘Oohh, look what I’m a part of,’ you know. I’ll tell you when it hits me. It hits me at her shows, when I’m sitting there with my daughter, and I hear tens of thousands of people singing a song that happened when Swift and I sat in a room one afternoon and she was just telling me about her day.”

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Street Smarts: Why Lyrics and Melody Matter

Michael Kosser — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:00:34 +0000

Cumberland University, MU135, Craft of Songwriting. Two young promising songwriters named Daley and Josh. Both have ambitions in the rock world and both understand the role of a great song in a singer’s career. Daley is a hard-nosed jock. He’s taking some basic music courses, but he has a rare gift for lyric—he can put his heart on a piece of paper and make the reader like it. Josh is a classical guitar player when you can get him away from his Les Paul guitar. His love for music goes well beyond the six strings and twenty frets that constitute his playing field. Josh feels music. And he can translate that feeling into riffs that rock. They were strangers to each other before they met in class. The first class they talked a little. The second class Daley brought in half a lyric. The third class Josh had signature licks. They had a really neat song going—and no melody. How was this possible? The instructor pushed them. The instructor cajoled them. The instructor badgered them. No melody came forth. Why? So they and the instructor talked. And he learned. These kids listen to a lot of contemporary rock. They focus on the signature licks. They identify the songs and the bands by their licks. Melodies? Not so much. Maybe not at all. So Josh played his licks, the instructor read the lyrics and the melody came. It was a piece of cake because the licks and the lyrics were strong and vivid. The song was written and more songs would come. But there are lessons to be learned here. Songwriters that work in particular genres get strong in some areas and neglect others. It’s kind of funny how we tend to regard “our” genre as being the one that is “legitimate.” We tend to ignore or disrespect other genres. And yet there are no pure song genres in our culture. We are an eclectic culture. Our music is filled with cross-fertilization. Rock music, for example, bears hefty influences from jazz, country, gospel, pop, classical, you name it. Meanwhile, pop, rock, gospel, modern and contemporary classical, etc., all bear influences from music that came before, as well as music that came later. In America, mainstream pop writers have always valued lyrics. I believe that’s because the pop tradition evolved from the old troubadour songs, who not only spoke of lost love, but sang about events that occurred in the kingdom. Some of those old songs were like the newspapers of the realm. In the 1950s, when rock and roll first arrived, many of the songs were simplistic, not really “written,” but rather worked out by doo wop groups in a hurry to grab some syllables to harmonize with. That period of lyrical anarchy didn’t last for long, but gave way to the craftsmen of the Brill Building, Motown, Liverpool and more. Many of us today believe that the rock of today has returned to lyrical anarchy. Daley and Josh’s instructor thought so too, but he hasn’t really listened, and Daley decided to teach the teacher a lesson. Early in the semester, the instructor asked Daley to show him a lyric he had written. Daley wrote down a lyric and handed it to the instructor, who was amazed that a beginner could write so well. He praised the lyric, but Daley immediately confessed. “I didn’t write this,” he admitted, naming a contemporary group as the originators. The instructor shook his head and confessed, “Never heard of them.” “I just wanted to see if you agreed with me that this song had a good lyric.” Daley smiled and handed the instructor a pair of earbuds, which were plugged into to his iPod. The instructor listened, only to find that the heartfelt and carefully crafted lyric with its creative near-rhymes had been buried beneath an avalanche of power chords, riffs and shrieks. “Why,” the instructor asked, “Had the band worked so hard on the lyric, only to deep-six it beneath a mound of sound?” The student explained that, if he likes the sound of the recording and if the lyric hook means anything to him, he’ll ask his friends or dig into the Internet to find out what the song says. I’ve written in earlier columns about the old pop days when co-writers were specialists. One wrote lyrics; one wrote music. Today in pop circles chores might be more specialized: Writer A is the lyricist, writer B is the composer, and writer C kicks off the process by coming up with a riff, then handing it off to A & B to develop it into a song. But in Nashville, and elsewhere, many songwriting teams labor cooperatively and simultaneously in developing melody and lyric. When they do, sometimes they concentrate on one aspect of a song to the neglect of others. In Nashville, there is a historic tendency to work the lyric to death while settling for music that works. In pop or rock, it can be the other way around. But I believe that songwriters who are really serious about their craft try to make their song go first class in all aspects of the song—melody, lyric, rhythm and phrasing. And I believe in my young songwriters. They will master the craft of melody.

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Street Smarts: Bringing It to Nashville

Michael Kosser — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 12:00:23 +0000

The last issue of American Songwriter contained a very nice letter from Nicole Nikki Sullivan. Part of the letter dealt with the agonizing problem many songwriters face about the need to go where the music business is. I began writing about the business of songwriting nearly 35 years ago and, even then, I was constantly screeching that you have to come to Nashville if you hope to make it as a non-performing songwriter. Since then, I’ve never had reason to doubt that bit of dogma, but Nikki’s letter got me thinking. Am I really right? Is there no other way? After all, there are a lot of talented and dedicated songwriters whose lives make it impossible to move to a commercial music center. I felt that I owed Nikki, and thousands of other readers of this magazine, more than pat dogma. As I start this article, I promise I haven’t come to any conclusions yet; you’ll read my thoughts as they develop.

First, Why Nashville? I’m sure many of you who are loyal readers of this magazine are somewhat troubled that we are constantly making reference to Nashville and Music Row as the center of the American songwriting industry, versus L.A. or New York. Some of you cannot understand why the magazine is based in Nashville. Well, you are not alone. I’m sure there are moguls at the major music conglomerates who don’t understand it, and don’t like it. However, it is a fact that Music Row presents a centralized, almost campus-like agglomeration of publishing companies, studios, labels, management companies, performing rights organizations—all the elements that make up a commercial music industry. Music Row feels approachable. It’s a place where a newcomer need not feel intimidated. It may not be quite as warm and fuzzy as it was 40 years ago, but it still feels like a legitimate destination for the ambitious songwriter. I, and others, have had a lot of discouraging words to say about the A & R functionaries who sign singers who have never written a song in their life, throw those singers in a room with veteran songwriters and then market the singers as the next Hank Williams or Merle Haggard. All that is true and deplorable. But as far back as I can remember, there have always been insiders with special connections that brought them songwriting success. It is these connections that songwriters cannot develop in Dubuque or Duluth or Peoria. But Nashville… the South… Country music? Get over it. You may or may not like the sound of country music, but on Music Row, they still honor the song as distinct from the production. Believe it or not, many of the most popular songs in the pop world come out of Nashville. In Nashville, songwriters still get together and write a song without making the melody and lyric subservient to a riff. We may be old fashioned here, but we deal in basics, and I earnestly believe it is the continued influence of Nashville that keeps the song alive in the pop world; otherwise, the song as we know it might have vanished from pop music somewhere around the Disco era. So I don’t care what kinds of songs you write. I believe that going to school for country songwriting is just as valid as studying Shakespeare, Shaw and O’Neill to learn the craft of writing plays. All Right, All Right, Please, Your Point I really thought I needed to establish “Why Nashville?” In order to proceed to the main question, “But do I really need to be here?” Answer: Songwriting offers a difficult road to success. Talent counts. Toughness counts. And yes, the luck of relationships counts. A new writer in town may hook up with an old pro, thinking that the old pro is a conduit to success. It may take three or four years for that new writer to realize that the business, and the music, have passed the old pro by. Or a new writer in town might hook up with an old pro who has hooked up with an up-and-coming singer/songwriter and the three possess a powerful songwriting chemistry that carries them to glory. Some paths of networking lead to fame and fortune, some lead to dead ends, and most, well, they lead to more networks. In Nikki’s letter, she explains why she can’t move to Nashville, and describes some of the networking she has done. It is this part of the letter that has grabbed me, and since y’all have read this far, here is a grain of wisdom you can glean from an otherwise digression-filled column: The Internet is changing the songwriting industry and will change it more and more, radically, over the coming years, in ways that we cannot imagine today. The Web can be one heck of a place to network. As an example, I suggest you visit AmericanSongpace.com, AS’s Web site specially created to bring songwriters together. Some smart people on the staff of this magazine are putting a lot of thought into that Web site. As the site matures, it will link with more and more websites for serious songwriters. One day cyberspace will replace Music Row. Even now, songpluggers e-mail a lot of their pitches. What would you give for the email address of the head of A & R at Big Machine or Capitol Records? So, in Conclusion … … Nikki and the rest of you, it wouldn’t hurt to make some appointments and spend a week or two on Music Row, just talking to people, getting a feel for their needs and how things get done. But there are also the online sites like American Songspace, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, CDBaby and a thousand others that might move a songwriting career forward. I do believe that, sooner or later, learning to do music business on the Web will be as important as hanging out on Music Square West is today. Thanks for the letter, Nikki. I think you’ll do fine.

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Legends: Bobby Braddock

Michael Kosser — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:00:23 +0000

What then do we make of Bobby Braddock, who came to Nashville in 1964, had his first country No. 1 in 1968, his most recent No. 1 in 2009, making him the only living songwriter having No. 1 country songs in five consecutive decades? These songs include “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” (one of Tammy Wynette’s career records), “He Stopped Loving Her Today” (repeatedly recognized as the one of the quintessential country songs of all time), “Golden Ring,” “Time Marches On,” “I Wanna Talk About Me,” Toby Keith’s career record and one of the most unique records in country music history, and, most recently, Billy Currington’s career smash, “People Are Crazy.” I wanted to know how he did it. What came out of our talk is a rare peek into the mind of a great songwriter that can help us understand the arcane art of balancing the desire to write great songs with the need to write hit songs. We all believe that great songs and hit songs are not necessarily the same, but I believe Braddock’s body of work proves that great songs and hit songs need not be mutually exclusive. Bobby Braddock is deadly serious in his dedication to being a songwriter, so when he decided to write his memoirs, it wasn’t surprising the amount of effort he put into the first volume, called Down in Orburndale, published by LSU Press in 2007. The result was a very funny yet soul-stirring book about growing up in Florida orange grove country. He is currently at work on his next installment (tentatively titled Hollywood, Tennessee), which covers his life from the time he arrives in Nashville to pursue his music career. Most successful songwriters tend to have their relatively brief era but then they go away. To what do you attribute your longevity through all the music changes over the past four-and-a-half decades? One, staying current on music of all genres over the years, not just country, and two, fear of running out of money. Would you care to elaborate? Whenever a new act came along, if I hadn’t heard anything by them, I’d go out and buy the album and listen to ‘em. I did that with Pearl Jam, Hootie and the Blowfish, with The Black Eyed Peas, Lauryn Hill and Eminem. I think staying hip to what everybody’s doing helps you in country music, since country music is not always all that country anyway. I mean, I know what country music sounds like. I’ve listened to it all my life. There was a period back in the ‘80s when you went a long time with almost no cuts, which was unusual for you. Looking back, what do you think was the reason? I was writing out of desperation, writing songs so personal that I couldn’t judge them objectively, and trying too hard to be original. Essentially, between 1984 and 1991, there were no hits. I think in the earlier part of that period, I was doing some of my best writing, but it was not necessary compatible with country radio at that time. Further on into the ‘80s, I think I started writing out of desperation. I can remember driving from my house to way south of Nolensville, Tennessee and back, listening to George Strait’s new album, and going home, and for about two, three nights trying to write something like what I had heard on the George Strait album. I look back on it now and think of myself as being kind of pitiful. I’ve talked about Bobby Braddock being a risk-taker when he writes. What do I mean by that? That I will risk looking like a damned fool in my quest for a hit song. I think that you probably—whose interview is this? I think you mean that I will risk looking like a fool or a crazy person in trying to do something that’s unique and different that people might like. Do you agree that you will go to those lengths? Oh yeah! But sometimes, I’ll do it without realizing I’m doing it. I’m just writing what I like. To illustrate the length to which Braddock will let his imagination wander, let me quote from a George Jones hit, “Nothing Ever Hurt Me (Half As Bad as Losing You),” back in 1973: I’ve had the lit end of a cigar pressed against my belly Whupped on with a crowbar till my eyeballs turned to jelly Accidentally nailed my index finger to the wall Cut off half my toes and soaked my foot in alcohol I’ve had my pelvis ruptured by an angry kangaroo But nothing ever hurt me half as bad as losing you. Most of us have taken extreme flights of fancy with songs, but it takes a talent like Braddock to craft extremes into the kind of a song that will be swallowed by a hit artist (George Jones), a great producer (Billy Sherrill), nearly all the radio stations in the country genre, and much of the country listening public. “Nothing Ever Hurt Me (Half as Bad as Losing You)” was a No. 7 Billboard country hit. After all these years, do you still have the fire in your belly to write songs? If so, is that fire to write great songs and let them fall where they may, or is it a fire to write hits? The fire has moved from my belly up to my esophagus. I always try to write the best that I can, and try to make it as commercial as possible, in the hope that someone will want to record it. Right now, the fire is to write hits. I remember a time when I was going through a breakup in my marriage that had a big emotional impact on me. I was writing songs that were totally autobiographical, and I didn’t care whether they got recorded or not; I was writing what was in my heart, and I listen to those songs [today] and I think, some of it is really powerful stuff. Then there are periods in my life when I was trying to be [too] commercial, and I think a lot of it’s pretty crappy. The ones you were writing when you were emotionally stressed and trying to be cathartic, did any of those songs wind up being commercially successful songs? A few: “Her Name Is,” “I Feel Like Loving You Again,” “Texas Tornado.” But most of the cathartic ones, no. They meant a lot to me, and when I listen to them now, they still mean a lot to me. They say, “The song remembers when?” Well, I remember when because I wrote it. Why do you think so many of your cathartic songs were not successful? The ones that failed were probably tailor-made to fit my own heart. I don’t think their blueprints were what people were looking for in country music at that time. Can you define where country music is today compared to where it was in other eras, both in structure and in subject matter? In the 1940s through mid-‘50s, the sounds were more rural and the lyrics more self-effacing than they are today. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, they stirred about half a cup of pop into the country stew. From the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, it was basically country, but with sounds and themes broad enough to appeal to a larger audience. By the mid-1980s, the crossovers had disappeared and the neo-traditionalists were the new big thing. Garth Brooks songs were an entity unto themselves, because, instead of country crossing over to pop, the pop audiences were crossing over to country. In the 1990s and 2000s, although fewer people lived in rural areas and small towns, the trend was toward lyrics about life in those places or lifestyles reflecting those places, often to a very rocking beat. I like to call this “redneck swagger.” While grandpa hillbilly cried because his woman had left him, modern-day grandson hillbilly doesn’t cry much, and if he’s missing his woman, often it’s because he dumped her and is starting to regret it. And while grandma hillbilly used to denounce cheatin’, modern-day granddaughter hillbilly may rip up your car or even shoot you. There’s a lot of this in 2009, but country songs today are actually all over the map stylistically, and the records they’re making today sound better than ever. Look at concerts and just find out what kind of music people like, particularly a lot of young people. Country music is very popular now. I don’t know if it’s the most popular genre. I have no idea, I haven’t been doing any research on it, but I just get the sense that country music has a big following, especially among younger people. As there always have been, there are different branches and tributaries to the country mainstream. Some of these tributaries go to other bodies of water, like, Taylor Swift has a huge following. She calls herself country. I don’t think she sounds really country, but then again, what is country? I mean, it’s been a long time since country music was agricultural music, but the more country side of country is that redneck swagger music. For instance, the song protagonist of, say, the early 1950s is totally different from the one in 2009. For one thing, southerners as a group are different. In those old Hank Williams or Webb Pierce songs, the protagonist was crying. You don’t hear the protagonist crying today. The old protagonist was crying and gettin’ drunk; now they’re gettin’ drunk and partyin’, and singing, “Kiss my ass!” You hear a lot of “my town’s more country than your town.” About the “kiss my ass” songs, why on earth do you think their listeners assume that somebody out there doesn’t like them or their lifestyles? Where does the hostility come from? Who are they telling to kiss their ass? I think it’s supposed to be the country fans telling the rest of the world to kiss their collective ass. It’s a little defensive, isn’t it? Yes, is this related to— The culture wars. But when I write songs today, I think love songs are still universal and I try to do those. Are there particular songs out there that really speak to you? Each era has its magic songs and this era is no exception. If Brad Paisley couldn’t sing a lick, I think he would be one of the most sought-after songwriters in town. His song “Letter To Me” is a masterpiece. I hear some country records occasionally that I really love. They can be the really country ones like “Whiskey Lullaby.” I loved Blake Shelton’s record of “Home.” Back in the earliest part of this millennium, when I was managing a publishing company, I signed a young singer/songwriter named Blake Shelton to my company. Since I loved Braddock’s demos and I was trying to help Blake get a deal, I brought the two together. Bobby got Blake his record deal and produced three successful albums on him, each of which contained a multi-week No. 1 country single. But unlike a lot of producer/songwriters, Bobby did not try and jam a lot of Braddock songs down his artist’s throat. Instead, he spent many hours listening to thousands of songs submitted from the outside, and he and Blake recorded what they considered the best songs they heard. So during this interview, I asked him. When you were producing Blake you took very seriously the difficult job of listening to songs off the street. What effect did that have on your writing? Did it detract from your creative energy? One way it detracted was it impinged on my songwriting time. Bob McDill once said, “Garbage in, garbage out.” So I was listening to great songs that inspired me and not-so-great songs that probably hurt me. I used to get on the Natchez Trace Parkway—truly a parkway, because it doesn’t go through any towns and runs all the way from Nashville to south Mississippi—and I would take along several boxes of CDs, a picnic lunch, and set my cruise control on 45 MPH. I didn’t enjoy the OK songs, but I looked forward to the great songs that made me excited, and the terrible songs that made me laugh. During the time I produced Blake, I spent a huge amount of time and creative energy on those albums, and I certainly believe that I lost some songwriting time. But I really enjoyed producing Blake and it’s a pretty good feeling to know that the one opportunity I had to produce a new young artist, the work we did launched a country star. Why do your successful “novelty songs” seem to have more gravitas and career friendliness for artists than most folks’ novelty songs? I’ve gotten several novelty songs recorded, but the only ones that went to No. 1 were “I Wanna Talk About Me” and “People Are Crazy,” which were really serious songs presented in a fun way. In the former, a lot of people identified with having a friend who was a transmitter, but not a receiver, and in the latter, I think folks found the idea of an old man leaving his fortune to a casual drinking buddy to be a deliciously happy ending.

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