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From the Mouths of Pros

8/26/2017

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DEMO APPROACHES
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Hi there, fellow songwriters! So, after a trying month which has included the loss of a loved one and my own major surgery, I'm back with my continuing blog series about the craft and business of songwriting, using interview segments from my book "Nashville Songsmiths - In-Depth Interviews with #1 Country Songwriters" to highlight specific issues pertaining to both the craft and business of songwriting, "From the Mouths of Pros!"

I spoke with hit songwriter and swell pal Walt Aldridge ("I Loved Her First," "No Getting Over Me") about song demos.

TH:  Let’s talk about the way you approach demos.  Do you, because you have the expertise in so many areas…I assume that you try to make your demos as much like what you hear the master recording sounding like as possible.
WA:  I do.  And I think most people do.  But the difference is that I’m able to converse with the engineers on a one-to-one level, and with the musicians on a one-to-one level.  Usually I play on my demos, so I’m on the musician’s side of the glass while it’s being tracked.  But I’ve found over the years that it really helps if you can speak with an engineer in terminology that he understands.  If you say to him, you know, “I’m looking for more of a transparent sound.”  Well, they don’t know what that means.  But if you’re able to say to them, “I’m looking for a sound that’s more like an API mic pre with maybe a little real ultra-high frequency added to it”…or something like that, then you’re speaking in their terms.  The same thing with musicians – to be able to speak to them in terms of music theory, or sounds, or whatever, and have it be something other than some kind of vague thing that a lot of people speak to them, like, “I’m looking for something with a little more punch to it.”  Well, that can be interpreted in a lot of different ways.  I have found that it’s helpful to me to sort of participate with everybody, in that I can speak both the languages – technical and musical.  
TH:  Are there any more instances these days of basic vocal/acoustic guitar demos actually getting pitched to an artist, or more often is that pitched to somebody that’s going to make that into a high-quality demo, then pitch it to the artist?
WA:  I think it depends.  I think there are writers that do that.  I have never been one of them.  I’ve never been one of those guys that really sold the song with just his acoustic guitar.  And part of it is the kind of songs that you write.  I have to tell you, a big part of songwriting to me is also writing the production of what I envision.  I write the intro lick….  I wrote that guitar lick for “No Getting Over Me” on the beginning, and I wrote the guitar lick on the beginning of “The Fear of Being Alone” - and those licks were just as important to me as…those guitar licks had to be there, just as importantly as any of the lyrics or the melody.  So, it depends on what kind of writer you are.  But I’ve always been a sort of production-oriented writer, who usually had a sort of end record in mind when I wrote the song.

Here's Walt on I Loved Her First. 

Next time, we'll talk with songwriter Anthony L. Smith ("What About Now," "Tomorrow") about licensing songs for advertising.

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From the Mouths of Pros

7/29/2017

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Writing to Spec
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Hi again, fellow Songwriters! This is the third installment of my continuing blog series about the craft and business of songwriting, using interview segments from my book "Nashville Songsmiths - In-Depth Interviews with #1 Country Songwriters" to highlight specific issues pertaining to both the craft and business of songwriting, "From the Mouths of Pros!"


Billy Montana
(Bring on the Rain, More than a Memory) talks about writing songs specifically with an Artist in mind - this one had an unexpected outcome!

BM: People ask all the time, “Are you writing specifically for someone, or are you just writing a song?” And my usual response is, “I’m just trying to write the best song I can that day.” Well, we have a thing called a “pitch sheet” that describes, you know, it has the artist’s name, who’s producing them, when they’re going into the studio, and what type of song they think they’re looking for. And so Lee Ann Womack was on that list, and the description of the song she was looking for was “an up-tempo, fun, traditional-sounding country song.” So (co-writer) Jenai and I decided, man, let’s just try for a change to write for an artist specifically, and so we wrote “Suds in the Bucket” with that in mind. And we finished the song and really liked it, and our publisher really liked it. It was a cool thing in writing this song, ‘cause this is a case where we had the music and we had the topic we wanted to write about, but didn’t have a title. And I don’t usually start that way – I usually start with a title ‘cause I like to know where I’m going. ”She left the suds in the bucket and the clothes hangin’ out on the line” just kind of fell out of the sky, and when I said that to my co-writer, she was like, “Oh my gosh, I love that, let’s do that!” It just fit perfectly into the music that we had, and the idea that we had for the song. So we ran with it, finished the song, everybody liked it…and we pitched it to Lee Ann Womack’s camp and they passed on it. Which isn’t unusual, you know, that happens more than not, obviously. But it wasn’t too long after that that the folks in the Sara Evans camp heard the song, and thought it would be perfect for her. And so, she ended up recording it, and man, I thought they did an amazing job. 

Here's an audio sample of  Billy Montana talking about Bring on the Rain. 

UP NEXT:
Walt Aldridge on different demo approaches.

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From the Mouths of Pros

7/22/2017

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OVERCOMING DOUBT THROUGH ACTION!
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Hi again, fellow Songwriters! This is the second in my continuing blog series about the craft and business of songwriting, using interview segments from my book "Nashville Songsmiths - In-Depth Interviews with #1 Country Songwriters" to highlight specific issues pertaining to both the craft and business of songwriting, "From the Mouths of Pros!"

Even after a multitude of #1 smashes, from Brooks & Dunn's "Ain't Nothing About You," to Brad Paisley's "When I Get Where I'm Goin'," to Kenny Chesney's "Living in Fast Forward," Rivers Rutherford STILL has days filled with doubt...

RR:  You know, some days for me…months’ll go by and nothing sounds like a song.  And then I’ll have a week or so where everything everybody says sounds like a song.  It’s really funny how that works.  And then I’ll start writing a bunch of songs that I really like…and I’ll dream ‘em, and everything else.  And then all of a sudden it stops, and I’m back to slaving away, tryin’ to make it happen again.  You start getting scared that it’s never gonna come back again.
TH:  Do you really?  Is there a point where you think you’ve written your last hit?
RR:  Absolutely.  I’ve thought that so many times, I can’t even count it…I thought that when I was twenty-two.   I thought I’d written my last song.  But it always seems to come back around, you know?  I think the older I get the more I realize, it’s in there, I’ve got plenty to say.  As long as I show up and do the work, kinda roll up my sleeves and dive in, sooner or later something’ll percolate.  
TH:  So you force yourself to write?  
RR:  Yes.  I don’t feel like it every day, but I do it every day.  There are days that I can’t wait to get in and write songs, and I don’t write anything good.  There are days I’d rather get a root canal than write a song.  But I show up and I write hits.  There’s just no accounting for it, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, there’s no rhyme or reason to it, you just gotta be present to win.
TH:  And you’ve had way more hits than root canals.
RR:  (laughs)  Thankfully.  So far anyway.

Here's a cool audio sample of Rivers talking about When I Get Where I'm Goin'  

UP NEXT: Billy Montana on Writing for Artists

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From the Mouths of Pros

7/21/2017

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GO WITH YOUR GUT
Greetings! Welcome to the debut of a new blog series about the craft and business of songwriting. I'm sharing the wisdom not which I have learned in my thirty years of struggle, but that of some of the most awesome and successful Country songwriters around, culled from interviews which first aired on the American Forces Radio Network in 2011, and which are included in my book, "Nashville Songsmiths." Hope you enjoy and get something out of this - I know I sure did! TH
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Here's Tony Arata (The Dance) on listening to your inner voice, and how well his own instincts paid off!

 TA: So in those years the song was continually being pitched and continually being passed on by the biggest and the best in town.  But I believed in the song, I thought there was something there, and the reaction it got from the lay-folk…you know…I knew there was something there.  Oddly enough, I was told on more than one occasion that nobody was going to record it because it didn’t have a bridge.  It’s just verse-chorus, verse-chorus and you’re done.  So I tried to write a bridge, and it seemed so foreign to the song, having sung it for so many nights, in its format…I finally just had to say that I don’t think it’s supposed to have one.
TH:  Did you ever try doing a bridge with a banjo in it? (laughs)
TA:  (laughs)  I tell you what, at that time of my life I would’ve tried anything - a bassoon, whatever.
TH:  A little ukulele?  
TA:  (laughs) Whatever you got.
TH:  Of course they’re all little.  Ukuleles.
TA:  (laughs)  But it was just one of those things, I finally had to make a decision that I thought I was done with the song and that’s what it was gonna be.  Oddly enough, in the years that passed, Garth came up to me and said “You know what I always liked about that song is that there’s no bridge.”  And so every once in awhile, you know, idiots like me…every once in awhile you finally come to the right decision and the right conclusion and stick by your guns and go with the song as is.  

HERE'S A COOL AUDIO CLIP ABOUT THE DANCE

Next: Rivers Rutherford on overcoming Doubt through Action!

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    Ty Hager is a veteran broadcaster, songwriter, and novelist, and the author/host/co-producer of the little project to which this site is dedicated.

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