This blog’s not dead! The past couple of months have been pretty crazy… I found out in early April that I was going to be laid off from my day job (as the whole organization was being unexpectedly shut down), so that threw me for a bit of a loop. Around the same time, I was in the studio with The Georgian Company, working on our follow-up EP, Side B, which should be released early this fall via our Pants of Fate imprint.

So, aside from time spent in the recording studio, I spent the better part of the past couple of months doing extra freelance design work, updating my resume and portfolio, and looking for a job. Which, thankfully, I’ve found, started and like. So as I’m starting to get back into a routine, I’m hoping I’ll be able to get back to studying and doing some songwriting, along with the performance and production practice that has naturally accompanied my initial pursuit of studying country hits, and revive this blog a little bit!

With that, I’ll leave you with a vaguely-related video from one of my favorite songwriters, Radney Foster.

Lefty Frizzell’s “That’s the Way Love Goes” has been on my list to learn for a long time. My father-in-law, being a pretty serious music fan, suggested it among a handful of others shortly after he caught wind of this blog. The song was written by Lefty himself, along with Sanger D. Shafer, was included on Willie Nelson’s Frizzell tribute album, To Lefty From Willie, and won Merle Haggard a Grammy for his vocal performance of it on his 1983 cut of the song.

The song’s structure is unusual by today’s standards: verse-chorus-instrumental-chorus, and even the verse and the chorus are basically the same melody. And the spoken lines would be way out of place on contemporary country radio, too. But even as a song from a different time, this one is a classic. Without intentionally thinking about it, you’d probably just be singing along and enjoying it rather than noticing that it doesn’t fit today’s radio format.

Here’s a raw iPhone recording of one of my recent originals. I’m not sure how to classify this one… maybe just generic Americana? It’s one of those that just came to me, so I wrote it without worrying too much about its commercial appeal. Sometimes songs get started for me from a melody or lyric that starts going through my head, and sometimes they start with a vision or a memory of a physical space. In this case, it was the latter; I was remembering driving through rural northern California late one summer.

It would seem that I’ve slacked off a bit from this project lately, and maybe that’s true. I’ve been pretty busy with other projects as of late, but fear not, I will continue my quest! In the meantime, however, if you happen to live in Austin, please come out to The Ghost Room this Friday (2/19) night. I’ll be playing bass in a new band called Treaty Oak that my good friend/co-writer/bandmate, Topher Hyink, has started. His songs are dark and poetic without being melodramatic or too brooding, and the band sends them out like Crazy Horse with an extra guitarist. Another friend and occasional co-writer, Cam Houser’s band You Were Always is opening things up with their first show in a year and will be featuring one of The Georgian Company’s back-up singers, Jenny Kroening, on keys and harmony vocals.

Additionally, The Georgian Company will be back in the studio early next month recording our second EP and second half to our debut full-length. We’ll be tracking “Flock of Doves,” “After a Storm,” “Used to Sing,” and “If You Love a Ghost.” I’m pumped about this!

Meanwhile I’ve also been writing a bit, but haven’t had the time to learn any new country songs or track anything. But I’ll get to it, I promise! Meanwhile, I hope to see you locals at The Ghost Room!

This past weekend I attended the annual Austin Songwriters Group Symposium for the first time. It was their 6th year to host the event, and apparently it’s grown quite a bit since the beginning. The symposium consists of a variety of concurrent classes, song pitch & critique sessions and a few panels about the business side of songwriting. Overall it was a good and worthwhile conference for me to attend. I picked up some more mental tools for my songwriting, experienced having my song played in a pitch session and received good feedback, met a few other songwriters, and heard some great live performances. Of course not everyone and everything was great, but honestly, it turned out to be better than I expected.

On the whole, it was a good conference that was just a little bit disorganized. The speakers were all either pretty qualified or very qualified, and all were very personable. It was cool to meet such established songwriters as Sonny Throckmorton (who is hilarious), Austin Cunningham, Monte Warden and Chuck Cannon, and to hear Allen Shamblin and Rodney Crowell play and talk. It was also pretty cool to have the opportunity to pitch face-to-face to Moonkiss, Ten Ten and Writer’s Den publishing. I wish I’d have had something ready that they wanted. As it was, I ended up taking in my most recent working song, “We’ll Dance Tonight,” mainly for critique purposes… and critiqued it was! Daniel Lee from Ten Ten liked the song on the whole, but pointed out that I had switched points of view from the verse to the chorus, and that tends to confuse and/or alienate the listener. He also had a couple lyric-tightening suggestions. Monte and Brandi Warden really liked the melody and especially the hook (”we’ll dance tonight”), but pretty much hated the lyrics. In my attempt to write more conversational lyrics, I’d actually inserted too much actual conversation! So I’m back to the writing table with that one.

Something that I think has happened in my writing since deciding that I want to write popular country songs is that I may be focusing too much on creating commercial music. I need to remember to let go and to let the songs come to me as they want to be and to follow them, instead of pushing them around. Then, once I get the song’s first draft down, I might be able to reshape it into a more commercial mold—while maintaining its artistic integrity—if it doesn’t come out in its most commercial form to begin with.

I think that what I’m doing by “studying the hits,” as Robin Fredrick calls it, will continue to help me write songs that are both artistically true and commercially viable, because I’ll internalize a lot of the popular melodic patterns and various techniques used in these hit country songs—so the commercial side will come out more naturally. I was blown away by some of the songs that one of the guys I met at the conference, Russel Sutton, had written, and he’d just started writing songs a few months ago. However, he’d previously learned to play and sing over 200 cover songs, and I’m pretty sure that has really set him off on the right foot!