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.

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!

A friend of mine suggested I learn Randy Travis’s version of “Forever and Ever, Amen,” and being as it was a song I already had thought of learning, it seemed like a good fit for my next song study. This #1 hit was written by Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz^[1], a duo with an impressive songwriting resume. Another #1 the duo penned together is Keith Whitley’s “When You Say Nothing at All,” which I swear has been stuck in my head ever since rediscovering it as I was learning “I’m No Stranger to the Rain.”

From the religious “Amen” at the end of the chorus to the theme of a playboy straightened out after meeting the right woman, “Forever and Ever, Amen” is full of emotional hooks aimed right at the country and western audience. Can you imagine the girls hearing young Randy Travis telling them he’s going to love them even after their hair falls out? I imagine there was more than one who couldn’t handle it. Even Dolly Parton seemed pretty smitten when Randy came onto the scene.

One of the things about this song that I’ve found notable is just how smooth it is. It comes in, runs its verse-chorus, verse-chorus course, repeats the last line, and is over. There isn’t too much in the way of dynamics. Or there is a lot, from the electric guitar, dobro and steel to the background vocals, but they’re so subtle in relation to the bopping backbeat that it feels pretty one-level. Yet its story, its singalongability and Randy’s delivery just sold it all the way.

One interesting thing I noticed in this song is that one of the hooks involves a change to the II chord in the verse.  I feel like those slightly-less-than-expected changes really work to make a melody that’s interesting and holds the listeners’ attention. I tend to write from the vocal melody first, just filling the accompaniment chords in as support for the melody I’ve dreamed up. I wonder, though, if throwing a II or a VII chord into the mix in the middle of a verse might help out the melody and the song.

Anyway, here’s a pretty rough cut of “Forever and Ever, Amen.”