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!

I heard Rosanne Cash’s “Seven Year Ache” on the radio the other day, and it killed me how good it was. Rosanne wrote the song, and Rodney Crowell produced it^[1] (who I hope to meet at the 2010 Songwriter’s Symposium in Austin next month). It’s just a phenomenal song that holds up just as well today as it did when it when it hit #1 on the country charts in 1981. Right off the bat it subtly and gently beats you over the head with a killer melody coming out of the warmest 80’s synth you’ve ever heard (are you responsible for this, Rodney? If so, NICE). Right out of that, the verse comes in, and Rosanne nails the colorful and yet somehow vague lyrics with such swagger that you’ve floated into the heart-wrenching chorus before even knowing it. One of the things I think is so great about this song, other than the melody and the performance, is that you know exactly what the song is about from the title, but the verses dance all around “You #$%* cheated on me, you $%#*!” without spelling things out so specifically. Instead, broad strokes of scenes and situations are allowed to float around in your brain, allowing the listener to patch the story together.

When I started off working on this one, I was going to sing it myself (like I normally do), so I transposed it down (or up) to E from C, because that’s where my voice was comfortable. But then my wife, Dixie, volunteered, so we tried it out. The vocal is at the very top of her range, but she pulled it off. The quality of her voice is way different than Rosanne’s take, of course, and due to the key it seems a little high for the song, but I’m proud of her for knocking it out.  It was fun to play the role of producer for someone else, too. I played on the midi piano a LOT on this one, from the synths to the rhythm piano to the drum sequencing, and I feel like I’m understanding it better than ever. Inverting chords and playing in different keys and such. Then I tracked bass, guitar and vocals and a little lead-ish guitar to fill in for where the steel solo was in the original.

Mixing is still a challenge for me. I don’t have monitors or even a pair of decent headphones, so this was done mostly through crappy headphones and some Dell computer speakers. Atrocious, I know, but it’s what I have for now. I did try to work with this Redline Monitor plug-in that I found to try to compensate for doing headphone mixes, and going back and forth between using that and not using it helped a bit, I think, but it’s still muddy and too bright in places, among other issues. Overall, I’m happy with how this study turned out, though.