He very kindly explained to me that you can’t copyright a title and that I could, if I wanted, proceed with trying to pitch my song. But he also explained that pitching it would reveal my ignorance of country music to nearly everyone I pitched it to and that most artists wouldn’t cut my song out of respect for the big hits of the past. He went on to say “You are trying to be a torch-bearer for country music. The man carrying the torch needs to know the people who brought the torch to him.” That statement really had an impact on me. I asked him for a list of artists and songs that I should check out. And I started researching the great songs from the past. I listened to all of the “Songs of The Year” for about 30 years ago until the present. I explored artists that I had never heard before. I became a student of the genre that I was trying to write. And my writing changed. I discovered that I had been simply chasing what was on the radio. I was a copier, not an innovator. But, by learning what brought country music where it is today, I also learned to anticipate where it might go in the future and to write songs that actually change and shape the music on the radio. Years later when one of my songs came out on the radio, the great R&B country grooves from the past had long been out of style and forgotten. From my research, I knew that those feels really resonated with people in the past and I believed they could do that again. So, I wrote a song that had an older, R&B feel. Guess what? It became a huge hit and created a new resurgence of that kind of feel in country. I never would have written that song if I had not started to study music from the past. Whatever genre you are writing, you owe it to yourself to become a student of the past. The more you know about what worked 20 or 30 years ago (or more), the most likely you are to become one of the torch bearers that changes and shapes music instead of just copying what is on the radio today. If you want to carry that torch, look forward, but never forget to look back.
2 Comments
10/30/2020 09:49:39 pm
When it comes to songwriting, chasing what’s on the radio won’t get you far. You might produce a nice song, but nice isn’t good enough to engage listeners. A good songwriter learns how to share your own experience, we don’t need what’s already playing on playlists, we need you.
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Hangi Tavakoli
10/31/2020 01:17:43 am
Can't agree more, Linda.
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