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DON’T FOCUS ON THE SUMMIT

10/30/2020

Songwriting can be a wonderfully, beautifully frustrating pursuit. But it can be especially maddening if your singular goal is something outside of your control. It’s best to enjoy the way while you are climbing your way up this mountain of music industry. If you only and only focus on the end goal, the road to that goal would be extremely tiring and most probably you will give up when a couple of years past and you are still nowhere near your goal. In my humble opinion the best is to learn how to enjoy the way and earn all the you can while you are reaching the summit. Make your process sweet so you won’t give up very easily. So, let’s say your one obsession is a Bruno Mars cut. There are several reasons that you are going to likely spend the rest of your life banging your head on the wall and cursing the day you ever tried to be a songwriter. For sake of brevity, I won’t list them all, but the primary reason is that you can’t make Bruno Mars like any of your songs. And if he doesn’t like them, you’ll never get a Bruno Mart cut. So, I wanted to run through some alternatives to goals that are outside of your control. Considering these “what ifs” might just help you get closer to your goal than you ever imagined.

KIDS ARE DREAMERS, DREAMS CHANGE THE WORLD

10/27/2020

I remember spending my days daydreaming as a kid. I daydreamed sitting in my desk at school, I daydreamed while doing the list of chores waiting for me when I got home from school, and I daydreamed before closing my eyes and falling asleep at each night. These days I’m sure a teacher or someone would have diagnosed me with ADD and put me on some medications right away to insure a better future for my little daydreaming shoulder devil and myself!

What I didn’t understand then and what a lot of non-creative type of people don’t get, is that there is nothing more powerful than daydreaming. I believe, when done positively, it’s a form of prayer. A way to focus your intention so profoundly that you gather forces larger than yourself to change your future. The Wright Brothers dreamed of flying. Jonas Salk dreamed of curing Polio. Thomas Edison envisioned the light bulb.

They spent every waking moment dreaming first and later working to make those dreams come true. Kids get this. They don’t question if their dreams are crazy. It’s just a natural creative process. It’s the grown-up world that tells the kid to “grow up” or “be more practical” or “that’s impossible!”

HOW TO FIND GREAT SONG IDEAS

10/23/2020

Ever wonder where your favorite artists or songwriters consistently get those great song ideas from? I like to think of ideas as a creative river, constantly flowing by. It’s simply a matter of learning to catch them. I always have my antenna up. Basically, everything around us can give us hundreds of very interesting ideas to be used in the songs or to have the songs being written around them. Here are some simple techniques that you can use to find hit ideas right away.

Watching movies for song ideas. Many classic songs have used lines from your favorite movies as titles. Kenny Chesney wrote the hit song “You Had Me From Hello” after watching the movie Jerry Mcguire. Kenny called songwriter Skip Ewing after hearing the line spoken in the movie and the duo turned it into a blockbuster hit. In a lot of great movies, specially the classic ones there are tons of quotes and sentences that each of them can be translated in at least one great song.

Just think of how many love ballads you can write with the famous quote of “Offer them something they can’t refuse” from the Mafia movie, The Godfather! Totally unrelated yet can easily turn it into at least 5 or 6 great songs. And this is even much easier to do with the romantic movies. Just keep watching and keep your ears sharp for catching some awesome lines from the classic movies.

5 WAYS TO INCREASE YOUR CHANCES IF YOU LIVE OUTSIDE A MUSIC CENTER

10/20/2020

As a mentor and coach living in Singapore – which is not exactly the biggest music town in the world – I am often helping many songwriters that don’t live in a music town too. Natural being based in a city that is known to be music center, it can help your career a lot but if you are not based in any of “music cities” it still is perfectly okay. Nowadays with all the technology you can be completely present in a place without physically being there! Here are a few of my suggestions for getting deals and cuts while you are not living in a music city.

Visit as often as you can. Even if it’s just once a year. Even if it’s not possible to literally keep going to the music cities, some wisely planned “face time” with your key contacts can help you make progress and make new connections and strengthen the existing ones. Just letting people see your face and hear what’s going on with you can make a difference. Human being tends to forget about others if they don’t keep the connections. Everyone once in a while just drop and email or give a quick video call and say hi. Let your name to be under “alive” status in their mind.

ARE YOU THINKING LIKE AN ARTIST?

10/16/2020

If you are trying to write songs to pitch to artists, then you must learn to think like an artist. You must understand their concerns and – in most cases – their weird mindset. Here are some example questions that artists ask when they choose songs. They are also the questions I ask myself as I’m writing to make sure I’m writing something an artist would want to say.

How does this song make me look? Image. You must know the image is the first marketing too for an artist. One wants to have a badass image in public while another wants to be known as the cool one. Before you write the song, you should study your targeted artist and find out what image they have, and write your song based on that. As an almost general rule, if a song makes an artist look bad, they will almost never record it. – except for Miley Cyrus!

JOB #1 MEANS DOING YOUR JOB!

10/13/2020

Some time ago I was enjoying a mentoring session and was offering tips to help a young songwriter understand what producers and publishers often listen for in song demos. One of the demos had an extremely long guitar solo after the first chorus. I offered that:

#1. Guitar solos typically are after the 2nd chorus and not the first.

#2. The solo was so long it pushed the song to over 4 and half minutes. And that hurt the chances of getting the song recorded. The songwriter I was mentoring shot back this question. Why can’t a publisher or producer who knows what they are doing, hear the song with all the changes and record the song anyway?

AN OPEN LETTER TO YOUNG SONGWRITERS

10/9/2020

I write with a number of young songwriters and I can’t count the times that I have referenced an older song (80’s or 90’s) and discovered that they had never heard the song and in many cases, had never heard of the artist either. This isn’t shocking to me – I once was that guy myself. But it does make me want to pass on something that my mentor, told me years ago. I had just gotten my first writing deal and had written a song that I thought turned out amazing. I proudly presented it to my mentor, and he gave it a listen. He had a huge smile on his face as the song ended and I thought that I had really impressed him. Turns out, I had made an impression, but not the one I wanted to make. He said, “You know that is iconic song for Ernest Tubb, don’t you?” I didn’t know that. I didn’t know one song by Ernest Tubb. I didn’t really like the super twangy old country. I didn’t understand why it even mattered. He changed all of that.

LEARNING TO THINK LIKE A PROFESSIONAL SONGWRITER

10/6/2020

The difference between a professional songwriter and a person who just writes for their own joy is a difference in their goals and they way they look at songwriting as a whole. Basically, can say their difference is in their way of thinking. Those two types of writers are coming at writing from vastly different perspectives and at the end of the day they want to achieve very different things. Here are the primary differences in thinking that enables the professionals to get their songs recorded.

Professionals realize that they are writing for someone else. Just like how a political speechwriter is trying to craft words that sound natural and believable coming from their candidate, a professional songwriter is trying to craft a song that is going to cause the listeners to think that the artist wrote it by themselves and they truly experienced every single word of what they are singing. Professionals make choices when they write based on what their target audience will or will not say.

HOW DO WRITERS AND PUBLISHERS SPLIT ROYALTIES?

10/2/2020

I get lots of music business related questions on my inbox and this is a very common one. The business side of music is not as complicated as it seems. The contracts and “rule” can look pretty confusing and complicated but once you get it, it will be very easy. Just need to get that on click in your mind and suddenly it’s like the fog had gone away and you can see everything pretty clear. Here are the basics of Writer – Publisher deals and how money is split.

There are two shares of royalties for each writer when a song is created. Each writer has a writer’s share and a publisher’s share. So, if there are two writers on a song, there are four shares assigned to that song. Two writer’s shares and two publisher’s shares. The way those shares are divided depends on the contracts that the writers have entered into basically it’s going to both of them as a whole and depending on the type of agreement they have between themselves it can be divided. In Flipside’s case, we sign the writers to an exclusive publishing agreement.

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