Your Problem Isn’t Access

By SongTown co-founder Marty Dodson

For years, I had a story I told myself. It went something like this: “I already have the hit songs. I just can’t get to the right people. If I could find a publisher who really gets me, everything would change.”

I believed that with my whole heart. I had a collection of songs I was absolutely convinced were hits — twenty of them, burned onto a CD — and I blamed the music business for keeping me locked out. The gatekeepers were the problem, not the songs. At least, that’s what I thought.

Then I signed my first publishing deal.

My publisher, Kim, had signed me based on some songs I’d been writing with one of his staff writers. He hadn’t even heard my stockpile of “hits” yet. So we set up a meeting. I walked in there with that CD feeling like I was about to show him what he’d been missing. Twenty songs. My greatest hits. I was ready.

Kim listened quietly as we went through all of them. No reaction. No nodding along. Just listening. When the last song ended, I asked him which ones he was most excited about pitching.

He looked at me and said, “None of them.”

I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even process it. I had spent years — years — telling myself these were hits. And here was an experienced publisher and songwriter telling me flat out that not one of them was worth pitching. I was crushed.

He could see it on my face. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Tell you what — write with me for a year. At the end of that year, we’ll listen to all of these again. If you still think they’re hits, we’ll pitch them.”

It was the smallest sliver of hope, but I grabbed onto it. I decided I would prove him wrong. One year. Then he’d see.

That year flew by. The Monday I was supposed to meet with Kim, I pulled out that CD and put it in the player one more time — just to remind myself which songs I wanted to fight for.

What happened next stopped me cold.

As I listened through all twenty songs, I couldn’t find a single one I still believed in. Not one. Over the course of that year, Kim had mentored me. I had learned what it actually takes to write a hit — the real craft of it — and now I could hear every fatal flaw in every one of those early songs. The melodies that went nowhere. The lyrics that said nothing specific. The choruses that didn’t lift. I heard it all clearly, and I was embarrassed I hadn’t heard it before.

When our meeting time came, I sat down in Kim’s office. He smiled and asked, “Well, are we going to listen to those songs?”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t think we need to. I listened to them this morning. I get it now — they weren’t very good.”

He laughed and said, “I knew that would happen.” Then he told me he was proud of me for learning, for growing, and for being honest enough with myself to admit that not everything I wrote was great.

That conversation changed everything for me.

Because I realized in that moment that access was never really my problem. It was never the business keeping me out. It was that I didn’t yet have songs worth pitching.

Here’s what I’ve seen over and over again as I’ve mentored other writers – we all do this. We get excited about what we write — and we should, that excitement is part of what keeps us going. But the best songs we have at any given moment feel like hits to us, so when nothing happens with them, we blame the industry. We convince ourselves it’s about who we know (or don’t know), not the quality of the songs we’re writing.

The truth is harder than that, but it’s also more hopeful:

if you have genuine hit songs, it only takes one person hearing them for things to start moving. The business needs hit songs to survive. They are always looking. You don’t need to know everyone — you need to write something undeniable.

If you’re reading this, I’d be willing to bet you have enough access to succeed right now. What you may not have yet is the catalog to back it up. And that’s okay — it’s fixable. Keep learning. Take classes. Read books. Study great songs and figure out why they work. Never decide you’ve arrived and have it all figured out, because none of us ever do.

As Clay and I always say: “Writing a better song” is the answer to almost any problem you’re having as a songwriter. And that’s the truth.

Write on!
Marty