At SongTown we deal in real… People often ask Clay and me why two writers who have had multiple #1 songs and are still getting cuts would spend time doing something like SongTown? SongTown is the community we wish we had in the early stages of our careers. It’s a true labor of love. We…

Being realistic about your songs… Clay and I talk to people every week who are obsessed with finding a publisher to hear their songs or a song plugger to pitch them. 99.9% of the time, those songs are not ready for a publisher or a song plugger. Why? Because they haven’t yet gained a realistic…

I believe that the scariest songwriting moment in songwriting is the moment before you start. Most of us have voices that play in our heads. Those voices often tell us that the task at hand “can’t be done”. “You aren’t good enough”. “You can’t handle this”…. you know the drill.   It is the rare…

The Horse & Writer Retreat A number of years back I got an invite from one of my favorite country songwriters, Skip Ewing, to go out to Wyoming and share my knowledge of songwriting at a camp for a week. The event was called Horse & Writer. We rode horses during the morning and worked on the craft of…

The chorus is often the most important part of a song.  It’s the piece that (hopefully) people will be walking around singing for years to come.  So, spending a little extra learning to write a better chorus will pay huge dividends.  Here are some things I always try to keep in mind. Make the chorus…

The set-up line is the line just before the title or hook of your song. It is probably the most under-valued yet crucial lyrical line of most songs. Yet, I am constantly reminded in my mentoring sessions of how few writers are aware of this element of a song. Here’s an example of a verse from “The Song…

I’ve enjoyed a 25+ year music business career that has exceeded my imagination by far. I wanted to pass on some of the things I’ve learned in that time period about keeping cuts coming over time. Here are the ways I have turned a couple of cuts into a bunch of cuts: Don’t develop a…

One of the biggest mistakes I see aspiring writers make is that of overlooking their peers. When we are trying to get things going with our writing, too many of us are so busy looking up that we forget to look around. There are people at your level right now that are easily accessible to…