Posts Tagged ‘Articles’

Here are 4 areas of songwriter quicksand that are hard to get out of. Watch where you step! 1) The “I can’t play this for anyone until it’s perfect” quicksand. I can’t count the number of people who have told me that they are not going to let anyone hear their music until it’s perfect.…

Today, I met with a songwriter friend who is very talented and very frustrated with her lack of music business success. She was describing to me how she had thought she would be so much farther along by the time she reached the birthday that had just passed. I told her my story. It took…

Songwriting skills are like muscles.   The more you use them and challenge them, the stronger they get. Sometimes when I have a few spare minutes, I use these exercises to keep my writing muscles in shape. 1. Choose a song from the music charts and come up with a response to it. For instance,…

For centuries tales of Monster Dragons have been told in folklore, art, and in the last century, motion pictures. As kids, we believe Dragons are REAL! They seem like giant fire spitting creatures with bulging eyes—unbeatable. But as we grow older, we realize they aren’t real. Monster Dragons are made up, and they lose their…

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…

There are a number of quick ways but these are my top 9 on how to lose a co-writer and friend… 1) Show up late, drunk or hungover regularly. I can’t count the times co-writers have shown up in bad shape and I consider that wasting my time. Be professional. Be on time. in other…

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 first things I did when I decided to seriously pursue writing as a career was to attend an NSAI Song Camp. I submitted my application and nervously awaited a response to let me know if I was accepted or not. Finally, the day came. There in the stack of mail was a…

People often ask me, sometimes skeptically, why I almost exclusively co-write instead of writing alone. I have some reasons that I find pretty compelling, so I thought I’d share them. 1) Not many people I know are world-class at melody AND lyric. There are plenty of people who do both, but doing both and excelling…