"I worked 17 years for overnight songwriting success."  - Tim Hicks   There's often a misconception when someone in the music business succeeds. It's easy to think that an artist became and instant sensation or overnight songwriting success. So, I thought I'd share a story of how it most often happens here in the real world... Several years ago, at our publishing...

How many times have you heard it said that one must "Fake it to make it" or "Act as if you've already achieved your goal." Nice comforting quotes but not a smart strategy for chasing your songwriting goals. I remember starting out years ago, landing my first publishing deal as a staff writer in Nashville, and being asked to play...

Here are some ways to judge whether you are writing “better” commercial songs. No one of these measures alone determines “writing better,” but putting all of them together gives you a pretty good sense of your progress: Are you writing more unique ideas? Look at the songs you wrote a year ago compared to the ones you are writing now....

Songwriting can be a wonderfully, beautifully frustrating pursuit.  But it can be especially maddening if your singular goal is something outside of your control like focus on the songwriting summit. So, let's say your obsession and songwriting summit is a Bruno Mars cut... There are several reasons that you are going to likely spend the rest of your life banging your...

  Eight years ago, fellow pro songwriter Marty Dodson and I made a pact to do all we could to keep the craft of songwriting alive. We were chatting at a local coffee shop in Nashville, Tennessee. We discussed how we'd learned early on in our careers from master songwriters who passed their knowledge and torches to us: Hall of...

                One of the most popular questions we get at SongTown is "how many songs should I send to a producer or publisher?"  The prevailing myth for aspiring songwriters is that “more shots equals a better chance of something great happening”. I want to dispel that myth and to explain why pitching your songs with a shotgun is NOT the...