Where Do Songwriters Come From?
Are they poets? writers? musicians? or some combination of the three? Are they serious about songwriting as a career?
Anybody in Nashville might tell you something different when asked these questions. All I can say after only being in Nashville for about half of 2021 (before being bounced back temporarily to Chicago with Covid pneumonia), is the answer is yes, yes, yes, and yes.
Some songwriters are fortunate enough to have parents that compel (or force) them to learn the piano when they are children. Some others picked up the guitar in their childhood or teenage years. Personally, I didn’t learn how to make noise out of an acoustic guitar until I was about 30 years old. However, I came from a writing background that saw me endeavoring in fiction in my youth.
After I had accumulated 1000 rejection letters from a legion of publishers and editors–then triumphantly had a few short stories published in literary journals, I discovered what many young scribes eventually discover. Life as an American fiction writer is one lonely road to tow–with little recognition and little reward besides the journey that is the work itself.
So, for me, the prose and its poetry became songs. Music had always been a big part of my American soul, and that’s the thing I’m sure I have in common with all songwriters in Music City. We want to be part of the thing that made us feel so special when we were young, the thing that still makes us high–great songs. We want to write great songs. We want to be part of a family that thrives in music. It’s both a truly artistic and truly human thing, to be sure.
Personally, I write from the notion of a title. I think a lot of songwriters do the same thing–but certainly not all. A month or so ago, a friend casually sighed out a very familiar refrain: “Yeah, sure, one of these days…”
And there it was. All it would take would be the writing. The chorus, “one of these days“, had been started. A playful delusion of a person who has to work for a living.
one of these days
I’m gonna drive my truck to the mountain
man, I’ll shout down all over the place
I’ll drink from that cup
I’ll swim in that fountain
the master of all I survey
I finished the song pretty quickly. Is it my best? Not even close. But it’s done and not just sketched in my head, hummed a bit on my lips, or left in a notebook somewhere.
I think that’s where real songwriters come from. The place where they learn to get their songs finished, wrapped up in a decent acoustic demo, and out to a studio or a few players that help in producing a potential sound.
When the lyrics are in a binder, the mp3 is on a hard drive, and then uploaded to SoundCloud or BandLab, you’ve done it! You’ve got a real song that’s really out there. A few verses, a chorus–maybe even a pre-chorus, and a bridge! A song that might be passed on by every music publisher that hears it, but still a song that was conceived and performed and finished.
That’s the thing that makes a songwriter feel like a songwriter, and essentially what makes them become a songwriter. The thing makes them feel like they’re in the right place and doing the right thing.