In
response to the need for country demos for New Yorkers, I’ve actually
started a service where using streaming audio and both my New
York and Nashville studios, I’m making country demos for New York
songwriters using my Nashville studio, session musicians and singers
while we listen in real time and full-fidelity from New York.
For more info click here.
Finding
the Songwriters
One difference between the two songwriting communities is how
easy they are to locate. Because Nashville’s artistic community
is predominantly made up of singers, songwriters and musicians,
it’s much easier to find the music/songwriting community there.
New York, on the other hand, has a wonderful songwriter population,
but it’s mixed in with the countless other artists and creative
types that live there and is thus less obvious. In other words,
it takes a little more effort to find the songwriters in New York,
but believe me, they’re there.
Before moving from Nashville to New York,
I’d taken several writing trips a year up to New York and, by
a process or trial and error, I found a core group of NYC songwriters
that became my go to people on every trip. This way, when I eventually
moved to New York, I felt like I was instantly part of the community
even though I had to discover it little by little. I highly recommend
this approach for anyone considering a move to New York as it
eases the transition and makes the entire process much less overwhelming.
Co-writing
Although both New York and Nashville have large numbers of songwriters,
cowriting is much more a part of the day to day routine in Nashville.
It’s not unusual for a Nashville writer to have five cowriting
appointments in a week where they meet with a different cowriter
every day in a publishing company office on Music Row. This happens
for several reasons. First of all, as a hired staff songwriter
for a Nashville publishing company, you are given a yearly quota
of songs that you need to fulfill. The more songs you write, the
more quickly you’ll fulfill your quota. Publishers make a real
effort to connect songwriters they think will work well together
and go as far as to set up cowriting appointments for their writers.
As a result, it’s fairly common in Nashville to be set up on a
“blind date” cowrite. Secondly, even though you’re only credited
with half a song for a cowrite, it’s easier to motivate yourself
to write if you’ve got someone to collaborate with. The act of
scheduling appointments and being expected to show up significantly
eases the stress of having to create on a schedule. This approach
seems odd to a lot of New York writers who are either artists
themselves and used to writing with their own bands or are songwriters
used to working with artists whose schedules are much less predictable.
Lyrics
Staying with the generality that you’re writing country in Nashville
and pop or rock in New York, I’ve noticed that the rules of lyric-writing
between these genres and cities differ significantly. In Nashville,
the story is king. This means that the lyric has to make perfect
sense, the images are concrete and the story has a logical flow
from beginning to end. There’s not a lot of room for poetic, impressionistic
lyrics that don’t have the arc of a story. New York, on the other
hand, while it certainly has its share of great songwriter/storytellers,
has a broader tolerance in its pop and rock genres for words that
“feel” and “sound” good together. Please don’t misunderstand.
It takes just as much skill to write a great pop lyric where the
words convey the emotion of the song and carry the nuances of
the melody as it does to write a great story in a country song,
but it’s a different skill set. I’ve found that switching from
one approach to the other can be creatively liberating and quite
a bit of fun. Also, it’s interesting to see how one city’s lyrical
approach can bleed into the other’s. In this way, you can end
up with country lyrics where the words in the story sound good
next to each other or pop lyrics with the arc of a story to them.
Labels
Speaking of artists, another similarity in the two cities is that
they are both home to major record labels and their signed artists.
This alone attracts a huge number of songwriters to both cities.
The difference here is that country music artists are still largely
dependent upon outside songs for their projects. In New York,
bands tend to write their own material and it is less common for
these artists to go looking for outside songs. Occasionally songwriters
will be paired with these bands/artists in New York allowing the
writers to end up with cuts on these acts. Of course, all of these
distinctions are lessening as more country artists write and cowrite
their albums as well.
You
Can’t Lose
At the end of the day, both communities are great places to work
and create. Ironically, after living in Nashville, working as
a staff songwriter and writing for the country market for twelve
years, my first cut was with a New York writer and was recorded
by an Irish tenor on Universal Records named Ronan Tynan. In my
opinion, it was the blend of our New York and Nashville songwriting
sensibilities that came together to create that song. What I mean
by this is that somewhere between the soaring melody more suited
to pop and the lyric that had more of a country attention to detail,
we came up with a classical crossover song. So, if you’re a Nashville
writer thinking about working in New York (or vice versa) I’d
highly recommend it. Sometimes it’s the differences that create
the best art.
Cliff
Goldmacher is a songwriter, producer, engineer and the owner of
recording studios in both Nashville
and New
York City. Cliff is also a regular contributor
to EQ
Magazine and Pro
Sound News. He can be reached at cliff@cliffgoldmacher.com.
