Musings

My Body Knows Me Well

The human body is an amazing thing. That is a general statement of fact. I’m sure there are individual human bodies that aren’t worth the price they would get from the local college to be donated for research. But I am referring to the normal wear and tear, average age, decent habits human body. Crystal Meth devotees need not read further.

Farther.

This is going to be a short muse. Late and short. Sorry about that. Let me explain.

I have been on the road. Many, many shows. In NYC for our “Nashville to New York” show with Gary Nicholson and Sharon Vaughn. Freezing cold walking the streets making sure that Georgia can carry all of her Nordstrom bags. We do the show. Suddenly the weather is 70 degrees. We are now walking around in T-shirts carrying our coats in empty Nordstrom bags. Our bodies are frightened… confused. They are simple machines not used to this meteorological pin-balling. But we are strong and healthy and we go on. Why? Because we know we have more shows to do.

I make it till Sunday when I have a big show with my Crosby, Stills & Nash tribute band, Laurel Canyon. Yes, I am one of THOSE guys. It’s fun. It’s with two of my longest, dearest friends (that does not mean that if you lie them down they are any longer than a normal person… I mean I have known them for a loooong time) and we are very, very good.

This show was at the Iridium in Times Square and it was for booking agents from all over the country. A good show and we work a lot next year. A bad one (one of us comes down with pneumonia) and our booking agent drops us and we are back playing the small stage at Eddie’s Steak House. The SMALL stage for God’s sake!!!

We play on Sunday, all of us hale and hearty. We kill!! Business cards are offered and accepted. Pictures are posed for. Our future in the entertainment world as faux rock stars now carved in cement.

Does my body then say to me: “I’m exhausted. I have been in many time zones under many different atmospheric conditions and I’d like to break down now.”

No.

It says: “Don’t forget we have a show in Irwin Pennsylvania in two days!!”

I hate it when my body pays more attention to my calendar than my brain does.

So I fly home. I feed the dog. I get back on a plane and fly to Irwin, PA. It is 16 degrees again. We sing “Helplessly Hoping” fourteen or fifteen times and I wake up and get back on a plane and fly home. It is 10 degrees at home. Finally my body sighs…”Off the hook. I can collapse in a steaming heap of success.”

Oh no, my organ-filled friend.

I have a benefit show at the Bluebird for Live Hospice. That’s the place I may end up if I don’t slow down and take care of myself.

We have a wonderful show. Mike Reid, Jim Photoglo and Sarah Buxton. I am healthy. I am a little vocally tired but push thru it. My body agrees and we play till 11:30.

My body knew that was my last show for about ten days. I play The Bluebird with Chip Esten and Georgia on the 28th of this month. My body knows it has served me well.

I woke up today with a cold. Feel lousy. Staying on the sofa. Drinking tea. Feel crappy. Leave me alone.

Songs Are Like Grapes

Is anyone ever truly satisfied? I made a salad for dinner last night and, as I’m eating the last bite, I realize “Oh damn. I could have put grapes in here.” My night was ruined.

How many of you out there write a song that makes you say “Yup. Every ounce of my talent is right there on the page and in the notes. Couldn’t do better if I tried.”?

I wrote a song last week that is as good as any song I’ve ever written. It was an amazing feeling. At my age (I’m a young and feisty 107) I am kind of amazed that the melodies and words keep coming. Lucky for me my co-writer had a great start that inspired me. The song was basically completely written except for punctuation. Just kidding. But he DID have a North Star and a couple of very wonderful lines to grease the skids and get us going. And it was for a project so the finished song had a reason to exist!!!

That is the problem these days. Two writers in a room writing a song are pretty much dooming the song to be trapped like Rapunzel in the tower of good intentions. These days we need to be in a room with someone with a record deal so you have a target to shoot at.

That’s what we had here. A target to shoot at. And we hit it. We hit that sombich good. (Sorry. I promised to clean up.)

That song was a week or so ago. Now I am back wondering if I remember how to write a song!! (I actually am a very confident man in that regard. I always say that I can write about a toothbrush if I thought that might be the latest song craze!)

I play shows and, if I am playing in the round with three other writers… sometimes when it gets to me, my song sounds like a ten year old wrote it. Yes, sometimes I hire ten year olds to TRANSCRIBE my songs.… but I do the actual writing.

If I listen to country radio I might hear five songs in a row that sound like… songs. Then I hear one of MY songs and it sounds like the song you would hear when you wind the crank on a Jack in the Box you bought at a mobile home yard sale. It must be because I was there when the song was made up. So it sounds… made up.

I have recorded three albums. Mariannes (My “POP offering)… “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One” (My live “all the hits that fit” album….and “Juggler’s Logic.” (My more acoustic folkier thang).

Yet I feel like I haven’t made the album I was put here to make. This year I am pledging to myself that I am going to make that album. I am stockpiling songs that I am proud of and putting away my pennies so I can go into the studio and make some art. Or go into the studio WITH art and make some music. (Art is my engineer)

Will that make me satisfied? Will grapes in my salad tonight make me satisfied? Am I destined to being dissatisfied hitting triples when I want to hit home runs? Am I an egomaniac to think I am hitting triples when I’m probably hitting bunt singles? I guess it’s a good thing when it comes to the arts. Otherwise you just string a few words together and say “There. It’s a song. I’m going to go watch TV.”

I never want to be one of those guys.

There. It’s a Monday Musing. Now I’m going to go watch TV.

Tanya Tucker and Walt Disney

Everyone is Tanya Tucker crazy right now. A new album that’s getting great reviews. Grammy nominations. Starring role in the next Mandolorian season. No? Well, you can’t trust Facebook.

She deserves it. She got a little lost for a while but there aren’t many singers who can deliver a song like Tanya. Imagine having a hit with a mature song like “Delta Dawn” when you are only 3 and a half years old.

No? Damn Facebook again.

I have a Tanya Tucker story.

Full disclosure. She recorded a song I wrote with Victoria Shaw many years ago called “We Don’t Have To Do This.”

Is Victoria reading this? No? Well then I wrote it myself.

No, seriously, I wrote it in Miami with Vic while we were eating. We wrote most of it on the menu and the rest on the drive back home. I still have the menu. Did you know you could get a cheeseburger in 1993 for $1.75? Jeez.

It wasn’t a huge hit for Tanya but we were proud to be small links in her musical chain.

So my story is this. She was known as quite the wild child for a period of time. I had been hired by Disney to produce an album for them. They wanted an album of country stars singing famous Disney songs. I loved the challenge. I got to pick the songs. I got to pick the artists. It’s a wonderful record if you’ve never heard it. Faith sang “Part of Your World” with a full orchestra. (That was a scary afternoon. My first orchestral session. I had them all wear tuxedos and red fake noses. Wait, that was the Beatles. I am getting my legends mixed up.)  I had Alison Krauss sing “Baby Mine.” Gorgeous.

I had George Jones and Kathy Mattea sing a duet on “You’ve Got A Friend In Me.”  It was so fun producing the vocal on George Jones. And by producing I mean getting coffee when he asked. Actually one of my finest producing moments came when I asked George to “Sing this line starting up high and then go low.”

He said “Oh… you want me to George Jones it, do ya?”

When that track was finished I went in and sang Kathy Mattea’s part and put it on a cassette so I have a version of it with ME singing with George. I sort of sang with George Jones. Move over Tammy.

Back to Tanya.

I wanted Tanya to be on the record. I knew she had to sing something fun and uptempo. So I took the famous song “Someday My Prince Will Come” and I made it a roadhouse rocker!! Check it out here:

I was worried. She had a bit of a reputation that she was living down to. She had already bailed twice and I was running out of time. I had sent her the song but couldn’t get her into the room to sing. Finally her manager called to say that 11 PM on Saturday night she will be there. Now if you know musicians at all you would probably think…”Hmmm. Saturday night at 11….she should be well rested.” I got nervous.

About twenty after eleven I was waiting at the studio door when a large black limo pulled up. Like that scene in “Fast Times At Ridgemont High”… the back door opened and smoke billowed out. Now I’m not a chemist so I am in no position to analyze the composition of said smoke but there was a butt load of it. The smoke was followed by four laughing women who spilled out onto the pavement with shoes and purses flying.

Tanya straightened up and announced she was here and, “Let’s get ‘er done!!”

To quote a later song of hers… I was fairly sure I was in “Some Kind Of Trouble.”  It had become a complicated song after a massive rewrite of the arrangement.

She went into the vocal booth, put on her headphones, we rolled tape and she proceeded to sing the song perfectly from top to bottom.

Just to sound like I knew what I was doing I said, “Let’s get one more to be safe” and she did it again.

Perfectly. Better, even.

I said, “We got it.”

She said, “All right, darlin’”

She walked outside to her waiting friends, got back into the limo whooping and hollering and drove back off into the night. Not getting into the limo with them was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done.

The point to this musing?

Tanya is and always has been a pro.

I am and always have been a fan.

I hope she wins a Grammy.

Ice Cream Slinger

My first real job happened in Santa Cruz after I moved out there in 1972. Before that I worked for my Dad at Burr Electric Company. It’s not fair to call that a “job” since, in the immortal and paraphrased words of Lyndon Johnson, “I did not seek it nor did I accept it if offered.”
It wasn’t offered. I was told I was now working for him and I should probably go out and buy some big boy pants and a screwdriver.

When I left CT for CA ( Hey! I traded T for A!  There has to be a joke in there somewhere. Anybody?) I found myself in a big house living with twelve other young people like myself. Well, not really like myself. The difference was….they liked it. There were bodies everywhere at night. Nothing in the fridge was safe. The electricity would be turned off and the landlord would knock on our door telling us the bills and rent weren’t paid because the guy we designated as being the leasee of the house REALLY liked cocaine. I mean he REALLY liked it. He liked it more than he liked living up to his fiscal responsibilities so sometimes we had to pay rent twice. Once to the landlord and once to a guy with face tattoos on Pacific Avenue.

That was when the grim reality hit me. I was there to be in this band. We rehearsed every day. No one woke up before three in the afternoon. I had my days free. Time to go out and find a job.

Dean, our drummer, worked a few nights a week at a pizza parlor. That meant that at least three times a week we could count on him bringing home unclaimed pizza (memo to self: Great band name…Unclaimed Pizza) and a green hefty bag full of beer. You did not know that beer could be transported in a green hefty bag? Where were you raised?

Side note: We eventually got to play at his pizza parlor. That was the good news. The bad news was that, in order to GET to California, the other guys in my band sold all their instruments. They arrived in California to be in a band with no instruments to hit or strum or pluck. Zip. Nada. When we GOT the gig at the pizza parlor we gathered around two acoustic guitars and hoped for the best.

Back to my job.

I saw an ad in the paper that said Marianne’s Ice Cream Parlor was looking for someone. “I’M someone!!!” I yelled out loud to a house full of sleeping hippies.

I looked in the mirror. What I saw was a twenty year old, skinny as a rail kid, with hair down past his shoulders that made him look like Michael Ansara on a non-call day. What to do? What to do?

I went out and bought a wig. Where does one find a wig, you ask? I don’t remember. Today I would Google it, but back then I probably looked in the Yellow Pages and found a wig store. And I bought a hair net. Wearing a wig is a whole big thing. Put all my hair up under the hair net. Secure with pins. Not bobby pins. Actual pins that I drove it through the net and into my skull.

I’m kidding. They were bobby pins. I’m not a masochist. (well, I wasn’t one yet back then) Then I slipped on the wig and… presto chango… I looked like someone you could kind of trust with a scoop and a cash register.

I got the job. It was a great job and I realize now that a lot of what you learn on your first real job guides you and influences you for the rest of your time here on Earth. For example:

My boss Sam was great. Funny and kind and fair. He knew I was in a band so he let me have weekends off. I would open the store and work till mid-afternoon so I could be back in time for the band to wake up and start doing drugs. Eventually I confessed to him that I was wearing a wig (It was hot as hell under that thing) and he basically said “Duh!” Then he told me as long as no one complained I could de-wig. Now when I run a session or are in charge of a project I try to be like Sam… keep it fun, keep it fair and allow people to take their wigs off. Metaphorically speaking.

Another lesson: Sam said I could eat as much ice cream as I wanted. I could eat the stuff all day long for all he cared. The first two weeks it was sundaes for breakfast followed by milk shakes and banana splits for lunch. After a while…you guessed it. I no longer cared for eating ice cream. His inventory was now safe from me. Smart move on his part. I raised my kids the same way. If you deny it…they want it a thousand times more. If you let them go nuts for it they will eventually get sick of it. That philosophy was not successful with my band though. Apparently if you let someone have all the cocaine they want …what they want more than anything is…a lot more cocaine. Forever.
They have a lot in common with guppies. Guppies will eat till the explode. Cocaine users will do cocaine till your band explodes.

Last thing I learned? I love to clean. I also MADE the ice cream in the back room. At the end of the day everything had to be cleaned with soap, water and a hose. And I loved it. To this day I rush through meals so I can start cleaning the kitchen.  Give me a sponge and a dirty plate and I am in Disneyland!!

Random wrap up thoughts:
I like ice cream now.
I would drop in and say hi to Sam every time I was in Santa Cruz. till he died a few years ago.
I know the correct way to scoop ice cream out of a can.
My hair is shorter now and I look a lot like the pictures of me in the wig all those years ago.
There is a dirty plate in the sink but I am saving it till later so I have something to look forward to all day.

Legal Musings

“If I go to a seminar and play a pro writer my best song…what if he steals the song or the idea….or my guitar strap? Look at these “pro writers”… they’ll steal anything that’s not tied down.”

Here’s a bit of a deep dive on this subject.

You can’t copyright a title…or an idea. Your idea or title is probably not that original anyway. (Sorry but it’s true) People have been coming up with titles for a thousand ideas. When one of the disciples whispered in Jesus’s ear at the Last Supper he was probably saying “Judas just said something that would make a GREAT song. Let’s write it tomorrow and not tell him!

I get it. When I want to play a new song at the Bluebird I ask everyone to turn their phone cameras off because it’s a new song and maybe not quite finished. I certainly don’t want it out there in the cloud where anyone can steal it. Look at them . They’ll steal anything that isn’t tied down!

Whatever song you are convinced is precious and THE SONG that is gonna make you a legend in your own blue jeans…..in six months you probably won’t even remember it. When I was starting to play the Bluebird, I hit them with all my precious, classic stuff.

I don’t remember any of those songs today. Why? Because I got better and left those songs in the dust. In the dust, I say! Relax. If you are a real writer you have lots of great songs in you.

The odds of something good happening from playing your song at a writer’s night or at a seminar far outweighs the odds of something bad happening.

And last…. here’s a wacky idea.

Register your song. Register it with ASCAP or SESAC or BMI. Send it to yourself in a registered letter and then don’t open it. Copyright it with the Library of Congress. If you wait until you have half a dozen or so, you can call it a portfolio and register the whole thing as one work. It’s lots cheaper that way. Protect your song the way you would anything of value.

Think about this… publishers and pluggers like to be asked to go to exotic locales where they only have to listen to songs and get a tan. They want to be asked back again and again. If there was a whiff that they were ripping songwriters off they would never be asked to go to Bali again.

If I see another writer in the club when I am getting ready to sing a new song… I keep my eye on them. If I see them reach for a pen I leap off the stage and bludgeon them with my guitar.

Woody Guthrie’s guitar said, “This machine kills fascists.”

Mine says, “This machine kills plagiarists.”

Songwriting Questions

What question do students ask most often when I have a class in songwriting? Try to guess: 

 “Where did you get that shirt?”  

“Is that your real hair?”  

“What’s the capital of Botswana?” 

 Nope. 

 It’s:   “How do I get my songs HEARD?” 

 You took the classes. You put in the time. You studied every move your collaborators made and imitated them to the point of them taking out a restraining order. Your songs are good. Better than ever! Mom and Dad LOVE them.  

How do you get them heard by someone who can make your dreams come true? How do you get your song cut by an artist that will get it on the radio where you will make a buttload of moolah and put your kids thru college? Or enable you to actually HAVE kids. (One step at a time) 

 I’m warning you…this musing is not gonna end well. 

 I don’t know. 

 I used to write for a publishing company. I would turn a song in at the end of the day…someone would listen to it and decide who might like to record it. They would make some calls, take some meetings and the next thing I knew…..my song was on an album.  I don’t write for a publishing company anymore. I decided to stop when I realized that everyone my publisher was setting up meetings with I already knew well enough to send the songs to directly. 

The problem I have now is that I am not a great self-promoter. Getting a cut involves pestering. A great deal of pestering. Pestering is an art form I have never mastered.  

 It’s not enough to send them a song. You have to follow up. “Did you GET the song?” “Did you LISTEN to the song?” “Did you LIKE the song?” “Will you cut the song?” 

 Every one of those questions is a separate phone call that takes weeks of energy and chips away at your self esteem like a stone hammer in Shawshank Prison. 

 Enough negative malarkey.  

Here’s what I DO know. 

 You go to every songwriting seminar you can afford to go to so you get to play your best work in front of people who can tell good from bad. Tom Douglas played “Little Rock” for Paul Worley at one of those seminars and now Tom is in the songwriter Hall of Fame. 

You come to Nashville when and if you can so you can gauge yourself against the writers here. You can be the top tier writer in your town but remember…Nashville is the All Star Game of songwriting. Many writers came here thinking they were ready just to find out that they had a lot to learn. I used to go to the Bluebird every night I was free so I could listen to the great writers and get inspired. And by inspired I mean incoherently drunk. 

You meet people who can help you. And then…DON’T ASK THEM TO HELP YOU!!. Sounds counter intuitive, doesn’t it? Just tell them how much you like and appreciate what they do. Make them laugh. Something about a priest and a rabbi walking into a bar is always a good icebreaker. Be pleasant to talk to for a few minutes. Then go away.  

 The next time you see them they will remember you as the cool kid who was polite and stroked their ego and they will give you a little more of their time. And then one day they will ask YOU “What do you do? Oh. You’re a songwriter!” (Inside they will say to themselves…”how cool that they never mentioned that!”) 

 Then they will ask YOU to let them hear some of your songs. You will fall in love. You will get married and live happily…wait. That happened to ME. It probably won’t happen to you. Sorry. 

 If you are talented and do good work and have a great work ethic good things WILL happen. Amazing things that will change your life and make your being on this planet part of a plan instead of an accidental combination of chemicals and amino acids. Yes, that’s what we are. Accidental combinations of chemicals and amino acids. 

 It’s just that some of us can rhyme and carry a tune. 

Weird Old Guy Things

I’m getting old. I know that. I’m getting weird “old guy” physical ailments. Odd things growing on my skin. Odd things growing UNDER my skin. Don’t ask me if I need to go to the Men’s Room. I ALWAYS need to go to the Men’s Room.

Recently I came down with some strange disease called Dupuytren’s Contracture.  The symptoms are your fingers, in extreme cases, curl into your palm and you can’t even put on a glove.

Now I know all of YOU know how much I love a nice glove. Lamb’s skin, leather. A nice glove is the way to my heart. But screw the gloves. I was starting to be unable to play my guitar the way I wanted. With my hands.

So I got surgery. They went under my skin with a little sharp thingy (I’ll try not t get too technical) and cut the cord that was contracting my finger and…voila!! I’m playing like I was seventeen!

Unfortunately, I didn’t learn guitar till I was nineteen.
See what I did there? I kid. No, seriously, I am back playing normal again. A bloody miracle.

One of the things that this experience revealed to me was… I’m not ready to quit. Do I wish it was still a strapping 25 year old strolling on stage? Sure. Thank God for stage lighting. Do I wish sometimes that that my voice was as high as Vince Gills… like it used to be? Vince was one of my first writing appointments when I started coming to Nashville. When we got to the chorus of the song we were writing, the hotel manager knocked on our door to complain that the dogs in the neighborhood were dropping unconscious.

I’m not that guy anymore. Now I have  people coming up to me after a show and saying my voice reminds them of Kenny Rogers. I am fine with that. Now the first thing I request when I do a show is NOT cocaine and an Asian hooker… it is a stool on stage. Preferably with a back.

When I get together with other writers and singers of my generation the topic invariably comes around to “How long do we keep doing this?”
Mick Jagger said “If I’m still singing Satisfaction when I’m 30…shoot me.” It might have been Pete Townsend and “My Generation.”  We all ask the question…”Do they want to see someone my age singing on stage or do they want to hear what someone my age has to say in a song?”

My friends who are asking these questions are great. They are singing great. Playing great. Writing great. Is there some imaginary line in our heads that shows the cutoff where Old Great is not as good as Young Great?

I have always believed that the audience will tell me when it’s time to go. I wrote a song years ago about our profession. I compared writing songs and performing to being a tightrope walker. (Not a terribly original idea… I think every writer has one)

It’s called “My Life Is On The Wire” and the last verse goes like this:

“Someday I will lose my sense of balance 
The crowds will turn and cheer for someone new 
and the voices that once told me I was golden 
Will tell me when I’m through 
One day there’ll be nothing left for burning 
so what will I do then with all this fire? 
My life is on the wire” 

(That is followed by a whole bunch of “doo doo doos” but you get the idea.)

I still have something to say. There are older artists out there who can barely sing anymore but they are out there because they feel like the audience still wants to have the experience of seeing them. Maybe they have to talk the songs. But they tell stories of an older age when they were Golden and people lap it up and let the memories get ripped out of them like some weird cord coming out of the palm of my hand. Try getting THAT image out of your head.

I hope my friend keeps going. The world will miss his art. They will miss being brought back to when and where they were when they first heard his songs.

I’m playing a show tomorrow night. I will have my stool with a back. I will have my diet coke so the caffeine will help me stay up past 10 PM. I will have comfortable shoes. But my hand will be fine. My voice will be lower but will hopefully still do what I ask it to do. Hopefully no one will ask me to sing The Gambler.

I’ll let the audience decide if I’m overstaying my welcome.

Funny Guy

Sometimes I think I’m a funny guy. I’m a tool, but I’m a sharp little tool. This has gotten me in trouble many times. There are plenty of people in this town, I am sure, who think that I am a less than nice guy because I said something that I truly thought would be “witty” and it was perceived as cruel, heartless, sadistic and possibly legally actionable.

This is not only in the realm of verbal faux pas.

I am terrible with names. That is why we named our dog “Brick,” because for some reason I have no trouble remembering building materials.

So when I am at a party or industry function I am often perceived as shy or aloof. It is because I live in deadly fear that someone is going to come up to me and strike up a conversation and my face will give me away.

“You have NO idea who I am, do you?”

“No”

“Some brother YOU are.”

When people DO try to engage me in conversation, I never look directly into their eyes. They will see the panic in mine. These could be people I have worked with, made money with, dated… and in the heat of the moment their names cannot be recalled in that porous gelatinous mass I laughingly refer to as my “brain.”

But it’s my fabulous wit that gets me in the most trouble. Especially on this Itraweb thingy the kids are so crazy about. That is because, as I have lamented many times before, there is no sarcasm font. I did a tour many years ago playing with my dear friend, the amazing Don Henry. My nickname on the tour quickly became “Sarcasmo.”

Then it just as quickly became “That guy we left behind in Chattanooga.”

Here is a perfect example of how me thinking I’m Red Skelton backfired.

I was on stage at the Bluebird doing my show with my band. A beautiful girl was sitting at the front table with some guy… a pretty obvious “first date” situation. She ordered the plate with veggies and brie. I notice these things because I generally am hungry when I play. She was not eating because she probably was afraid to make any noise being up so close to the stage in a “shhhh” environment.

We started a song and I watched as she finally broke down and picked up a piece and took a bite.

Here’s what I thought would be funny.  I stopped the song and in front of everyone, looked at her and said, “Enjoying that, are we?”

She could have thrown her drink in my face. She could have run out of the club wailing. No. I had picked on the wrong gal.
She played the long revenge game.

She waited fifteen years…

And then she married me.

Co-writing

Just when I thought I was so drained of ideas that I was going to have to write about my 4th grade crush on Ms. Kowalski along comes some suggestions by YOU… my Muse Enthusiasts.

One of you asked about co-writing. IN particular…
“Can you talk about how working with songwriting partners have made or broke songs, and/or opened up your songwriting capacity.” 
 
In response…
No.

Just kidding.

I was weak in many areas of writing until I started co-writing with writers down here in Nashville. I specify “down here in Nashville” because this is where the writers were professionals and better than me and I was able to learn tips from every one of them. I did not start co-writing down here till I had a few hits so I was a good candidate to be set up with some great people right off the bat. Always shoot for collaborating with people at your level, or even better than you, so you can watch their fingers.

These days I write with someone new for the following reasons.

1. They are great. I hear about writers and I check on them; if what I hear on iTunes or the cloud blows me away… I sign up.

2. They are signed to a good publisher. That way I know that what we write is going to get pushed all over town (if it’s worth it) by a top notch plugger, and make the day worth it.

3. They write in a style that I do NOT write in, but it intrigues me. This includes some of the younger kids that are doing demos on their laptops while you are writing the song.

4. I respect them, and think there might be a few tricks left that I can learn at my age.

I have certainly had my share of hits due to the efforts of my co-writer. My Garth single happened because my co-writer wrote for the same company as Garth, who heard the demo playing in the tape room.  Some of the co-writers I write with have great writing relationships elsewhere and someday they might say “Hey you wanna get in on my next co-write with ______?”

I love writing alone. I can write several songs at the same time and work on one while I’m thinking about another. The songs I write by myself tend to be more adventurous because I don’t have to expose my wacky ideas to another human.

I love writing with some one else (sometimes) because some of them are my dear friends… some have great stories to share… some bring snacks (Victoria comes to mind) and some let me put my name at the top of a page of a song that I had very little to do with. Those are my favorites.

Awards Season

It’s awards season. Night after night of banquets and shows. It’s exhausting. Slightly less exhausting than back when I was hitting the charts with regularity.

All careers have cycles. You’re hot. King of the town. Master of all you survey. Then you notice that you haven’t had a song on the charts for a year. Then that stretches out and you become that guy who USED to be rockin’ back in the 40s. Then Arnold’s stops saving the fattiest pieces of roast beef for you.

That’s okay. I’m in the lottery business. Every song I write is a lottery ticket. I sit back and wait for the right ping pong balls to show up and BOOM.

Hi! Remember me? YES, I want gravy on that fatty roast beef!

So the awards shows all happen around this time. It’s CMA week. The big show is Wednesday. I will be in Naples FLA playing a show so if you DVR the show and look for me…I’ll be the guy not there. On the left.

The different organizations all have the banquets this time of the year because it’s when all the artists are in town to go to the CMAs so there is a fighting chance that they can wrangle a star or two to show up.

First up is NSAI. It used to be one show that featured the Hall of Fame induction AND the awards for chart toppers. They decided that the show was too long and they split it up. Maybe they figured out that the young kids who are making the money and the older ones who are tightening their belts and downsizing were sitting across the room from each other glaring. The colder you get the farther back in the room you are seated. From the back all the tables in front look like the toddler table at Thanksgiving. So they made it two different nights. One to give pats on the backs to the youngsters with their “Up ON Cripple Creek” hats and the other to honor the oldsters who like their food soft, their valets quick and their songs with pedal steels.

Next comes the SESAC awards. SESAC is one of the younger performing rights organizations. PROs are the folks that collect money from radio stations, restaurants, skating rinks….if they play music while you are there then they have to pay. The organization then splits it up using some sort of witchcraft algorithm that no one outside of NASA understands and no mortal can question and sends checks to lucky people who walk out to their mailboxes in their jammies.

At SESAC there are a lot of alternative artists. I did not recognize many of the songs they gave the awards to. I think you have to be on Spotify to know these folks. Since Spotify is the devil and I would have to be in hell to listen to it….I am out of luck. (This is my personal opinion based on the fact that a writer who has a song streamed on Spotify five hundred zillion times and get a check for twelve dollars while the owner of Spotify, who did NOT write that song, will take home a base salary of somewhere around “all the money in the world”).

A very young crowd. Lots of vests and hipster beards. You could definitely get a table at any hot East Nashville restaurant that night just by walking in. Ray Wylie Hubbard played a song so that definitely makes it the coolest event.

Then comes ASCAP. I used to belong to ASCAP but I haven’t in quite a few years. We had a falling out over a statement discrepancy.  My statement was “You have my money” and their statement was “We would like to keep it.”

Georgia belongs to ASCAP so I went as her plus one. A lot of these organizations are big on coming up with achievement awards. The Diamond award. The Trailblazer award. The Coco Puffs Award. They gave one of these to Hillary Lindsey who happens to be a genius and deserves any ward they want to throw at her INCLUDING the Coco Puffs. Lots of nice long speeches. Lots of old friends. A table way at the back. I was sitting way back near the door with another writer and we both realized that we had both been ASCAP Writer Of The Year at various times. Two Writers of the Year sitting at a table so close to the bathrooms that I had to keep a little dish of mints with me next to my wine glass. Glory Days, baby!.

Tonight is BMI. We have nothing to do with BMI though we have many dear friends who belong. I don’t judge.

Wednesday I will be poolside in Naples Florida all day and performing with my CSN&Y Tribute band that night. Yes, nothing rams home the decline of fortunes quite like a table at the back and being in a tribute band. I kid. I am in the band with two of my best friends and we have a blast. We know all these songs like the backs of our veiny, arthritic hands. There is a booming market for bands that can reproduce the cool music of the 1940s.

That’s our week down here in Nashville. I hope my friends who are up for awards at the CMAs win. I hope the monitors work. I hope we present our best foot forward to the rest of the world. I hope there are no hay bales on stage.

On Thursday I’ll be back at Arnold’s. Checking on my status.