NHT Blog

Today is International Podcast Day and the occasion has grown as quickly and largely as the medium itself has.  The creators of International Podcast Day actually coordinate live broadcasts that begin on what is September 29th in the U.S. since time zones make it the 30th in other countries where they’re marking the occasion (since it is international, after all).

A week ago yesterday I came back from Los Angeles where I was a speaker at the Outlier Podcast Festival.  Over the course of the event one of the speakers was talking about controlling your RSS feed.  He was essentially saying that as long as you have your podcast on your website, even if it got taken down from other platforms and/or your (podcasting) hosting service went out

For someone who’s always preaching about collaborating, it feels a little strange for me to write a blog under the headline of “It’s Okay to Say No.”

When I was young I never liked the expression, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”  I was determined to prove that theory wrong.  I was going to graduate with top grades and get ahead thanks to my smarts.

Maybe I’m more in touch with Hurricane Dorian because I live in Florida.  Even though, thankfully, it seems like we’ll be okay here in the Tampa Bay area, we still get brought into the conversation in more ways than one.

If you get interviewed enough times you get plenty of reps to where you’ve got answers prepared for just about anything that gets thrown your way.  More importantly, though, are the questions you’ve not gotten yet and/or those that you weren’t expecting.  How you handle those will say a lot – on different levels.

One of the many terrific scenes in the 1980 movie “Caddyshack” is when Judge Smails (Ted Knight’s character) asks Ty Webb (Chevy Chase’s character) how he shot in his round of golf that day.  When Webb replies, “Oh I don’t keep score, Judge,” the immediate follow-up that he gets asked is, “Then, how do you measure yourself against the other golfers?”  With his dry wit, Webb comes back with, “By height.”

If you can get people to come see you perform live, that’s only half the battle.  Now that you’ve gotten them there, you need to give them a performance that they’ll not only remember and tell others about, but, want to come back and see you again as a result.

As a songwriter you work so hard trying to come up with original ideas for songs.  You sit in songwriting sessions for hours, for days, trying to come up with a hook that will make yours the next big song that hits radio.  You wake up in the middle of the night to jot down something that somehow crept into your mind.  You don’t want to forget it when you wake up because it’s going to be great for that next song you’

Late (late!) tonight will mark exactly one week from when I flew back from Nashville.  Now that NFL training camps are opening, I can say, “After further review” it was a more productive trip than it already seemed on the surface.