A GRAMMY-recognized songwriter, music producer, and educator, plus he has even done TEDx talks on songwriting. He has built a catalog of over a thousand songs and has gotten cuts by major label artists across genres from country, pop, and jazz, to classical crossover. Last month he put out a new book called, “The Reason for the Rhymes: Mastering the Seven Essential Skills of Innovation by Learning to Write Songs.”
"The myth is that if you are good enough, the world will beat a path to your door. And, in fact, that's now how it works at all. If you are good enough and you are motivated enough to go beat a path to the world's door, then maybe something will happen. But you can't be passive in this industry. You really have to put yourself out there."
"Nothing in music, in my experience - and I've been doing this for 30 years - nothing happens the way you think it is going to happen."
"I was moved to do this. This really was something I was passionate about."
"If you're looking for a way to make yourself miserable, especially in a town like Nashville, just start comparing your talent to the people around you. That is a sure-fire recipe to be instantly miserable."
"You need to be writing songs for the right reasons... Writing songs for the money is like getting married for the sex."
"It was FIFTEEN YEARS from the time I wrote my first song until the time an artist on a major label recorded one of my songs... After I got that first cut with a major label artist, songs that I had written five, six, seven years earlier ended up getting cut."
"I think of songs as lottery tickets. So, I bought my lottery ticket in January of 2015 and... in January of 2020 that song gets on the album that wins the GRAMMY."
"One of the gifts of having written songs for 15 years without any appreciable outward success, is that you have learned how to get up every day and do the work."
"Artists are singers, and singers have broader ranges and write more interesting melodies if they are also songwriters."
"I can say with a hundred percent certainty that collaboration is the reason I have a career as a songwriter."
"When things are working in your life, everything informs everything else."
"You tie the message of your song to the end of a baseball bat, and you beat the hell out of people with it. And that's what choruses do, and the best choruses are the most memorable choruses."
"I think one of the great roles of the arts - of all kinds - throughout time, is that it gives people a way of sublimating these terrible things and bringing release and happiness and a way of expressing yourself to help you get through painful or difficult experiences."
"Young and Naive" (by Heather Rigdon)
"Lost in Los Angeles" (by Spencer Day)
** Bonus content with Cliff Goldmacher **