Nashville pros offer tips on generating hit singles
| • | Can you write the songs? |
By Jeanne A. Naujeck
Nashville Tennessean
Your boss is a corporate conglomerate obsessed with sales figures and profit margins.
Gannett News Service
You report for work every day, spend hours in meetings and often stay up until dawn trying to put a new spin on an old cliché.
David Rivers, director of the Nashville Songwriters Association International Workshops, selects a track to play at a songwriting workshop in Nashville.
Your product has to grab the attention of consumers who are often too busy juggling kids, jobs and rush-hour traffic to listen to your three-minute spiel.
Who are you? A professional songwriter.
Amid the business chatter about "unleashing creativity" and "finding the tipping point," we decided to ask some of today's top creative people in Nashville's signature business — music — how they achieved success.
All of these working songwriters have produced songs that climbed to the top of the charts.
Their main themes: Go out and take in new experiences, listen more than you talk, use criticism to improve your skills, and, most of all, pursue passion over money.
Tom Shapiro — Decades of Hits
- Songs recorded: 350
- Top 10 hits: 47
- No. 1 hits: 21
With every major songwriting award to his credit, Tom Shapiro was a shoo-in for Nashville Songwriters Association International's Songwriter of the 1990s.
The Kansas City native grew up listening to Motown, The Eagles, Simon & Garfunkel and Burt Bacharach. So it's natural that he started out writing pop and R&B in Los Angeles in the 1970s.
"Never Give Up on a Good Thing" appeared on jazz vocalist George Benson's 1976 album and opened doors for Shapiro when he moved to Nashville in 1980.
"At the time I came here, 'Urban Cowboy' was big, and country was trying to cross over," Shapiro said. "Anyone from L.A. who could write pop music was considered interesting. I was embraced right away."
His first country cut was George Strait's "Every Time You Throw Dirt on Her (You Lose a Little Ground)." And he's spanned the decades with hits such as Joe Diffie's "In Another World," Holly Dunn's "Only When I Love," Rhett Akins' "That Ain't My Truck" and Sara Evans' "No Place That Far."
"I go for the emotion — I want to make you laugh or cry," he said. "Lyrically, you've got to know your audience, and I'm writing for radio." As in other genres, radio hits follow a formula, Shapiro said. "You're trying to write in a small box, but the confinement can be freeing. The challenge is, how creative can you be within that box?"
John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote songs in the 2 1/2-minute, 32-bar mold that fit the 1960s. "They were trying to write hit songs in a certain form, and they mastered it better than probably anybody else," he said. "Those songs are still around today.
"I would love to write songs that live forever, but at this point I just try to do the best I can.
"I don't think the Beatles were thinking that way either."
Jeffrey Steele — The Frontman
- Songs recorded: 175 in past three years
- No. 1 hits: 5
- Top 10 hits: 11
Jeffrey Steele has the looks, energy and charisma of a lead singer, and that's what he was when he moved to Nashville in 1994, after an earthquake hit his native Southern California and his band Boy Howdy broke up.
"I kept giving myself a deadline to have some sort of activity going on with my songs, and of course I kept pushing it back," Steele said.
Around 1998, things changed. LeAnn Rimes cut his song "Big Deal," Kevin Sharp had a hit with "If You Love Somebody," and Diamond Rio struck gold with "Unbelievable."
"All hell broke loose. I can't explain it and I don't want to," Steele said. "I just kept doing the same thing and working harder at it ... next thing I know, I'm getting cuts."
These days, producers and song scouts come looking for him.
Steele writes with an edge. Tim McGraw's "The Cowboy in Me" portrays a man who is restless and ungrateful — "my own worst enemy." It echoes the gritty scenes Steele has observed in the 20-some years since he quit high school to play in bands.
"I got my education in the redneck honky-tonk bars around Riverside (Calif.)," he said. "I got so many stories out of those places that are now on the radio 20 years later."
"I think it's really all a culmination of finding what worked for me and never forgetting stories from people I met, gigs I've played."
He performs frequently and just released his second CD, "Gold Platinum Chrome and Steele." The real reward, he said, is hearing an audience sing "a lyric about my life."
While in his 20s, Steele met Kris Kristofferson and asked his idol for advice. "He said, 'Don't ever do it for the money,' Steele said. "At the time I was like, 'That's all you're going to tell me? The greatest songwriter ever?'
"Twenty years later, he was so right."
Troy Verges — 'I have no secret desire to be a star'
- Songs recorded: 61
- Top 10 hits: 5
- No. 1 hits: 2
Growing up in Shreveport, La., Troy Verges never imagined he would write songs for a living. The musician didn't know songwriting was a career, but a lucky break in college got him an internship at Patrick Joseph Music, a small but influential publishing company led by veteran Pat Higdon.
Working in the tape room, "I got an inside view of the town at a company that was really happening," Verges said. "You meet people in a completely natural way that's not forced. I got an education there."
Verges also found his writing voice. A month before graduation, Higdon offered him a modest publishing deal, and stuck with him for the nearly four years it took to get his first big cut, "Love Is a Sweet Thing" on Faith Hill's smash album "Breathe."
"When you write song after song that doesn't work, it takes a toll on your confidence," Verges said. "But after that was out, I started to get more of a favorable ear. They wanted to listen."
At age 30, Verges has had 61 charting singles, including Trisha Yearwood's "I Would've Loved You Anyway," Martina McBride's "Blessed" and Sara Evans' "Backseat of a Greyhound Bus."
Verges tries for a sound that's "familiar, yet offers something new."
Craig Wiseman — 'Joe Regular Guy'
- Songs recorded: 180
- Charting singles: 60
- No. 1 hits: 11
Craig Wiseman is like the Jerry Seinfeld of country music — a guy riffing on the smallest observations of daily life, but in song.
"I'm just Joe Regular Guy," he said. "I assume, if I felt it, everybody else did, too."
Wiseman's songs are snapshots of America, like the sports fanatics in the Mark Wills anthem "And the Crowd Goes Wild," or the check-your-troubles-at-the-bar crowd portrayed in Montgomery Gentry's "Hell Yeah." Both were written with frequent collaborator Jeffrey Steele.
"We used to go to bars, and there'd be these guys going up to the stage and going, 'Hell, yeah!' Wiseman said. "We breathe life into these people."
"Young," a Kenny Chesney hit, was inspired by his high school reunion, Wiseman said.
"I'm not a songwriter. I'm just a writer. You observe the stuff everybody observes ... what makes people point at the radio and go, 'Exactly! Man, that's just how it was."'
The Hattiesburg, Miss., native discovered his talent as an adolescent, rewriting lyrics and learning how to transpose songs into three chords so everyone at church camp could sing along.
"It all happened in a month.
I'd stay up all night writing seven or eight songs, just hooking up words with music, play them for Mom at breakfast and then go to bed," he said.
A chance visit to Nashville showed him he could earn a living at it. He arrived in May 1985 not worrying about whether he could "write country."
"You write whatever you listen to," Wiseman said. "I grew up listening to everything — Bob Seger, The Eagles. ... I'm fortunate that a lot of country today is what pop rock was in the '70s and '80s."
Wiseman said he could never make up stories like the one that inspired Faith Hill's "When the Lights Go Down."
At a casino one night, he asked a card dealer what to play. The dealer replied that not only was he a recovering gambler, but also a recovering alcoholic who worked in a package store.
"Who would ever believe that?" Wiseman said, marveling at the true stories he's heard and turned into song.
"Constantly, life will outstrip fiction."
Can you write the songs?
Hit songwriter Ralph Murphy analyzed the No. 1 country hits of 2002 and found the 21 songs had the following things in common:
- Two-thirds were not written by the artist.
- The average intro time was 14.2 seconds.
- Nineteen of the 21 used the title of the song within the first 60 seconds (including intro). Seventeen had nine or fewer uses of title, including in the fade.
- Sixteen of the 21 used the first- or second-person pronoun (I, me, you, us, we), in line with the theme of country songs being conversational and personal.
- Patriotism, fishing and drinking had their time at the top, but most of the themes were about love, found or lost, celebrated individually or as a family.
Add irony, humor and image-inducing detail, wrap it up in about 3 1/2 minutes, and you're on your way!
— Nashville Tennessean
