Last week was Tin Pan North, the annual fund-raising festival for NSAI’s Toronto chapter. There are two sets of music a night for three nights at three bars, featuring four writers each in the round. Three of the writers in each round/set are local small fish like me, and one is a bigger fish, either a Canadian or Nashville pro. I played an early show on Thursday. There was a small audience but they were very attentive, which honestly is way better than a big crowd talking amongst themselves in a small bar.
One cool thing about Tin Pan North is that NSAI members have the opportunity for a small fee to sit down with one of the Nashville pros for song reviews. I Googled the writers who were available and very quickly settled on Rob Crosby. I didn’t know of him before that, but it turns out that I did know some of his songs, one of which is Friday Night by Lady Antebellum.
So I took Friday morning off work and, with laptop, lyrics and guitar in hand, headed off to meet Rob.
Editing with Rob Crosby
What a great guy. Super friendly, easy going and really lyrically insightful.
We chatted for a little while and then took a couple listens to the first song. We ended up spending about 45 minutes on it! We took a lot of time discussing the subtle differences between various words, how they worked together, etc, moved the whole message along from beginning to end. We ended up changing 23 out of 198 words.
It was really exhilarating and confidence-building to be sitting there across the table from a veteran hit writer, sipping coffee, me strumming his guitar while he sang, and bouncing ideas back and forth.
One thing I’ve learned about critiquing creative work, whether it’s me giving feedback on other people’s songs or marketing stuff at my day job, or having my own work critiqued, is this: supposing the critic is experienced and insightful, the more specific and narrow their feedback, the better the material was in the first place; and the more general and vague the feedback, the rougher the material was.
So I left the meeting with Rob feeling pretty stoked and happy. And, to be honest, I’d been needing a lift after the last month of so of rocky terrain.
We finished up that song, stretched our legs and took a quick run through a second song. I was all set to leave because the allotted time was up, but Rob was gung-ho on listening to something else. See… great guy.
So I think that was the closest I’d come to co-writing since I wrote lyrics for another fella’s music back in high school.
I went to hear Rob's set that night. One of my favourites was "She's More" which was originally recorded by Andy Griggs and, I believe, later covered by Keith Urban. I just listened to Andy's version and Rob's was a bit more upbeat and I liked it better! :-)
Writing with Emily Hurson
Strangely enough, I had my first co-writing session planned for the coming Sunday afternoon. A friend introduced me to Emily a few months ago. She’s a local actor and writer and I knew she sang too. So I asked her if she’d like to take a crack at writing together and she was all for it.
I was a bit late crawling out of bed Sunday because I was out late with Alex watching the hottest, tightest most fun funk band in the country (possibly the world!): Five Alarm Funk.
Over coffee, I thumbed through my notebook looking for ideas to share with Emily. I came across a line I had back in March. Ideas started flowing and I had the song finished before lunch. It’s a really upbeat, positive love song that I’m really happy with. Have edited it a bit since and will probably fuss with a few more words before it’s “finished.” Obviously it didn't end up as co-write material, but at least I knew I was in a good creative space for our meeting.
So Emily showed up and pulled out her notes. She read some lyric starters she had for a city-mouse-country-mouse sort of theme. There was one word in there that I thought had a whole other concept to offer. So we batted that around for a while, just lyrics, hadn’t gotten into music yet.
Then I asked her what key was good for her. She didn’t care, so I said sing any old random note. She gave me a big fat laaaa which turned out to be an A. So I fiddled around and came up with a melody in A. Now, this is the really interesting part. It’s hard to explain why exactly I know this, but I know without a doubt that I never would have written a melody anything like it if I was sitting alone in that room. There was just something about the flavour that was new for me. So I told Emily that and she said “yeah, hive mentality” as in collective consciousness.
Very cool indeed. We were off to a good start.
So that melody got Emily rolling with some vocal embellishments and we started filling in a few words here and there. Turns out she writes a lot like I do, humming and singing gibberish until words begin to form. The tune seems to have a young, upbeat vibe. Makes me think of Taylor Swift. And the subject we arrived on had nothing in the slightest to do with the city-country idea we started with, or the second one that fell out of that.
We wrote the chorus and I recorded some music for Emily to work on verses with this week. We’ll get together again this Sunday. Looking forward to it.
Buzz buzz.
