{"id":16894,"date":"2013-03-13T15:56:17","date_gmt":"2013-03-13T15:56:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whisnews21.com\/?p=16890"},"modified":"2013-03-13T15:56:17","modified_gmt":"2013-03-13T15:56:17","slug":"differences-between-songwriting-in-nyc-and-nashville","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/2013\/03\/13\/differences-between-songwriting-in-nyc-and-nashville\/","title":{"rendered":"Differences Between Songwriting in NYC & Nashville"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"CliffGoldmachermaritz01\"<\/b><\/h1>\n

The Differences Between Songwriting in NYC & Nashville<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Written by: Cliff Goldmacher (www.EducatedSongwriter.com<\/a>)<\/p>\n

As a transplanted songwriter from Nashville to New York City, I\u2019ve had the chance to observe, up close, the approaches to songwriting and the songwriting communities in both cities.\u00a0 While there are of course many similarities, there are also quite a few differences. By the way, I feel I should mention that the following observations are really more my impressions than hard facts.<\/p>\n

Differences Within the Similarities<\/p>\n

In this article, I\u2019ll start with a similarity between New York and Nashville as it\u2019s readily apparent and then explain how, within that similarity, one city differs from the other.\u00a0 One of the first similarities is that both cities have huge songwriting populations.\u00a0 The depth and breadth of talent in both places encompass many more genres that the obvious country music for Nashville and pop and rock music for New York.\u00a0 There are great pop writers in the suburbs of Nashville and extremely accomplished country songwriters living in Greenwich Village.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Finding the Songwriters<\/p>\n

One difference between the two songwriting communities is how easy they are to locate.\u00a0 Because Nashville\u2019s artistic community is predominantly made up of singers, songwriters and musicians, it\u2019s much easier to find the music\/songwriting community there.\u00a0 New York, on the other hand, has a wonderful songwriter population, but it\u2019s mixed in with the countless other artists and creative types that live there and is thus less obvious.\u00a0 In other words, it takes a little more effort to find the songwriters in New York, but believe me, they\u2019re there.<\/p>\n

Before moving from Nashville to New York, I\u2019d taken several writing trips a year up to New York and, by a process or trial and error, I found a core group of NYC songwriters that became my go to people on every trip.\u00a0 This way, when I eventually moved to New York, I felt like I was instantly part of the community even though I had to discover it little by little.\u00a0\u00a0 I highly recommend this approach for anyone considering a move to New York as it eases the transition and makes the entire process much less overwhelming.<\/p>\n

Co-writing<\/p>\n

Although both New York and Nashville have large numbers of songwriters, co-writing is much more a part of the day to day routine in Nashville.\u00a0 It\u2019s not unusual for a Nashville writer to have five co-writing appointments in a week where they meet with a different cowriter every day in a publishing company office on Music Row.\u00a0 This happens for several reasons.\u00a0 First of all, as a hired staff songwriter for a Nashville publishing company, you are given a yearly quota of songs that you need to fulfill. The more songs you write,\u00a0 the more quickly you\u2019ll fulfill your quota.\u00a0 Publishers make a real effort to connect songwriters they think will work well together and go as far as to set up co-writing appointments for their writers.\u00a0 As a result, it\u2019s fairly common in Nashville to be set up on a \u201cblind date\u201d cowrite. Secondly, even though you\u2019re only credited with half a song for a cowrite, it\u2019s easier to motivate yourself to write if you\u2019ve got someone to collaborate with.\u00a0 The act of scheduling appointments and being expected to show up significantly eases the stress of having to create on a schedule.\u00a0 This approach seems odd to a lot of New York writers who are either artists themselves and used to writing with their own bands or are songwriters used to working with artists whose schedules are much less predictable.<\/p>\n

Lyrics<\/p>\n

Staying with the generality that you\u2019re writing country in Nashville and pop or rock in New York,\u00a0 I\u2019ve noticed\u00a0 that the rules of lyric-writing between these genres and cities differ significantly.\u00a0 In Nashville, the story is king.\u00a0 This means that the lyric has to make perfect sense, the images are concrete and the story has a logical flow from beginning to end.\u00a0 There\u2019s not a lot of room for poetic, impressionistic lyrics that don\u2019t have the arc of a story.\u00a0 New York, on the other hand, while it certainly has its share of great songwriter\/storytellers,\u00a0 has a broader tolerance in its pop and rock genres for words that \u201cfeel\u201d and \u201csound\u201d good together.\u00a0 Please don\u2019t misunderstand.\u00a0 It takes just as much skill to write a great pop lyric where the words convey the emotion of the song and carry the nuances of the melody as it does to write a great story in a country song, but it\u2019s a different skill set.\u00a0 I\u2019ve found that switching from one approach to the other can be creatively liberating and quite a bit of fun.\u00a0 Also, it\u2019s interesting to see how one city\u2019s lyrical approach can bleed into the other\u2019s.\u00a0 In this way, you can end up with country lyrics where the words in the story sound good next to each other or pop lyrics with the arc of a story to them.<\/p>\n

Labels<\/p>\n

Speaking of artists, another similarity in the two cities is that they are both home to major record labels and their signed artists.\u00a0 This alone attracts a huge number of songwriters to both cities.\u00a0 The difference here is that country music artists are still largely dependent upon outside songs for their projects.\u00a0 In New York, bands tend to write their own material and it is less common for these artists to go looking for outside songs.\u00a0 Occasionally songwriters will be paired with these bands\/artists in New York allowing the writers to end up with cuts on these acts.\u00a0 Of course, all of these distinctions are lessening as more country artists write and cowrite their albums as well.<\/p>\n

You Can\u2019t Lose<\/p>\n

At the end of the day, both communities are great places to work and create.\u00a0 Ironically, after living in Nashville, working as a staff songwriter and writing for the country market for twelve years, my first cut was with a New York writer and was recorded by an Irish tenor on Universal Records named Ronan Tynan.\u00a0 In my opinion, it was the blend of our New York and Nashville songwriting sensibilities that came together to create that song.\u00a0 What I mean by this is that somewhere between the soaring melody more suited to pop and the lyric that had more of a country attention to detail, we came up with a classical crossover song.\u00a0 So, if you\u2019re a Nashville writer thinking about working in New York (or vice versa) I\u2019d highly recommend it.\u00a0 Sometimes it\u2019s the differences that create the best art.<\/p>\n

Good luck!<\/p>\n

You can download a FREE sample of Cliff\u2019s eBook \u201cThe Songwriter\u2019s Guide To Recording Professional Demos\u201d by going to http:\/\/www.EducatedSongwriter.com\/ebook<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Facebook: www.facebook.com\/EducatedSongwriter<\/a><\/p>\n

Twitter: edusongwriter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Differences Between Songwriting in NYC & Nashville Written by: Cliff Goldmacher (www.EducatedSongwriter.com) As a transplanted songwriter from Nashville to New York City, I\u2019ve had the chance to observe, up close, the approaches to songwriting and the songwriting communities in both cities.\u00a0 While there are of course many similarities, there are also quite a few differences. By the way, I feel I should mention that the following observations are really more my impressions than hard facts. Differences Within the Similarities In this article, I\u2019ll start with a similarity between New<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16034,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16894"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}