Advice On Becoming A Nashville Songwriter

I’ll never forget some of the best advice I ever got was from Rivers Rutherford.  I had literally just arrived in Nashville that day, and through a vague connection I was able to meet this hit songwriter at his home and later in his office, and boy did I blow it!  

It’s okay, I have a feeling that most people like me blow those good chances at first.  At the time, I simply wasn’t ready to work with someone of the caliber of Rivers Rutherford, despite how ready I thought I was.

But oh how I’ve listened and learned since then, and if you are reading this Mr. Rutherford, I would love to take that second meeting and play Rescue along with some of my newer, more polished, commercially-potential ideas.

The simple advice Rivers Rutherford gave me was so valuable that I want to share this knowledge with other new songwriters in Nashville who are wondering where to go.  It’s simple:

Go out and play, make friends, and come up together.

Everything else will fall into place if it’s meant to be.

Have you ever heard stories about how movie stars and comedians all knew each other years and years ago, because they were all hitting the circuit trying to reach their own success?  It’s very much the same way in the music business, and probably many other industries as well.

In my fourth year I can already use all the fingers on one hand when counting the friends I’ve made in Nashville who are slowly but surely moving on to the next level.  If some of us make it to that next level of success, it’s likely that we will remember some of our colleagues from the days when we were in the trenches.  It’s one big network of like-minded people playing to a multitude of audiences, and the cream always rises to the top.

Whatever role you play, the industry consists of all sorts of people working together with different talents: artists, musicians, songwriters, producers, engineers, business executives.  There are different ways to make it in Nashville; I have the artist’s passion but I have been learning how to have the songwriter’s mind.  After all, my end-goal is to make a living being a songwriter.  I’ll always be an artist…

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