Cliff Goldmacher is a songwriter, producer, engineer and the owner of recording studios
in Nashville and New York City. When he’s not writing songs, Cliff is
also a regular contributor to EQ Magazine and Pro Sound News as well as
a number of online blogs. He can be reached at cliff@cliffgoldmacher.com
a transplanted songwriter from Nashville to New York City, I’ve had the
chance to observe, up close, the approaches to songwriting and the
songwriting communities in both cities. 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’ll start with a similarity between New York and
Nashville as it’s readily apparent and then explain how, within that
similarity, one city differs from the other. One of the first
similarities is that both cities have huge songwriting populations.
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. There are great pop writers in the suburbs of
Nashville and extremely accomplished country songwriters living in
Greenwich Village.
Finding the Songwriters:
One difference between the two songwriting communities is how easy they
are to locate. Because Nashville’s artistic community is predominantly
made up of singers, songwriters and musicians, it’s much easier to find
the music/songwriting community there. New York, on the other hand,
has a wonderful songwriter population, but it’s mixed in with the
countless other artists and creative types that live there and is thus
less obvious. In other words, it takes a little more effort to find
the songwriters in New York, but believe me, they’re there.
Before moving from Nashville to New York, I’d 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. 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. 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.
Cowriting:
Although both New York and Nashville have large numbers of songwriters,
cowriting is much more a part of the day to day routine in Nashville.
It’s not unusual for a Nashville writer to have five cowriting
appointments in a week where they meet with a different cowriter every
day in a publishing company office on Music Row. This happens for
several reasons. 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, the more quickly
you’ll fulfill your quota. Publishers make a real effort to connect
songwriters they think will work well together and go as far as to set
up cowriting appointments for their writers. As a result, it’s fairly
common in Nashville to be set up on a “blind date” cowrite. Secondly,
even though you’re only credited with half a song for a cowrite, it’s
easier to motivate yourself to write if you’ve got someone to
collaborate with. The act of scheduling appointments and being
expected to show up significantly eases the stress of having to create
on a schedule. 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.
Lyrics:
Staying with the generality that you’re writing country in Nashville
and pop or rock in New York, I’ve noticed that the rules of
lyric-writing between these genres and cities differ significantly. In
Nashville, the story is king. 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. There’s not a lot of room for poetic,
impressionistic lyrics that don’t have the arc of a story. New York,
on the other hand, while it certainly has its share of great
songwriter/storytellers, has a broader tolerance in its pop and rock
genres for words that “feel” and “sound” good together. Please don’t
misunderstand. 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’s a different skill set. I’ve found that switching from one
approach to the other can be creatively liberating and quite a bit of
fun. Also, it’s interesting to see how one city’s lyrical approach can
bleed into the other’s. 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.
Labels:
Speaking of artists, another similarity in the two cities is that they
are both home to major record labels and their signed artists. This
alone attracts a huge number of songwriters to both cities. The
difference here is that country music artists are still largely
dependent upon outside songs for their projects. In New York, bands
tend to write their own material and it is less common for these
artists to go looking for outside songs. Occasionally songwriters will
be paired with these bands/artists in New York allowing the writers to
end up with cuts on these acts. Of course, all of these distinctions
are lessening as more country artists write and cowrite their albums as
well.
You Can’t Lose:
At the end of the day, both communities are great places to work and
create. 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. In my opinion, it was the
blend of our New York and Nashville songwriting sensibilities that came
together to create that song. 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. So, if you’re a Nashville writer thinking about
working in New York (or vice versa) I’d highly recommend it. Sometimes
it’s the differences that create the best art.
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