“Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.” Plato
I have personally spoken with over 800 aspiring songwriters in the last 24 months about what we’re doing here at Nashville Christian Songwriters. Almost without fail every one of them has said the same three phrases to me during the course of our calls:
“I just want to get my songs out there.”
“I just want to be heard.”
“I just know God has something bigger for me and my music.”
You’ve probably said or thought these things, too, as have I. I’ve come to believe that we all feel this way, especially songwriters. Let’s just go ahead and admit to God and everybody that we all want to get our songs out and be heard, okay? No shame.
But why?
Why aren’t we content to just write our songs, file them in a little virtual cabinet on our desktops or laptops stacked in neat little rows on a neat little virtual shelf, only to pull them out whenever we want to listen to them ourselves or with friends in the living room, forgetting about whether or not anyone else ever hears them or appreciates them?
Could it be that God is yearning to be heard through our songs but His true voice has gotten tangled up somehow in our fantasy of “making it big” in the music world, which is perhaps, at best, a false measuring stick for His version of “success”? The last time I checked obedience to His voice was the real measure of success, not a famous music career, though there’s certainly nothing wrong with having one of those, too.
My Experience of The Call to Write for Jesus
I totally get this whole thing. I’ve lived it, too.
I got radically saved by Jesus Christ in 1976.
Yes, that was a long time ago, 42 years to be exact at this writing. But it stuck and it stuck hard. The first thing I wanted to do was write a song for Jesus, about Jesus, and even to Jesus because I was convinced He had invaded my life, delivering me from all that you’d imagine was going on as a little lost kid growing up in the era of “drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll.” That era, of course, has yet to end in our culture.
I started singing my little love songs to Jesus around Memphis, Tennessee, in area churches, fantasizing that I could make a record someday. When I finally got the nerve to “send my songs to Nashville,” I was promptly rejected and swore I’d never do THAT again. As it turned out, it was only about five years later that I accepted a job in Nashville that ultimately fell through, and we were left standing with about forty bucks, no place to live, and had not one connection into the music business.
I got a paper route, worked odd remodeling jobs, and wrote songs while I chunked papers out the car window in the wee hours of the morning to the rich people’s houses filled, undoubtedly, with successful songwriters. Within a few months, though, I was introduced to the now late great arranger/producer Lari Goss by his secretary, Cindy Dupre ( a dear friend to this day) who begged Lari to meet with me. He put music to a lyric that my wife had suggested a title for (“America, God Still Loves You”) which became a hit for The Singing Americans with Michael English singing lead. Not long after, I met Gary McSpadden and Bill Gaither, who signed me to a publishing contract.
That meant I had it made, right? I had been “discovered,” right? Wrong.
That’s when the real work of learning how to write professionally began. I wrote five nights a week and soaked it all in like a bone-dry sponge. God had provided the “break,” but that’s when I had to go to work. Like the adage goes, “When opportunity knocks, it’ll be work who answers it.”
It took me another year to actually learn the real craft and start getting songs recorded. I worked hard with my newfound knowledge and had around nineteen songs recorded the end of that first year or so, then was hired to be a publisher long before I understood what that even meant. Eventually working my way up to become VP of Publishing (Star Song Media) and then moving to Integrity Music where I managed eighteen full-time songwriters, I owe so much of my career and even NCS itself to Cindy, Lari, Bill, Gary, and many patient cowriters who loved me through the process of learning the real craft of songwriting.
You see, I understand what it’s like to be outside the Nashville bubble, much as you may feel right now.
I didn’t have an “NCS” in my day to help guide me towards great songwriting.
I thought, sincerely, that pro songwriting was all about me expressing my personal thoughts, feelings, and devotion for Jesus in music, but it wasn’t then and it isn’t now. Although my personal devotion to Jesus remains the central cause and delight of my life, what I discovered was that my “prayer closet songs” weren’t designed for the masses. Simply writing from my intuition and devotion fell miserably shy of reaching anyone with anything they could appreciate or sing along with. It was nothing but eye-opening and, frankly, quite difficult to understand at first.
Can’t they see I love Jesus?!
Can’t they see that I read my Bible, pray, tithe, give, serve, and show up at church every time the door is open?!
Don’t they know I’m on the praise team at church?!
Can’t they see how sincere I am and how called I feel about this?!
Of course they can.
They’re not blind to our devotion and character.
But devotion and Godly character don’t make you a great songwriter. They can help, but they can’t do it alone. It requires specific, deep, accurate knowledge of how to use a higher poetic language (though it seems like simpler language) and uniquely crafted memorable melodic phrases to catch the ears and attention of anyone in the world, how much more busy music executives trying to find the next trend leaders.
There are specific rules and principles of commercial communication that we seek to equip you with to reach the maximum number of people with your songs, regardless of your current context. Learning the real craft of songwriting is how you’ll do it and you’ll do it without losing your true devotion to Christ.
Remember: Cling to Christ and use your craft.
Moving from Self Expression to Communicate with a Real Audience
Few are the songwriters who haven’t believed in the myth that successful songwriting is all about self expression.
On the surface, it’s probably because we believe that’s what songwriters and artists do… they express themselves, right? We see the late artist formerly known as “Prince” expressing himself and branding himself like few have done. The Beatles expressed themselves to iconic status, too, as well as hundreds of other artists we’ve known and loved through the decades. They did their thing.
But is that really enough?
The desire for expressing ourselves is inborn, innate, and just part of the human experience.
Unlike animals (who do communicate in many brilliant ways), we are the only creatures who get to capture our communiques in words and melodies that can outlive us on paper and on recordings to communicate very distinct messages for future generations.
Birds don’t Tweet.
We desire to express ourselves because we know intuitively that God has created us to use our gifts and talents to communicate something (Matthew 25). It’s only human to desire to connect with others and how much more so when we feel we have a great message, the Greatest Message on earth, even, to communicate the love and power of God to others through our songs.
But the innate desire to communicate does not itself qualify us as great communicators.
Andy Stanley said in a podcast recently about Gospel preaching, “Until you are concerned about the guy on the back row who’s not coming back, or the woman who’s finally got her boyfriend to come and he’s going to give it one shot, if that image or that person hasn’t grabbed you, then you’re not ready… ultimately this has to be about the audience and not the person standing in front of the audience.” [https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/122-andy-stanley-5-questions-that-will-make-any-talk/id1092751338?i=1000423669340&mt=2]
When we’re writing songs just to express ourselves, I believe we’re missing a very important, and practical point. That is, that our pain, angst, failures, and foibles can’t be all we parade across the stage if we wish to reach others. We must write with them in mind and not just ourselves. We all have pain. The trick is in redeeming it somehow in our songs by identifying with others in their pain or by identifying it in ourselves and pointing to Christ as the answer.
The audience, all audiences, are permanently tuned into radio station WIFM (“What’s In It For Me”) and any song that has no apparent value for them will be instantly dialed out. “I wrote this song after my fourth surgery” as an intro is a definite turn off. Be careful to craft your lyrics with immediate value for your audiences or you will have no audience. Think of songs like In Christ Alone (Townend/Getty) or 10,000 Reasons (Redman/Myrin) and you’ll remember that these songs seem personal, but are universally embraced by believers for obvious reasons.
Remember: Your gift isn’t for you. Write songs with your end-users singing in your ears.
The New Way of Being Heard
The old way of “making it in music” was working hard (or waiting around) to be “discovered” by someone in “the music industry” who would hear your greatness, champion your cause, spend tons of money on making you famous and practically handing you the career you were too lazy to go build or didn’t have a clue where or how to start.
Technology has shifted all of that.
Now, any 10-year old with a smartphone in Brooklyn or Dubai or Sydney can upload an original on Youtube in the next ten minutes, go viral, appear on The Ellen Show and The Jimmy Fallon Show for their fifteen minutes of fame and get 8 million hits on the video. Things have changed, but most of us haven’t and still cling to the old, thread bare fantasy that someone’s going to discover us.
The new way to really make it is to figure out how to write songs that aren’t just adding to the enormous sea of musical mediocrity and get busy building your tribe. By the time you read this, over 10,000 hours of video will be added to Youtube. That’s not an exaggeration. Much of it will be music. Bad music. Will some of it be yours?
If you’re not a performer, the next task is to align yourself with cowriters who can sing and deliver your songs and build that following. Publishers and music company people rarely look at anything that hasn’t already gained a lot of traction in the church or on another media outlet like Youtube.
Remember: If you want to be heard, learn to write better than everyone else and build your tribe.
Are You Really Good Enough?
The fourth thing everyone says to me is, “I just want to find out if I’m good enough.”
“Good enough to make it in the music business,” I suppose, is what they mean. But it’s the wrong question to be asking. In fact, it’s the absolute worst question you can ask yourself or ask of anyone else because it puts you or them in the judgment seat only God deserves.
You see, the real question isn’t if you’re good enough, especially since the answer is probably no because you simply haven’t done what it takes yet to write songs at that level. It doesn’t mean that you can’t learn to do it, but that you just haven’t learned and worked hard enough to get there yet. That’s a lot like a talented high schooler asking if she’s good enough for the Olympics. The answer will almost always be not yet.
The real question you should be asking yourself is, “Am I called enough to fight through all the learning and practicing and never ending hours of soul searching and researching and trying over and over and over again until I finally start understanding how to be a truly great artist and then not give a rip if anyone likes me or my music because I’m just doing this for God anyways?!”
Or, to simplify, “Am I called enough to learn how to fulfill my calling?”
The disciplines you can learn here can take you a long way towards becoming a phenomenal songwriter one day and achieving the kind of career you dream of, as so many of our songwriters are doing. Check out Terrance McCoy’s episode of our podcast HERE for some inspiration on that.
If you were good enough, you’d have publishers calling you instead of you trying to figure out how to contact them. The hardest meeting to get with a publisher is the second one, so you want to be ready the first time. You don’t want to blow the chance, right?
To hear most aspiring songwriters talk about how called and how passionate they are about this, you’d think they’d be laying down everything to do it. But that’s rarely the case. They seem to all want God to drop songs on them that will make them famous, but it hardly ever happens that way. The truly called and successful have paid dearly in time and money to learn this craft and then have spent years applying it. Check out the podcast with Integrity Worship Artist Alisa Turner for some inspiration.
Remember: True callings don’t come easy.
Conclusion
Writing for yourself is fine. You should be expressing you heart to Jesus in song every day and spending time in the prayer closet just worshiping and making up songs for Him. Just don’t bring those unrefined, free form songs out and claim they belong on Christian radio just because you felt so deeply about the moment they happened.
Devotional writing isn’t commercial songwriting.
The moment your songwriting isn’t focused on yourself is the moment you’ll start communicating with a real audience. You definitely use feelings and stories and thoughts from your life, but that’s different from writing songs strictly about your life that few will care about, if any.
Self-focus isn’t pretty in any area of life. Why should it make for good songs? When you begin to understand that your gift isn’t for you and that the important thing is to serve others with your songs you’ll begin to gain some traction. Cling to Christ but use your craft. Write songs with your end users singing in your ears. Raise your thinking to a higher level of service and watch as the audience connects and begins to engage with your songs.
Remember: Selfless songwriting is a key to greater success.
