Country Music Broke My Brain

by Gerry House

  Songwriting is a mystery to a lot of people, including me. It can be joyful, and it can be a total slog. It’s both magic and mundane. Songwriters are the same way. I’ve written with guys who have plopped down in the chair opposite me, fired up a doobie the size of an ear of corn, and then announced, “I’ll be with ya in a minute.”

  I once wrote with a guy who never looked at me. He sat at the piano with his back to me for three hours playing what he called “Danny” chords (i.e., chords he was making up). He then suddenly stood and said, “This don’t work for me today.” And he walked out the door.

  I once wrote with a tall, blonde babe who showed up at my office braless in a tank top with low-cut jeans that were tattooed on and a purple thong showing in the back. I didn’t write anything like what I was thinking that day.

  Songwriters also have their own schedules—not your schedule usually, but a schedule. To be honest, quite often sitting down in a room with somebody when it’s beautiful outside is tough. You don’t want to be there. They don’t want to be there. You could be golfing or fishing, so it’s sometimes painful. That’s why songwriters jump at any excuse to be late or not show up. They also use the “check in” as a surrogate for the actual appointment time. If your songwriting appointment is for 10:30 A.M., they will call at 10:29 A.M. and say they are running a little late. They “checked in,” so they get credit for being on time. Others you just plan on being an hour and a half late, and you show up accordingly. And others never show up at all. You wait, you pluck, you hum, you think, and, finally, you call, and they laugh and say, “Man, I’m in the Everglades. I can’t write today!” As if to say, “You idiot, didn’t you know I was going out of town to go bonefishing? How lame are you to bother me now?”

  At one time or another, every songwriter has said, “I am gonna quit this stupid business.” This means other people’s lousy, crappy, tuneless melodies and words are being recorded and yours aren’t.

  Songwriters lie and smile and say, “I’d love to hear your new song.” They really don’t. It’s either gonna be terrible or so good they get jealous. It’s true. I’m that way. Everybody is that way.

  Perhaps Layng Martine is the only songwriter in America who is truly happy for you when you get a song recorded. Layng wrote “Rub It In,” which has been a hit record and used in commercials for years. He’s a special person and probably under some medication to make him so nice. I appreciate a great song, I really do, but I don’t want to hear it before we start writing our song together. That’s like going on a date and the girl says, “Before we start, here’s a picture of the hunk I went out with yesterday.” Great. I want to go home now.

  What keeps me from saying, “I’m gonna quit this stupid business” to nearly everyone I talk to is the response from my friend Wayland Holyfield. When I told him I was gonna quit, he just said, “You may already be out. They don’t send letters, you know.”

  The greatest part of songwriting is having somebody look up across a table or a room and say something just brilliant. That gleam in their eye says, “I’ve got an idea that’s amazeballs.” It happens. And then you get folks who will say something so confusing or ridiculous you just sort of ignore it, and life goes on.

  Then there are the comedy songwriters. (I learned early on not to do this ’cause it really drives some folks nutty.) In the middle of writing a heartbreaking love ballad, there’s always the guy who sings a fake line that’s funny and inappropriate. Usually you laugh and sometimes join in, but mostly you just try to get back to the business at hand.

  Songwriters are also the gossip kings of the western world. Any excuse to not write and talk about other songs and other songwriters and how the music business is going to hell on a runaway train is always fair game. I have several friends I’ve met for a songwriting session and gabbed the entire morning away without writing one note of a song.

  Some songwriters are serious. I’m talkin’ stern nun/state trooper/librarian serious. They are poets and “there ain’t no room for cuttin’ up while we’re writin’” serious.

  Then there are the guys who used to fax lyrics (remember faxing?) and call and have an intern stand beside the fax machine to make sure nobody stole their genius out of the fax machine.

  Where you write is also interesting. It’s usually in a small office in an old house on Music Row—two streets just outside of downtown Nashville, filled with the ant-like writers who move from hill to hill, office to office, studio to studio, making the songs that part of the world sings.

  There is a major publishing company that has a writer’s room with no chairs, just an old, grungy couch and a broken piano. Then there are the rooms with coffee machines and snacks put out for the kings of melody waltzing in around 10:30 A.M.

  I can’t write if I can hear the duo in the next room also struggling to wrestle a song to the ground. A lot of these old houses have ductwork and heat registers in the floor so you can actually hear everybody in the building. One time we started at 10 A.M., and so did three or four other groups in the building. By 2 P.M., we were all writing basically the same song through the heating system.

  I’ve never done it, but some writers do what’s called “chasing the hillbillies,” where a star/artist/singer takes writers on the road with them. You ride the road and the bus and hope to catch lightning in a bottle when the artist is not drinking from the bottle or playing “spin the bottle” with some “friends” he met at his last concert. It always sounded dreadful to me and, from what I hear, I’m right. One great “chaser” told me he rode in a bunk for six days, and when he got back to Nashville, all he had to show for it was a killer hangover and a misspelled tattoo that read “Born Too Loose.”

  Probably a thousand people have told me they’d like to do a radio show called “The Story Behind the Song.” I did it when I started out ’cause every hit has a funny/sad/movie plot story for how that song was born.

  And there are some good ones . . . maybe five in history. What you then get is, “Well, me and ol’ Harley hooked up about ten that morning, and he had this idea, and I had this melody thing, and it sorta fell out.” End of “The Story Behind the Song.”

  I also really love to hear people say, “I didn’t write it. It came from God or Jesus or someplace other than me.” That’s fine, of course, but I think it’s funny that rather than say, “Yep, I wrote that one. Good, huh?” they give God cowriting credit. I always want to ask if they send half the royalty check to one of the Lord’s helpers. Maybe they do.

  Guy Clark is one of the Texas songwriting greats. He’s also a luthier. He told me that at a New Year’s Eve party, and I thought, Why would a man announce his religious affiliation while wearing a party hat? Turns out that a luthier is a guy who makes his own guitars. Guy’s theory is that most great songs are written by one person.

  I know, I know. You can instantly name twenty-five great songwriting teams, but if you think about all songs, a lot of the truly great ones were from the mind of one solitary man. Or if it came from a “team,” most of the song was written by one guy. That’s why we know the McCartney songs from the Lennon songs. Cole Porter and Irving Berlin did it all by their little lonesome and that’s why those songs are so distinctive.

  Cowriting is just odd to begin with. Who wrote which part? Who gets the credit for what? Who gets the money for what? It’s usually understood that if you cowrite, you split it in half or in thirds, etc. There are, however, famous stories of one particular guy who counted the words he’d contributed. Counted the words. He kept track during the session and then announced, “I wrote 54.5 percent of this song, and that’s what I am claiming credit for.” Of course, this is the same guy who handed out copies of his new album in the reception line at his own wedding, so go figure.

  Some writers can hear what others can’t. Particularly rhymes. They create a masterpiece of a rhyme with the words stove and horse. “Hey, sing it,” they argue. “It works. I’m telling you, it’s fine.”

  Others are mo
re exacting. Top songwriter Gary Burr says, “If you want to be certain it rhymes, use the same word.” Gary didn’t do that—he’s brilliant—but I hear songs all the time that do that.

  I wrote several songs with Clint Black. Clint is funny and smart. He’s also from the Planet Igmo. He has written some of my favorites and some I have no clue what he’s talking about. That’s Clint. If you get the chance, write with Clint. Do not play golf with Clint. He does not understand the concept of “picking up.” When you are out of the hole, or when you’re on your fifteenth whack at the little white pill on the same hole, Clint stays with it. If he’s on his way to a record-breaking 19 on No. 4, he’s gonna make his 19! He’s the same way when writing. He’s gonna stay with it no matter what.

  My favorite Clint Black moment (and there are many) was when we wrote for one of his later albums. Clint lived across the field from my house. He and his fabulous wife, Lisa, were neighbors. When we met for dinner one night at a restaurant, I told her she looked much different in person than she did through a telescope at night. She kinda laughed.

  But back to Clint. We wrote a song and he said he was gonna cut it for his album. One sunny day he called and said, “Wanna hear our hit?” Of course, I was thrilled, and damn right I wanna hear it. He drove the few feet to my driveway in his little black Porsche. I walked out and got into the passenger seat.

  He then said, “I only have the track. I haven’t put my vocals on it yet. But it goes like this.” So he started the track and put his vocal to it “live and in person.” It was fabulous, and I gave him a “bro” hug and said I’d see him later. When I got back inside my house, I told my wife about the song. She ooohed and ahhhed and then said, “By the way, did you realize to people driving by it looked like Clint Black was singing to you at the top of his lungs in a car in the driveway, and then you hugged?”

  Songwriting as a career is painful, exhilarating, and hardly like any other. It’s wildcatting. Punching a hole in the ground and hoping to strike oil. Everybody has a song in them. Most of the time, it’s not anything anybody wants to hear. Buddy Killen, a great music publisher, told me, “In thirty-five years, I’ve only had one good song come in through the mail. I always listen, thinking and hoping it’s gonna be great. It ain’t never.”

  Songwriters, for the most part, live on hope. They dream and they take even the faintest of a hint of a connection to a “cut” as their comfort. Getting a cut is like a drug. My friend Bob DiPiero has written numerous No. 1 records, but it’s always the “next one” that he really wants. Here’s how songwriters really are:

  Will Robinson is a great songwriter. We wrote one for Reba. Will wrote many hits for Alabama. He said he was standing in a hallway at a publishing house when the receptionist told him, “Tony Brown is on the line for you.”

  Now, Tony Brown has made hit after hit as a producer. Tony Brown played piano with Elvis. He produced Reba, George Strait, and Vince Gill. The list is astounding. Tony Brown recorded my (and Devon O’Day’s) song for George Strait. It was called “The Big One.” I was riding down West End Avenue when I heard a car honk, and Tony was in his Mercedes next to me. I rolled down the window and he shouted every songwriter’s dream come true to me over the street noise, “HEY! GEORGE STRAIT IS GONNA CUT THE BIG ONE.” Yes, I know. When you repeat that out loud, it sounds like George has gas, but it was still a heart-pounding pronouncement.

  Back to Will Robinson. Danger, Will Robinson. This is how songwriters think. Will said, “Between the time I got to the phone and said hello and Tony answered, I imagined he was calling to tell me that he was producing an album of all my songs. George and Reba had selected ten of my songs for their new project, and he wanted to let me know.” What Tony actually wanted was a translation of song lyrics into Portuguese, which, oddly enough, Will speaks. But we’ve all been through it. The rumor. The dream. The hope that somebody took one of my tunes.

  A word about what I call “The Big Silence.” The BS is the most painful part. This is where you send in a song for consideration. I’ve done it a thousand times. Multiply that by the thousands of songwriters, and you get the idea. You rarely get a call back. It’s an understood part of the game, but it doesn’t make it any easier.

  Over time, the Silence gets louder and louder. It’s with you all the time. “Any word on the song?” you ask the bartender or wife or whoever happens to be near. I don’t know how to fix the system, but it seems that with technology that allows you to send a song with the push of a button, you could also post somewhere that your song is rejected. Although then you lose the hope of a song being recorded.

  The hope doesn’t really die until you’re on iTunes listening to the singer’s new album and you notice your song is not on the record. This is usually a good sign that it’s not going to ever be on the record. I still sometimes hold out hope that there’s been a drastic mistake and that somebody will fix the CD or iTunes, and the song will magically appear.

  You get the Big Silence from friends and nonfriends alike. I happen to know a lot of people in the business who actually record the songs. They is de Stars. Some write back and some just don’t say anything. They become part of the Big Silence, too. Martina McBride, who I truly love, once wrote a tortured note to me about how the song didn’t work for her album. I felt her pain.

  I have to understand, as every other tunesmith does, that nobody wants to tell somebody their kids are ugly. And trust me, songs are kids. Oh, I still send songs to friends. After all, if you can’t beg, gherm, arm-twist, or guilt a friend into recording a song, what are they friends for? What does hurt are publishers who ask you to send a few mp3s (songs) over for them to consider. The BS roars again.

  Let me conclude by saying definitively, without a doubt, and with no further discussion, that although I hate the Big Silence, I understand it. I’m now going to try to make that work when my wife wants to know my opinion of which shade of white I like for the kitchen cabinets (we’ll discuss that later). I’ll employ the BS to see if that gets me off the hook. How do you like my chances?

  An engineer told a guy fixing the plumbing that one of my songs was on the list to be considered as a possibility to present to a guy who knew a secretary who worked for a manager’s girlfriend. Yes, it’s that easy.

  You want to live on the 1,000 days of “maybe.” You’re in the “pile.” So, what happens? You call to see if they got the song. Yes, we got the damn song and stop bothering us. In the world of Nashville, the Big Silence means no! If they are gonna record the song, if they like the song, if they are remotely interested, they call and let you know. If it’s tossed like an old newspaper, they don’t call. It was just a song and there are a thousand more to hear. You don’t feel like that. You know your song is a hit.

  But one word from anybody can kill it. Some casual doubtful word from the receptionist can cause people to drop a tune. Lewis Anderson told me he went to the Bahamas because Alan Jackson had recorded a song, and it was on his new album coming out. “It ain’t final ’til it’s vinyl” used to mean it’s officially a cut. You made the deal. Lewis got a call while he was lounging on the beach as a newly minted moneyed maker-upper of hit tunes. He was told, “We’re recalling all the 300,000–400,000 CDs we printed so far and are taking your song off the album to put on another. Sorry.” That’s ugly, ain’t it? It wasn’t personal against Lewis. Alan just had a song he liked better.

  My daughter listens to songs for a living. She’s the most beautiful A&R person who ever lived. She’s also very tough. I’m trying to get an appointment with her soon.

  She told me, however, “I learned watching you, Dad. I always take care to let people down as gracefully as possible because I have seen how it feels.”

  She has a lot of experience watching songwriters hear they didn’t make the project. It hurts, but then moments later somebody calls and says, “Hey, man, I just got a call from the guy who washes [producer’s name here]’s car, and he said he saw our CD in his player! I think we’re in.”


  Showbiz Is Tough

  YOU KNOW THE OLD JOKE: A man is walking behind a circus elephant, shoveling “fertilizer” for hours. A friend asks the guy, “Why don’t you quit that job?”

  Man replies, “What? And give up showbiz?”

  Actually, showbiz usually quits you. A close pal of mine once said of Pam Tillis (the supernaturally talented daughter of Mel Tillis and hit singer in her own right), “Pam will never quit. She’s an entertainer, and that’s what she does. She’ll be out there on some stage for the rest of her life” (singin’, it’s hoped, Don Schlitz’s and my song, “The River and the Highway”). Roger Miller once said about a fellow singer’s need to stay in the game, “He’d appear at the opening of a pack of cigarettes.”

  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. You’re an entertainer, you get onstage somewhere. That’s fine, although sometimes you gotta know when to get off. One of the great things about the Grand Ole Opry is that it provides a venue for the older performers. I haven’t gone to the Opry much because of that. Sometimes it’s painful to see some of these people struggle through a song. Others still have the stuff or have learned to keep it going with new tricks. Their voices might be gone, but they continue to deliver the entertainment goods.

  While I’m on the subject of gone voices, how about voices that never were? I know he’s one of the all-time great songwriters, but Kris Kristofferson cannot sing at all. He never could. It astounds me how we all overlooked that fact because he’s so cool and charismatic. If he tried out for American Idol, he’d be part of the joke “vocalists” they always show. I comb my hair and never look at the back of my head. I know there’s an exposed area back there, but looking straight on from the front, it’s fine. I totally ignore my “spot” and instead go with the “damn fine hairdo” scenario. We do the same thing with bad singers and funny-looking singers. If the song is good or the guy is cool-looking, we are willing to ignore the “bald spot” in the mirror.