Darrell Brown is another one of those people I’m proud to say I went to high school with. Until recently I hadn’t realized how exceptional our high school actually was at inspiring and motivating us to do something with our lives, to be what we could be if we tried.
But I’m very glad that it was, and that so many of my friends have done well for themselves and made a difference in the world.
Darrell has a new book coming out he’s written with Leeann Rimes, “What I Cannot Change”, and co-wrote many of the songs on her album, “Family”.
The Get-Out-the-Song Effort
By Darrell Brown
In 1979, I moved into a one-bedroom apartment adjacent to the Hollywood Bowl with my rental piano in tow and began trying to write songs. I didn’t have a clue how to get started in the music business, or even where to get good advice. But I had the blind willingness to put myself out there and see where life, love and God would lead me. The first of many mysterious events unfolded when I met a guy in my building who co-owned a recording studio in downtown Hollywood. The technology anyone can use now to record music at home was then neither readily available nor affordable. This person was a miracle find in my book. A miracle.
Eventually I made him an offer: I would bring local clients to his studio and split the proceeds with him if he would let me use the studio for free for my own work. The pitched worked — he said yes. Not long after I had my first cuts hit the radio airwaves — in the form of jingles I produced — and I thought that maybe-kinda-sorta I was on my way.
It’s not that the jingles were great (they weren’t) or that anyone besides my family and friends knew that they were on the radio (they didn’t). Yet I felt I had broken through some invisible wall that the gatekeepers of the music world had put up. There I was, just a young mutt barely paddling upstream. I kept paddling. There was no shore in sight, but at least I was figuring out how to paddle. And I was happy.
My next step up the ladder of the music world came when some of my original songs were cut by extremely unknown artists on their own indie labels. The kind of cassettes — yes, I said cassettes — sold in night clubs or bars, usually set up on a card table down the hallway of a sticky-floored nightclub where people would pass by on the way to the toilet. But each night it felt so great that people were hearing, dancing and singing along to songs I had co-written with the band. It felt great to know that the band was selling some product and that I was getting my share of the sales as a songwriter.
I found it was important to keep getting myself out there, physically, to the clubs in town or the coffee shops where singer-songwriters would perform. The more I hung around these places, the more artists I met. That led to more co-writing, and eventually, more recorded songs. Of course, there was a non-monetary benefit to all that hustling to make a few bucks from my work — I got better. I was learning so much as songwriter from everyone I was working with. It was the best education I’d ever received. Since then I have been an enthusiastic student at the School of Getting Off Your Butt and Doing Something. Nothing ever happens if you just stay locked away in a room somewhere.
I also kept reading music magazine and trade papers. I memorized the names of producers, songwriters, musicians, engineers, record company executives — the gatekeepers who had the ability to open doors for me or slam them shut. If I came with the goods, I believed, the best work I could muster up at the time, things would continue to happen for me. I was right.
As I kept reading these trade papers I came to see that the music world wasn’t just here in the good ol’ U.S.A. but in practically every country on earth. So I started contacting publishers, producers and record executives in other parts of the world and — wouldn’t you know it? — I started getting a couple of cuts per year with foreign recording artists.
The way I looked at it, no opportunity was too small. I quickly found that no matter how unknown some of these foreign artists might have been in the States, each new cut I placed with them gave me a story to tell the next musician or producer. It gave me some hope to hold on to, and built up the confidence I needed to go to my room and write again and again. It made me feel that I was on the right path, and most of all, it brought me absolute joy to know I was becoming a working songwriter.
I loved, loved, loved hearing my songs being sung in choirs in schools and in churches for holiday services and special shows. I got my songs put into small local theater presentations and found vocal groups around town to perform them at special corporate shows and fundraisers. I had singers sing them at piano bars. I wasn’t restrictive or choosy — anyone who wanted to sing my songs was perfectly O.K. with me.I believe that this is the way it should be. I write songs. And to fearfully shelter a song, afraid that someone might ruin it or not record it correctly or sing the perfect “first” version of it — that seems wrong to me. Of course I have had those fears. Like everyone else, I’ve been afraid that I was not good enough or that someone might ridicule my work. But in my life, I have seen too many brilliant men and women turn down opportunities to have their songs heard — simple ones like the church choir gig or the jingle — and then years later put down their pen and paper in bitter disdain for a business that has proven to them that it doesn’t support art.
I’m not saying that if I have an unbelievable gift of a song come out of me that I won’t take it to the artist I think could make it a timeless smash — I’m not crazy. But I do know that one can never know or truly predict in the raw stages of a career who the next Madonna or Garth Brooks or Michael Jackson or Frank Sinatra is going to be. So I am open to all possibilities to be amazed, surprised by joy and hit records.
And so I keep traveling forward, hopeful for the willing ear.
via The Get-Out-the-Song Effort – Measure for Measure Blog – NYTimes.com.
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