I moved to Nashville over twelve years ago - twenty years into my music career - to work in country music. I love the songwriting community here, and I occasionally love the songs it produces. I love this Hailey Whitters’ song “Ten Year Town,” from a few years ago. It’s a common theme in country music for songwriters to write about their journey trying (often failing) to make it in country music. Here’s how it opens:
I’m twelve years in to a ten year town
I’m too far in to turn around
Too old to go back to school
Won’t be much longer I’ll be old news
I thought I’d be a big star now
I’m twelve years in to a ten year town.
Twelve years in, this resonates with me on several levels. The specific brand of heartbreak Whitters and co-writer Brandy Clark1 so eloquently describe is everywhere in this town. I’ve seen it a lot; I’ve experienced it as well - mostly before I came here to reinvent myself in the Nashville business. If you dare to chase a dream, if you go all-in, you know the risks. The show business myth is binary: success or failure, no middle ground. That’s why anything less than everything is a heartbreak story for a country song. Everyone sets out to become a legend, but most never get there. Most who succeed end up somewhere they didn’t expect. Sometimes that isn’t a bad thing.
I’m thinking about Ten Year Town because lately I’ve been listening to a podcast by the same name. The Ten Year Town podcast, hosted by a young(ish) Texas-via-Nashville singer-songwriter named Troy Cartwright. Troy, a fellow Berklee alumnus, is sincere and low-key, the sort of guy who I know would put you at ease in a blind co-write. He has an easy rapport with his subjects, which I’m sure is often rooted in the culture of co-writing in Nashville - which is as often about sitting around and shooting the shit as it is about grinding. Nashville is a relationship town; in ten years, you can know just about everyone. In his own Music Row journey, Troy has signed and lost a major record deal, and he’s on his second publishing deal. He’s on the journey, writing his own story. That makes it more compelling.
Troy interviews a range of Music Row songwriters, artists, rank-and-file workers, and executives, each telling their own story about finding their way in the Nashville business. The guests are varying degrees of successful - all the stories include frustration and failure, but they all have happy endings of working in the business. I’ve listened to about a third of the episodes, and not all of his subjects held my interest beyond the first few minutes. When things click, it’s very compelling. I love these sorts of stories. My favorite episodes if you want to dip in are music publisher Chris “Falcon” Van Belkom from Combustion Music, longtime BMI executive and music publisher Jody Williams, singer/songwriter RaeLynn, and - the jewel of the collection - Kentucky songwriter Aaron Raitiere, who lived for a time in an RV parked on Music Row and caught his first break when a writer asked his BMI rep if he could write with a person experiencing homelessness.
The podcast serves a specific mission: to help people embarking on their own ten-year journey with insight about how things actually work. What I love most about Music Row is that it’s a real community. It’s a community made up of many smaller communities. People who succeed find their people and create their own community, their people. When I joined my first Music Row law firm, my partners told me I’d better be patient - it would take a few years to settle in. It takes time to understand how the business works, how the community operates. I’ve always had a creator-centric view, and many things about the Nashville business seemed antiquated and regressive to me. I had a lot of ideas and opinions, and I ruffled some feathers. I’ve learned that it’s possible to innovate here and find value for creators, but change happens within the community. I’ve taken time to understand how things work and to find people who share my values and goals so that I can have a greater impact. That’s my twelve years in a nutshell - finding my way professionally for the opportunity to bring about change.
At a certain point in my life as a musician many years ago I hoped to write country songs in Nashville. I even made a country album back in 1996. I’ve always loved country music and I thought I could do it. I’m still proud of some of those songs, but I definitely wasn’t ready to make a living as a commercial writer. I hadn’t put in the work, and it takes a lot of work. If I wanted to do it, I’d have to put in my ten years. Then maybe it would happen, but maybe it wouldn’t. Writing country songs for the commercial market is a special kind of creativity, and a hard-won skill set that takes years even for talented writers. To sell songs, you have to write within existing structures, color inside the lines. You can’t be too creative, but you have to be just creative enough. The best songs are familiar, but with surprising and novel ideas, turns of phrase, melodic turns. It’s hard to be truly creative within such a tightly-formatted structure, and that is where the genius comes in. Nashville songwriters collaborate because they bring specific skill sets they bring such a writing hooks, finishing lyric ideas, or making demo tracks on the fly. They also collaborate because each writer brings a unique experience and perspective, and the sum of the parts is likely to better represent the current song market. They learn each other’s strengths, they enjoy each other’s company. They put in the work, and sometimes they reap the rewards.
People come here all the time to make it as songwriters, and the sad truth is that most people don’t succeed. If you believe the subjects in the Ten Year Town podcast, making it as a songwriter involves finding collaborators who help each other on their path. It’s a huge plus to have social skills, which will get you in the right rooms. Once you’re there, however, you have to deliver. Becoming a successful songwriter is a process: you’re invited into the collaborative process, you have the goods to be invited back, you start to get cuts and then the publishers come into the picture. Once a songwriter has a real Nashville publisher, they hand off the scheduling. Writers used to manage their own calendar, now managing a calendar is part of the creative services of a publisher. Why do Nashville publishers still own 100% of the copyright when the trend is towards creatives owning their work? Because writer development is a long, expensive process. When a publisher signs a new writer, it will likely take years for the writer’s work to be profitable, if it ever gets there at all.
One thing I love about the Nashville publishing community is it’s congenial. Publishers compete to sign hot writers, but it isn’t a toxic culture of competition like you often find at record labels. Publishers understand that it’s in their interest for their signed writers to collaborate with writers signed to competing companies because 1/3 of a hit song is still valuable. Hit songs typically have multiple writers representing multiple publishers; therefore it’s contrary to their interest to try to force their writers to write exclusively with other writers signed to the same publisher. Competing publishers are friendly with each other, because they often share in the same successes. Exclusive record deals make collaboration among different companies difficult; publishing encourages collaboration. That’s a big part of the culture here, which helps writers in their development because the only rules governing co-writing are rules of decorum, and understanding what it takes to be invited into a writing room.
Some of the things they talk about on the podcast seem quaint with all the changes in the business. There’s a lot of talk about #1 songs, with country airplay as the primary driver and the primary goal. One of the ways I got myself into trouble twelve years ago was predicting that country radio would decline in importance to eventually become obsolete. Man, did that used to piss people off. Now, it’s definitely happening. Radio means less and less every year as digital platforms have gained momentum. Nevertheless, songwriters still talk about how it felt getting that first #1 song. Technology is changing the industry so much that it’s hard to keep up, which raises the question of what the future holds for the traditions that have long driven the music economy in Nashville. With all the structure and tradition that makes up the music culture, what will the future hold?
There’s plenty of talk about social media and streaming, but little discussion of how generative AI will change things. There’s an aspect of the Nashville writing process that is about reverse-engineering hits. There are approaches to writing songs that are almost better suited to AI. One of the stranger passages on the podcast is when a writer describes creating an application on some business application to identify words that certain writers rely on heavily in their songs. There are also mentions of writers using Chat GPT as a tool in the writing room. In one of my favorite moments in my favorite episode featuring the hilarious Aaron Raitiere, who says that AI is going to learn to write normal songs as well as humans, therefore our value will be in the weird, noisy, or otherwise out-of-the-ordinary contributions. I think he’s right. Writers will rely on AI tools in the writing room more and more in the near future, but it’s their expressions of unique humanity that will set their songs apart.
Likely it’s because I relate with the stories on such a personal level that I’m so easily sucked in to the frustrations, failures, setbacks, breakthroughs, and successes woven into these stories. These stories make me feel deeply grateful to be part of this community, optimistic about the future. Then I remember that so much of the Nashville business is still toxic and deeply anti-artist, often by custom. AS ever, so many people are running scams and encouraging the hopelessly untalented for a profit. But then I remember that I’ve not only found my people here, but I continue to find my people year after year. It’s incredible to live a place that has prioritized songs and music culture for most of a century. It makes me want to dig in, to build, to do what I can to make this place better for artists and other creatives. That is a goal I share with so many around me.
I’m not worried about the future of Music Row. The culture is well-established and mostly welcoming and friendly. Throughout the industry, the future belongs to the artists and writers - the ones who have an audience, anyway. Publishing deals will evolve, I believe, in the writers’ favor; good publishers will continue to work their magic with passion. We’re all here standing on the shoulders of giants, just trying to leave our mark. If you’ve got ten years to spare…
As heard on More Than a Whisper, remember to check it out
I can't sit still for Caledonia to be dismissed as "still proud of some of those songs," cuz Slip Away is my No. 1 favorite Strohm song and one of my favorite Ackerson songs, as well.
Staff writers give up 100% of their copyright? It's entirely a work for hire?
I did not know this.
Do writers who happen to write a hit song typically continue to work under that arrangement? Or do they have the clout to arrange a better deal?