Veteran and wannabe songwriters grace Nashville stages like the Bluebird’s to hone their craft. But ELAINE GLUSAC wonders, How hard can writing a country hit be?

Photos by Thomas Patillo

Twang goes the steel guitar. Cue the beat. Lace in lyrics about the loyal dog, the long-gone gal, the cowboy at the bar. Thanks to long drives in rental cars button-punching the radio, I’ve become well-acquainted over the years with the loners and lovers who make up Country Music country. It’s a big country, dominating the airwaves with 2,087 U.S. stations and 56 million listeners per week last year. And while the livin’ and the lovin’ might be hard, the writing has always struck me as, well, easy.

Country music clearly has a way with words, telling stories that play like mini movies in the back of your mind. Unlike much modern pop, the words come first. And the singing, even in a deeply Southern accent, is well enunciated, which is encouraging if you’re a lyrics-lover like me. Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler,” for instance, works on two levels: first, how to play poker (“Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em”); second, how to live life (ditto). How does country music face death? By living life to the fullest in the last moments (“I went sky diving/I went Rocky Mountain climbing”), as celebrated in Tim McGraw’s hit “Live Like You Were Dying.” And you have to cheer Garth Brooks’ high-society misfit at his ex’s wedding who declares, “I’ve got friends in low places/ Where the whiskey drowns and the beer chases my blues away/and I’ll be OK.”

Wanderlust over the radio dial has left me well-schooled in the vocabulary of country: heartbreak, heartache, forever, always, lonesome, fate, barstool, goodbye, Grandma. It’s always whiskey, never vodka. It’s a pick-up, not a compact. It’s a world of words filled with love and loss. It may or may not exist literally, but it looms large in the imaginations of country music songwriters. I figured, Take a stab, write a hit, get rich. How hard can it be?

Anyone who wants to know needs to go to Nashville, Tennessee, the center of the country music universe. In the same way that Los Angeles has industries besides Hollywood, Nashville has a lot more going on than music. Health care, for one. Also education—it’s home to two universities—and government (it’s the state capital). But like Los Angeles, the city is best known for its most glittering sector: country music.

Resident stars like Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, and Keith Urban have put Nashville on the celebrity map, but it’s the songwriters that make this town run. They churn out the raw material that the stars record, that become hits, that make them famous enough for People magazine. The truth in this town and a secret to most music fans is that songwriters, not performers, are largely responsible for those storytelling songs about love, Grandma, whiskey, and divorce. But that’s precisely what makes Nashville interesting: the surprise of seeing a balding, middle-aged guitarist sing your favorite song, only to find out that he wrote it. Unlike in Los Angeles and New York, where bands and soloists write their own material, in Nashville it’s the writers who feed the stars.

And these days the lucky ones are eating well. Country used to be the recording industry’s stepchild, its labels happy to sell 250,000 units. “Then platinum happened,” says Shelby Kennedy, director of writer-publisher relations at Broadcast Music Inc., which collects royalties for songwriters and publishers. “The class of ’89—Alan Jackson, Garth Brooks, Clint Black—was a changing of the guard.” Their songs and those of Vince Gill and Travis Tritt reached new audiences for country, moving beyond the feedlot and Four H Clubs into the strip malls of suburbia and even the subways of the big cities. “Now even the Eagles are on country radio,” Kennedy says, referring to the rock band’s latest release. Country music is the new pop.

Hum a Bar: Songwriting hopefuls take center stage at the Bluebird.

From the airport to Nashville’s Music Row is a quick drive at 10 a.m. And, of course, en route there’s country music on the dial. Tuned into 103 WKDF, I hear “[Everybody Dies] Famous in a Small Town,” which is what Nashville, despite its state capitol building, copy of the Greek Parthenon, and the entire country music business, feels like.

It’s certainly what Music Row looks like. The name is a misnomer for two parallel streets that run for about seven blocks south of downtown. Music publishers and recording studios occupy a series of rather modest 1930s and 1940s homes. Makes me think I could walk up and ring a doorbell, if I could find one. Then I notice what’s missing on Music Row: foot traffic. Most entrances are in the back of the buildings, by the parking lots. In other words, you need to know where you’re going. You need directions. You need an introduction.

Poetic License: Rivers Rutherford
puts a story to music in his office.

Kennedy, clad smartly in a navy blazer and rimmed glasses that frame piercing blue eyes, doesn’t look cowboy whatsoever, but he’s bona fide country. His father played the solo guitar riff on Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman.” Now 45, he wrote his first song, “Who Cares,” for Ray Charles, and more recently the hit “I’m a Survivor” for Reba McEntire. And he doesn’t even consider himself a songwriter. It’s just that, as he explains in a very country-music kind of way, “We grew up around this pond, so we swim in it every day.”

I’m new to the pond and need an orientation, which Kennedy patiently provides. Even if I come to town with good songs, he says, I need to learn the system for getting them heard. And it doesn’t start where you’d think it would, with the publishers. It starts with your rivals, other songwriters. He tells me to go out and make friends with the competition. He says if I collaborate with one of a music-publisher’s established writers, “The doors will fly open. If you are good enough for that writer, then you’re good enough for the family.” I am in short order turned out, if not into the literal cold then certainly into the temperate unknown that is the Nashville songwriting community, another wannabe in a city full of ’em.

Collaboration is a discomforting word. Writing, it is generally acknowledged, is an individual sport. You sweat even the small stuff solo, measuring your personal progress from draft to draft. Even in country music, Kris Kristofferson not only wrote alone a lot, but evoked the loner to great effect in songs like “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” which begins, “Well I woke up Sunday morning/With no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt/And the beer I had for breakfast/Wasn’t bad so I had one more for dessert.”

Read more on Taylor Swift and Liz Rose

In Nashville’s contemporary country music culture, however, you work as a team. It’s called “cowriting,” and it’s how songwriters join forces for greater creative and commercial good. Liz Rose, cowriter of several of the hits on Taylor Swift’s debut album, says that “cowriting is very personal. A great song is an honest song, so you have to be able to open up to the person in the room. It’s like a blind date. I know in the first five minutes if it’s gonna be weird.” With Swift, she says, it was easy. “You have someone to bounce things off of. She says a line, I say a line, and that way you don’t get stuck in the mud.”

Hillary Lindsey and Luke Laird, like thousands of songwriters in other rooms around town, are trying to do just that one stormy afternoon in Universal Music Publishing’s offices just blocks from Music Row. One of nine writers’ rooms in a rehabbed 19th-century mansion, it strikes me as a designer frat house, absent the typical beer stench. A rainstorm pummels the oak leaves outside the open window.

“If I’m in the room with someone,” starts Lindsey, “it keeps you more disciplined,” finishes Laird.

Seated opposite one another in leather chairs, laptops open, guitars under their arms, they are a snapshot of the adage that the best partnerships are a pairing of differences: Lindsey, 31, petite, wearing tight designer denim and ballet flats, has the palpable intensity of someone very focused. Laird, 29, his jeans loose and T-shirt untucked, is her tall and easy-going counterweight. They both came to the area from small towns—hers in Georgia, his in Pennsylvania—to attend college. Lindsey aimed to sing for a living, but found more success writing. In 2006 her “Jesus, Take the Wheel,” cowritten of course, won a Grammy. Laird got a degree in recording industry management, then decided to give songwriting a go. The two met on the songwriting circuit; while they don’t always write together, when they do, good things happen. Together with American Idol winner Carrie Underwood, Lindsey and Laird wrote “So Small,” the No. 1 song last December.

When writers talk about songwriting, they talk about poetry. Rivers Rutherford, another of Nashville’s successful songwriters, says that “country music is the last genre of music on the planet where words really matter. In other genres, lyrics rhyme and titillate. In Nashville we tell stories, we exhort, and we lament. I submit to you that there is virtually no poetry outside of what songwriters do.”

Like poems, the best country songs are short and powerful. When you’ve got so few words to deliver the emotional punch, each word must be laden with meaning. But there’s more to songs than gauzy images. Much like screenwriters or playwrights, songwriters also talk about character and backstory. They may develop a life history for a fictional character that motivates his every move and makes the song believable. And stories, they say, are everywhere. It’s just a matter of listening for them.

Nashville’s Bluebird Café is dingy, a good 15-minute drive south of downtown, in a strip mall next to a dry cleaner and a hair salon. These unromantic and inconvenient facts do not deter the faithful lined up in the parking lot to be seated by the doorman—if they have reservations. Bluebird Café, you quickly realize, is not just a club; it’s more like a church. The Church of the Wannabe Famous Country Music Star Paying His Dues On The Way Up (Hopefully).

The Bluebird Café didn’t invent the songwriter’s show. That format was already around in 1982 when Amy Kurland opened a café too intimate for bands. Now a youthful 52, diminutive but direct as she peers between two columns of paperwork behind her cluttered desk, Kurland says, “I was a girl who wanted to be in the restaurant business and liked guitar players.” Her guitar-playing boyfriend at the time suggested the Bluebird was just right for songwriters. Since then, her showcases have helped a slew of writers land publishing deals and have launched a number of top singer-songwriters, including Taylor Swift, Kathy Mattea, and Garth Brooks.

After 25 years, Kurland recently sold the club to the nonprofit Nashville Songwriters Association International, but the system she created—a ladder to fame, often called a school of songwriting—is still in place. The first rung is the “Open Mic” on Mondays where, Kurland says, “you might find a date or someone to have Thanksgiving with.” In other words, you’ll be introduced to the community. If Bluebird staffers like you, you may be booked for one of the early 6:30 shows during the week. Nightly 9:30 shows are for the platinum pros who’ve already made it. The only way into the coveted Sunday Writers Night is by audition.

The Bluebird’s shows are acoustic, and most songs, stripped of their steel guitars and strings, showcase the fundamentals: the writing. I hear shushing, not shouting. There isn’t even heavy drinking. The couple next to me share a slice of lemon meringue pie.

Tonight’s early show features four hopeful songwriters: a portly emcee; a blond beauty with sincere songs; a clever but straight-faced enigma; and Sarah Majors, who stands out from the crowd. She pulls out “Love Me Anyway,” a heartbreaking song written to her husband about waiting too long to conceive a child, which makes me, the blond singer, and the Lemon Meringue Pie Pair tear up.

“I guarantee you six or seven waiters here are songwriters.” Kent Earls, 35, looks up from his Sonoma chicken salad and eagerly scans the dining room at the Sunset Grill near Music Row, where the music industry does deals in a glass atrium. “It’s everywhere.”

We test this theory on our spiky-haired waitress. She’s not a songwriter but she’s close, a road manager immersed in the music industry. “I know so many people who are songwriters,” she says, balancing an iced tea on her tray. “I don’t want to bring them down, but how many of them are going to make it?”

The affable Earls can answer that. Wearing a polo shirt and an easy smile, it’s hard to believe he says no for a living. His job at Universal Music Publishing is to sign songwriters to exclusive contracts and get their songs covered by recording artists. As he explains it, the economic facts of my songwriter’s life would go something like this: After I’ve networked and cowritten and played songwriter’s nights at places like the Bluebird, I hopefully get a contract from a publishing house. They’ll give me a “draw” of, say, $25,000 if I’m single (I might get more since I have a dependent; all deals vary, but $25,000 isn’t uncommon). That’s an advance that the publisher will start taking back as soon as my songs earn money. But first my song has to be demo’d—that is, played by studio musicians and recorded so that Earls can shop it around to singers like Tim McGraw. That costs about $800 a pop. My publisher pays for all of that in advance, but will expect to recoup half of it from my earnings. I could easily be $40,000 in the red before any green comes my way. And that will get split with the guy who fronted me the money in the first place.

“People think you have one hit and you’re set,” says Earls, nodding to a music executive at the next table. “No, it just gets you out of credit-card debt because you moved here broke. The key to making it is to be consistent, to write hits over and over and over.”

Debi Champion’s showcase at the Holiday Inn is an early stop for songwriters new to town. On stage two men and two women ranging in age from 23 to 62 take turns with their tunes, Bluebird-style. Some are fair, some funny, some downright bewildering.

Back by the bar, James Dean Hicks smiles supportively. He’s the master I’ve come to see. Like a diplomat for country music songwriters, he doesn’t judge the painful attempts on stage. “I have really thick skin,” explains Hicks, who’s written for everyone from Conway Twitty to Jessica Simpson. “This business is 99 percent rejection. You have to devote your life to it. Anyone who comes here just for the money usually doesn’t make it.” That would be me, I sheepishly note, suddenly keen to peel the label off my beer bottle.

With long hair and an edgy, country-boy resemblance to John Mellencamp, Hicks looks like he could be a singer, which is how he began at age 10 in his hometown of Bardstown, Kentucky. That’s why he came to Nashville, only to score two No. 1 songs as a writer his first year in town. “Almost everyone comes here as performers,” he says. But those odds are even longer, and after a while many settle for the words. “You start writing and discover this is a good life. You don’t have to leave home. I can write in my underwear.”

Tune Team: Luke Laird and Hillary
Lindsey pick out the next hit.

Amen to the missing link: the moral of the story. Country music songs are journeys of crisis and catharsis, leaving you with a lesson after the music stops. Honky tonk details like cowboy boots and rodeo Romeos are just country music’s dressing on what are three-minute morality plays, soundtracked in swinging style. Perhaps there really is a church of country music after all.

It makes me wonder if this powerful music is surrogate emotion for guys who haven’t shed a tear since they were 2 years old. I expect an argument, but get a confession. “Songs saved my life,” Hicks says. “Anyone with a great life who writes songs is gonna suck.” So who should write? He laughs, “Anyone with pain and trouble, or people like me who are too thick to have a therapist.”

Easy Going: James Dean Hicks scored two No. 1 hits in his first year.

Nashville songwriters talk about finding the song in the room in much the same way Michelangelo believed a sculpture existed within a piece of marble, that he just had to chip away to release it. The song is there, say writers; they just have to tap into it. And so it is that right here in a sports bar at the Holiday Inn, I find my song. It’s no hit—I know that. It is, at best, what Hicks would call a “Bluebird song,” entertaining in close quarters, with no life outside the clubs. What I’ve come to realize is that that’s fine with me. It takes too much dedication—and self-revelation—to moonlight as a songwriter. I like my day job just fine.

Twang goes the steel guitar. Cue the toe-tapping beat. Strum that lead guitar, with a little fiddle in the background. We’re going country in four-quarter time. C’mon y’all…

‘KEEPING MY DAY JOB ’
(An Up-tempo Ode to the Hard-Workin’ Nashville Songwriter Who Could Improve This)

The bar was smoky, the tap beer was warm
When in walked my fate at the Commodore
He strapped on a guitar, tipped his Stetson hat
To the 12 or so people who sat in the back
He sang about love, he sang about pain
He sang about whiskey with an upbeat refrain
He tried a few jokes on the men by the bar
Who drowned him out cheering for the game’s biggest star
Now I know that it don’t take a college degree
To sing in a bar, so how hard can it be?

CHORUS
He said you gotta tell the truth, but make it rhyme
Write out your heartbreaks to a country four-four time
Between dreams and despair we’re protected by faith
That the next one we write is gonna be great
In a city of dreamers with pen and guitar pick
Content to compete because they can’t quit
I’m hedging my bets just considering this mob
Hell, yes, I am, I’m keeping my day job

I love the stories that I sing in my car But you keep the songs, I’ll keep the bar.

This song will not fade out. It will end with a chord pounded in unison. Then someone will giggle in the silence as a coda, like that was fun, now let’s hit the bar. And I’ll be there listening, knowing that the livin’ and the lovin’—and the writing—in country music is sometimes exhilarating but usually hard.

Budding songstress Elaine Glusac lives in Chicago.

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