Most SG artists feel they have to include two blood songs, one every knee shall bow song, a couple of heaven songs and a slap in the face song to other religions, then a patriotic one to insure a standing O. That only leaves 3 open slots for something that deals with the every day life of the listener.

Get out your rhyming dictionaries aaaannnnndddd … go. Happy Friday.

For my part, I think Sumner was probably right that most writers - of songs or whatever else - have only so many original things to say and then they run out, at least of original ideas. I recall a few years ago reading of something that Stanley Fish, who’s a big blanking deal in the world of literary criticism, had reportedly once said to a graduate student: that if we’re lucky, we all have one really good insight into literature and life in our careers, and we keep writing various versions of that over and over.

That last bit is key. What I think he meant was not necessarily that everything’s a waste after The Idea hits you. Or in Sumner’s terms, that you could/should quit. Rather, the measure of a career’s success has less to do with how reliably original you are and more with how you can keep saying what matters to you with a certain freshness that doesn’t rely on the big splash of a debut.

This is where I think southern gospel struggles so much. It’s like everyone, no matter how many decades they’ve been around, wants every song to sound and be received like it was the first big then they ever did. That’s great in the abstract, I guess, but in practice it creates a thousand crappy little imitations that debase that good first thing you did. As we’ve been discussing recently, a lot of energy goes into orchestrations and elaborate arrangements to convince audiences that This Is A Great Song based on its capacity to sonically overwhelm people. One commenter put it this way:

Producers like Barry Weeks (Booth Brothers, Brian Free) use a “wall of sound.” Producers like Wayne Haun and Lari Goss use other techniques to bolster songs.

Weeks comes from a pop angle and is more aggressive in grabbing the listening spectrum. Goss and Haun come from an orchestral or choral sensibility, and they seem to choose certain motifs for their arrangements, hoping to add layers of interest.

The real question is why artists persist in cutting third-rate songs. If the producer can’t convince the artist to drop a weak song, the producer and the musicians are forced to make it sound as strong as possible, because they are being paid for their expertise. As a result, the artist and the record label think they’ve been proven right and release it to radio (especially if the artist has written the song). Vicious cycle.

Indeed. The result of this cycle are songs that, to rip off a phrase from a recent DBM review, don’t ever seem to come up for air. It’s a problem that’s endemic and structural and self-reinforcing, by which I mean mediocre songs that receive the Full Lari and Barry treatment end up sounding so larger-than-life that audiences start to assume that’s what good music has to sound like, and so the process loops back around on itself, infecting the creative side of things. Here’s another comment from that same recent discussion about third-rate songs that speaks to this problem from the industry’s internal dysfunction:

If A&R (Artist & Repertoire) Directors, record label execs, and producers would do their jobs there would be less 3rd rate material on the radio. You cannot expect an artist to be objective about a song they have written. That’s where a respected A&R Director should step in and tell “the king” that he’s wearing no clothes. But artists have egos (that’s what motivates most of them to seek a platform) and A&R Directors usually do little more than serve coffee and tell them how wonderful they are. Few producers are long-sited enough to invest the energy required to steer misguided artist toward wiser song choices….they’re hustling to finish charts and line up their next project before next month’s rent comes due. As long as everyone who’s ever owned a radio believes they can write a song, we’ll continue to have 3rd rate material. The best way to expose the bad stuff, and ultimately make it unacceptable to pass that junk off as legitimate, is to have a few incredibly written songs released throughout the year. Side-by-side comparisons are starkly revealing. Sometimes people don’t realize they’re being served slop until they begin to smell steak.

All true, except perhaps the contention that good songs rise to the top by their own power. Often good songs do come out winners - “Born to Climb,” as this reader noted, is a good example, and I would also say “Over and Over,” if we’re sticking with Jeff and Sheri songs, was a songwriters’ song, a textbook example  of a tune that spreads the musical work of the song in equal proportions across lyrics, vocals, harmony, and orchestration to achieve its marvelous, soaring , beautiful effect (having Charlotte Ritchie didn’t hurt either!). But so much cut-rate swill also ends up winning out too in sg that it’s hard to believe good music has much of a uniquely shaping influence in the process.

Daniel provides a list of writers he says refutes J.D.’s call for played out songwriters to put down their pen, but just to take one of his examples - Kyla Rowland - it’s also possible to see the drift in her catalog of hits in the last several years as confirmation of the first part of what Sumner was saying about the limited resources of the imagination:  big monster anthem/ballads aren’t the only thing Rowland writes, but ask ten ordinary fans in the fried hog fritter line at NQC what they know of Kyla Rowland and chances are they’re going to respond with some reference to one of the gigantic, increasingly derivative warhorses that take up all the oxygen in the room by the time they’re done. Some are better than others, but in general I liked this song the first time, way back when it was called “One Scarred Hand.”

I don’t blame her for this, necessarily. Why not ride the warhorse as far as it will go, right? But I remember listening three or four years ago  to  a Mercy’s Well album that showed up in my mailbox. It’s a pretty forgettable album on the whole, but  toward the end there’s this quiet little downtempo number — all shuffling backbeats and subtle stringed fills called “He Said Yes,” written by Donny Henderson and Bill Turpin. It’s got all the formal ingredients of a big roof-raising power ballad, including a title/hook with monosyllabic words that can easily scan across big open harmonies of the even bigger finish, and some classic chord progressions in the chorus that, the first time I listened to it, made me think, oh yeah this thing is headed for the stratosphere by the time it’s all over.

So here comes the bridge, and things build a little, a chorded walk up to the III, the IV, the V… and I’m thinking, feeling really, almost as if by instinct, here it comes … the half-step modulation up and cue the strings and horns and harps and spoons and washboards and take us on home and off to the moon.

Except not. The voices swell a bit and the instruments come together to create an intensification of sound and feeling, but then things calm back down … the vocals fall back away to the lead alone for a few bars, so that the finale is more thoughtful denouement  than the more typically explosive climax. Like “Over and Over,” it’s an insightfully balanced composition that distributes the musical labor evenly, beautifully, with powerful restraint.

It’s not the kind of song that makes a career, but it’s also not the kind of thing an inexperienced or young writer (or producer) pulls off. It requires time and experience and not quitting when the first starburst of originality wears off. It’s sad when that happens, but surviving it often means coming out the other side with the confidence to pull back a little creatively, and leave some white space around the edges, leave some notes unplayed and pitches unsung … to leave, in short, some room to breathe.

DBM runs down the particulars of the service and raises some good questions about who owns what publishing rights in this sort of arrangement. The ins and out of the publishing and rights management business are always things I consult friends or contacts in the bidness about, and when I ran this Allman thing by an established songwriter and publisher friend of mine, she replied:

Well, I think it’s interesting.  I’ve heard of similar things before but never at such bargain prices … makes me skeptical of the caliber of “professional” writer being offered for sale here.

I was once offered $500 a day plus travel expenses to write with a singer/songwriter looking to co-write great songs for his record. It was to work just like a regular co-write (I would keep my publishing, he would keep his). I thought it was an interesting offer and I would have done it if my schedule had permitted. A friend of mine who is an established CCM writer was once offered $750 a day to do the same thing; he did it and said he would do it again, if offered.

I will say that if the $50 a month deal includes a demo, that’s quite a deal just for the demo alone.  (IF the demo is half decent.)

This business about the quality of the demo is important. Demos aren’t just the way you get your songs heard; they send important signals about your seriousness and credibility as a writer. Southern gospel is infamous throughout Christian music as the genre in which people record themselves humming a tune in the shower and then send the recording off, as is, to record companies and publishers. Of course it’s possible for great songs to come from this process, but in general, if you’re a publisher looking for music and you hear hoof beats, why think zebras?

So while DBM has a point about rights and royalties, this presumes the songs will get picked up and cut and released. If I were a songwriter wanting experience and a foot in the door, I might try the Allman thing. But before I even started worrying about royalties and rights, I’d first want to know I was getting my money’s worth. Have these writers (not Allman necessarily, but the “other writers” that the site makes reference to) had cuts - if so, what were they? If they’re not pretty recognizable and verifiable successes, then it seems like the customer here would essentially be paying to write with equals more or less (as judged by cuts anyway).

As for Allman himself, he’s made a genuinely intriguing move. I do fear this may be the songwriting equivalent of custom recording companies that will have the effect of glutting an already saturated and creatively impoverished industry with more mediocre songs. Of course I could be – and hope I am – wrong. Better music is music, no matter what process it comes out.

But I confess, I wonder if Allman’s not squandering his own talents a bit by spending so much time and energy writing with people who probably aren’t going to bring much to the table.  (I mean, does he accept everyone with the cash to pay or is there a screening process?)

And this leads to another point: doesn’t it seem like there are an awful lot of mid-tier (and lower) writers out there who are making bank teaching others to do what they can’t even do themselves?  I mean, Chris Allman is a fine writer, but I don’t think anyone would consider him a real player in the industry as a songwriter. Same goes for someone like Jeff Ferguson, who has made a mint off of his “You Can Write A Song” seminars with Clint Brown. Brown, of course, is an established P&W guy, and Ferguson has his own ministry, plus a couple of solid Greenes cuts to boot. But still, it’s pretty amazing how many people flock to these guys’ events based a comparatively thin resume in the songwriting and publishing department.

The real doozy here may be Embassy Music’s Darwin Moody, who has by all appearances made a fine living for years now holding how-to seminars for would-be songwriters, yet his biggest claim to songwriting fame seems to be a co-write with Ann Ballard on the Cathedrals’ now long-ago “Scars and Stripes.”

If you scratch the surface, this sort of thing is everywhere. My songwriter friend told me she recently heard of seminar that promised a bunch of big name songwriting clinicians, only to have them show up, sing a couple of songs, and leave the teaching to the local church staff who had no real knowledge of anything beyond a layman’s comprehension of the music business.

I’ve wandered kind of far afield from Allman, and my point is not that Allman’s service is of this caliber necessarily (too soon to tell, of course). And even if it turns out to be a songwriting sweatshop, he and and all these other people have every right to be doing what they’re doing. But it does serve as a reminder how many people are  out there desperate for any foot in the door they can find, no matter how credible or not.

If you’ve ever read a press release for a new album, you know that the challenge is to distinguish the project from all the others vying for shelf space at the local Christian bookstore. They do this by presenting a list of “bullet points” - a string of trivia type “sound bites” regarding the group, or the album itself, that will hopefully pique the curiosity of the store buyer or the consumer. Since most new projects lack an intriguing back-story, the PR person must rely on the group’s past accomplishments, song titles, and the obligatory list of those involved in the making of the album, to fill space and to create interest.

One tried-n-true selling point, that is intended to set a group apart from others, is the mention of one of the members involvement in the writing of the songs. In an industry of “singing heads” this provides and added dimension of artistry and authenticity that seems noteworthy. This is not lost on the fans. Of course, how could they miss it when the artists, themselves, trumpet that fact from the stage…night after night. “And now here’s another song that our bass singer, Brother Bloodbought, wrote in the back of the bus on the way to Tunica.” We all know that not even Obama writes his own stuff! So anyone who can sing AND write is naturally elevated to legend status among those who are easily impressed.

So yes, being a singer/songwriter has its advantages both real and perceived. But…the dirty little secret that you won’t hear about at The Singing News Fan Awards, is that Brother Bloodbought has never finished a song by himself. His producer is always nearby to put the finishing touches on his Tunica tunes.

I can still hear George and Glen…, “Now here’s a song that our own Ernie Haas wrote” (cue the track for “He Made a Change”). Did anyone ever hear them mention that Ernie Haas AND Joel Lindsey wrote that song together? Probably not. Ernie has even introduced it, himself, as a song he wrote. Joel’s name is conveniently left out, but those of us who know what Joel’s written over the years, and those of us who can’t name anything that Ernie’s written alone, know the score. And heck, while this can of worms is open, has anyone ever seen Jim Brady’s name on a song without Tony Wood’s and Barry Weeks’ names in tandem?

There may be some out there, but I bet you can count them on one hand. And yet, Jim is lauded as the Songwriter of the Year at this year’s Diamond Awards and he’s gaining a reputation just short of the second coming of Fanny Crosby throughout the industry. Tony Wood is a Dove Award winning writer with astounding credentials in both the CCM and Southern Gospel markets. He can, and has, written amazing songs by himself. Barry Weeks has been The Booth Brothers’ producer.

If it means getting a cut on a decent project, most songwriters will agree to write with any artist who will show up and do nothing more than serve coffee. Smart move on Barry’s part to introduce the artist he’s producing (Brady) to his award winning songwriter friend (Wood). As the conduit who brings the parties together, he gets a piece of the copyright pie by being in the room. But the “Tony Woods” of the writing world are not the ones the fans know about - so the “Jim Bradys” of the SG world will continue to be heralded as songwriting wonder boys. And now, as Paul Harvey would say…you know the REST of the story.

Not much to disagree with here. It’s often hard for ordinary fans to know or tell when the symbiosis  of collaboration between performers and bonafide writers ends and a more parasitic relationship of harvesting someone else’s writerly talent for a group’s PR begins. And this confusion is, to a large extent, by design. Of course as the reader notes, professional, non-performing songwriters allow this to happen to some degree (they must if they want to work), but the greater responsibility for this paradigm falls to those with the greater power.

Among other implications of Casual Observer’s analysis, it suggests that artists and labels have a vested interest in elevating the alleged “singer/songwriter” profile of group member/writers at the expense of giving adequate due from the stage to the professional writers and composers without whom many of the songs artists claim to “write” would never be written.

Mount argues it has to with the proximity of the lyric to the singer’s life:

Nobody really disputes that a singer/songwriter can bring a passion to their song that’s hard to match, since they’ve lived the lyrics.

If I understand this right, it’s basically an argument about “authenticity.” The singer/songwriter can sing her own song more authentically than someone else because she’s closest to the complex of experience and feelings from which the song emerged. Doyle Doc Horsley makes a similar argument in his ebook, Gospel Quartet Music Then and Now:

Many top quality acts have member-songwriters … Others may draft lyrics, but these blessed folks are both writer and performer and are supported with sufficient grace to release songs which are distinct, different, inspired, and not duplicates of other themes, ideas, or lyrics.

Horsley overstates the case considerably, it seems to me. Writing songs that your group cuts and performs does not necessarily mean you have “the capacity, inspiration and dedication to create enough quality lyrics and original music to fill a 8-10 song project,” as Horsley goes on to claim. Usually, there are 6-7 duds for every decent cut. But no matter, Horsley’s is a common view, I’d wager.

For his part, Mount ends up arguing that it’s possible to sing a song you haven’t written with as much feeling as the original songwriter would, which is both right, it seems to me, and an interesting conclusion for Mount, since it implicitly cuts against the notion of the authenticity suggested by his original claim.

Libbi Perry Stuffle, to borrow one of Mount’s examples, sells “I Will Find You Again” (written not by her) because she’s a first-rate performer and a trenchant interpreter of gospel ballads. That’s what performers do. Sell other people’s material as their own. And in a less imperfect world, it would be enough for someone to be a performer who’s that good at just that.

But of course in southern gospel, that’s not always true. Or at least those artists who try to be double or triple threats are generally rewarded more than those who don’t, whether they deserve the accolades from a musical and artistic standpoint  or not. Still that doesn’t get at the underlying question of why singer/songwriters receive disproportionate amounts of fame and fan love.

My own theory is that fans are drawn not so much to the authentic experience provided by the singer/songwriter as to the idea of authenticity.

That is, fans don’t keep voting Rodney Griffin favorite songwriter because he is necessarily able to sing his own material better than anyone else. (My guess is, a vote for Rodney Griffin as songwriter is more often than not actually a vote for Gerald Wolfe as an impressario/vocalist extraordinaire, capable of making Griffin seem and sound much better singing his own music than he would have, say, singing that same stuff with the Dixie Melody Boys. But in any case, the most we can say here is that songwriters sing their songs differently than anyone else, but very few sing them better than the best performers could or can, given the opportunity.)

Instead, southern gospel fans like the idea that this song is a direct expression of some personal feeling, experience, or other dimension of the performer’s life, writ large in music (I’ll leave aside for the moment the question of how much southern gospel’s emphasis on confessional testimonies in and around song amounts to a kind of spiritual voyeurism).

I say “idea” because, whether we do it consciously or not, experiencing performance-based entertainment requires us to suspend our disbelief that the performance is a construct to some extent.

This is commonplace in most parts of the world, but in southern gospel, performers are in a pretty tight spot: fans want to be entertained and moved and shown a good time, just like fans in other setting would which requires all the typical artifices of entertainment. But in sg, especially over the past two decades or so, performers must also take into account the added expectations of intense piety, which demands - in the name of spiritual sincerity -  performances that efface almost every trace of being a performance, of appearing to be artificial (at least as these things are judged by the aesthetic standards of southern gospel).

What to do? Inasmuch as this trend has been afoot all over Christian entertainment to varying degrees, CCM has responded by (re)turning toward praise and worship music or derivatives thereof, which rely on simplistic, recursive lyrics and big open musical phrases that create the impression of artless, unself-conscious statements of religious and spiritual commitment.

In sg, one answer has been sentimentality and nostalgia, which translate on stage into all things lachrymose - tearful testimonies, cry-talking, chin-quiveriness, the conspicuous attempt to dab at one’s eyes inconspicuously, and so on. Of course not every instance of these things is performative, but the fact that there is a standard repertoire of emotional moves we all recognize testifies to their use as a shorthand vocabulary of affective authenticity.

One could argue that the rise of the singer/songwriter, which really seems to be a post-Hinsons phenomenon in sg, has been a response on some level to the increased pressure performers are under to be “real” in an age of digital pitch correction, band tracks, vocal stacks, and plastic surgery.

But whether that’s the case or not, it seems inarguable to me that on stage the singer/songwriter obviates the need for fans to suspend their disbelief about how “authentic” the song is in relation to the singer. That doesn’t mean the singer/songwriter won’t need to dab his eyes and do a little cry-talking now and again, but chances are he won’t have to do as much as his colleagues who sing other people’s material, since most fans will be doing a lot more emotional work for the singer/songwriter than they do for other artists.

Update: A couple of commenters have noted that part of the rise of the singer/songwriter in sg has been financial: singer/songwriters make more money by writing their own material and (potentially) they work more cheaply for groups/labels. This is true enough in accounting for one reason why the industry may have drifted in this direction, but it doesn’t really account for why fans seem to like the singer/songwriter so much. Following these commenters’ lead, one cynical answer is that having hit upon a lucrative arrangement, it’s in the artists’ and labels’ best interest to pitch these people and their material as more authentic and spiritual than other music. And there’s probably some of that at work. And I guess you could further argue that sg fans are gullible sops who will buy anything pitched as speerchul. But the point of the post was to try to push beyond the purely cynical readings, true (in part) though they may be.

I have this gut feeling that there were vague references to 9/11 in songs that came out in the earlier part of the decade. But apart from bespeaking my absentmindedness, this may suggest that what songs did emerge to address the situation did so in ways that were latent and/or late-coming.

Perhaps this makes sense. Southern gospel orthodoxy is built around the notion of a never-changing God who holds the world in the predestinarian sovereignty of his immortal hands. What seems like a world-historical upheaval to us in our mortal myopia is merely a blip in the cosmic weather pattern that the almighty sees and ordains from on high. Thus the sg response is the same in crisis and in calm: the redemptive crucifixion of Christ covers all.

Be that as it may, you can bet your bippy (as my psych professor in college would have said) that some emcee has already used the current economic crisis as a set-up for a song or five in an attempt to make old material seem newly relevant. “Here’s an old song that has never been truer than today …  listen as we sing, ‘I Hold a Clear Title …’”

But I wonder if we’ll see any lyrics that overtly reference the Great Recession. Anybody wanna take a stab at a hook? “Jesus already bailed us out”? “Bailed out by the blood”? “No credit default swaps in heaven”? “They’ll never foreclose on my mansion in the sky”?

Regular readers will know that I don’t like the song one bit, but reading this kind of nonsense nearly roused me into a fit of defensive pique, just out of spite for the stupidity of these complaints. Then I went back and listened to the song again just now … and yeah … well, my gallant tendencies sort of hitched their giddy-up to ole John Wayne’s trusty steed and cantered off somewhere around the second chorus.

The problem with the song isn’t its theology (there’s hardly any there to speak of, really). It’s the writing. This is a classic example of a concept (”Jesus and John Wayne!”) in search of some lyrics to justify the hook. When I first saw the title when the album came out, I braced myself for a “Baptism of Jesse Taylor” redux, with labored lyrics about a picturesque mischief-maker-who looks mean but means well deep-down despite his gruff exterior  and conspicuous (but endearing!) irascibility. And though this probably would have made my eyes roll, it would at least have made a decent amount of sense within the lyrical conventions of country gospel.

Instead we get this boilerplate ma-and-pa lyric about how daddy sang bass, mama sang … oops … wrong song … daddy was a COWBOY, this time, hard as a rock, and mama was quiet as a prayer. Or a bible verse. Or a nap. Yawn.

I mean, I get it. The singer is somewhere between the spiritual austerity of his father (John Wayne)  and the sweet piety of his mother (Jesus). And of course the fact that Guy Penrod actually looks a little like Jesus and John Wayne is probably no small reason why the song ended up getting written, cut, and staged in the first place. Which is fine. Songs get written for particular singers all the time (“God’s Little People,” anyone?). Then again, most songs don’t rely on lyrical syllogisms that call to mind an image like the love child of the son of man and the Duke.

But the real hoot about all this is that the song’s downhome spiritual angst and hokey attempt to capitalize on Penrod’s country-Christ look was probably written with the very sorts of people in mind who are now howling the song off the air. Jesus and John, meet rock and hard place.

PS: I wonder if the song would have gotten this reaction if Penrod were still with the Vocal Band?

PPS: For once, it’s nice to see someone else’s comments section get swamped by the Sister Bertha Better Than You Brigade.  We need the break over here!

Some directors are known as an actor’s best friend. Mr. Eastwood may be the writer’s. “He didn’t change a word,” Mr. Schenk said. “That never happens.”

Mr. Eastwood said he learned his lesson after making extensive revisions on the script for “Unforgiven,” then calling up the writer, David Peoples, and announcing he was returning to the first draft. “I’m emasculating this thing,” he told Mr. Peoples.

I enjoy listening to demos of successful/good gospel songs when I can, and there are a handful of cases in which I hear the demo, compare it to the recorded cut and think some version of this very thought: shoulda returned to the first draft.

Update: Reader j-mo asks for an example. Good question! One answer: “Yesterday’s Bread.” It’s one of those demos that uses better and more famous singers (in this case the omnitalented Terry Franklin, holding down three different parts) than the recorded cut (Karen Harding). Harding’s rendition wasn’t bad but hearing Franklin’s version, you realize how much more the song can be when it’s conceived of and arranged as a southern gospel song - which is to say, built around close harmonies - than as a vehicle for a gospel soloist.

This year’s other giant smash has to be “Free Credit Report Dot Com,” with multiple versions clogging the airwaves. The real toe-tapper is the seven-note phrase that punctuates their radio commercials, its placid female harmonies beckoning to us like the sirens of Experian. The hit, unfortunately, is the television version with the three slacker-ish dudes lip-synching offensive palaver that manages to insult both middle-class values and true love. See? It is like listening to Nelly!

The sound sucked. Mikes weren’t on for most of the singers and speakers for the first few minutes, including Cross’s. Songs had to be restarted including the first one, the Booth’s unremarkable “Welcome to the Family” , and there was generally lots of dead, awkward silence … Cross was visibly pissed early on, and barked out “just turn all the mike’s on on the platform please … God please.” Later he regrets this outburst and lavishes praise on sound techs. The crowd, however, was not so forgiving. Folks in the mezzanine stage-right started heckling performers whose voices couldn’t be heard. Turns out, as we learned at intermission, there was a necessary dead zone in the house sound to accommodate the monitors for the FBC Atlanta choir seated stage-right in the general admission seats (the choir was really big), but no one bothered to tell the audience that until intermission and folks were clearly not in a mood to be understanding about the sound (evidently random ticket holders were walking up to the sound table and letting fly).

The event is thoroughly Gaitherized whether any of the organizers know it or not … the songwriters are the friends, there’s a choir, a band and a poor man’s Bill Gaither.

“Grace that is Greater Than all our Sin” may be the most medleyed song ever.

The FBC Atlanta choir and orchestra are huge and impressive. Why didn’t ALL sg artists use them for their songs? Well, we know why … most folks don’t want to pay or take the time to score their tracks for orchestra and rehearse them just for a three-minute set on a Friday showcase, but a few of the groups DID use the orchestra and choir (the Hoppers, GV for one song, a guy whose name was never announced) and it made the groups using tracks seem small and cheap and amateurish. The songs that used the live music weren’t perfect but they were palpably present in a way the canned music simply wasn’t and couldn’t be.

The avfl Twitter crowd already saw this but Ronnie Hinson said that he wrote “The Lighthouse” “in the bathroom in seven minutes on a piece of toilet paper.” Which is so real, so human, so funny and endearing and free of the contrivance of Cross’s “it takes a lifetime to write a song” unctuousness that it was hard not to love Hinson. It wasn’t just his bathroom line. His set-up for “Lighthouse” was deeply moving, about how as a kid he saw a neighbor drown in the ocean in California and so had a phobia of the ocean that meant he never saw a lighthouse until long after he had written the song - a testament to the power of a great song to take on a life of its own beyond the limited range of the writer’s experience. Even though his rendition of it was horrendously bad (why not have the Crabbs or Perrys sing it?), the song is (and here, Cross got it exactly right) “a national treasure.”

Mark Bishop needs to get a pianist who can, you know, play and stuff.

The crowd roared for “My Name is Lazarus.” Absolutely roared. Which was good because that way they couldn’t hear how subpar the singing was. Me to MNP: who all was off on that ending? MNP to me: Take your pick.

Cross consistently failed to introduce the songwriters before they spoke and/or sang, which is just ridiculous for a guy who claims to be the songwriter’s biggest champion. The single biggest reason songwriting isn’t acknowledged or supported the way it should be is a lack of face and name recognition for writers of hit songs so that fans began see and talk about writers as important parts of the creative process and musical experience. Leaving most of them nameless (if you didn’t already know who they were by sight, and I doubt most people did in all but a few high profile cases) was bad form and even poorer strategy. On top of that, many of the songs simply weren’t introduced by anyone – not a songwriter, not Cross, not the group. So it was difficult to discern why “His Life For Mine” received an introduction by its writer, Rebecca Peck, but L5 singing “I Have Been Changed” didn’t. It’s a decent song and was well received, but there was no clear explanation for its presence in Songs of A Lifetime. Here and throughout, there was next to no overarching narrative thread or connective tissue running through the concert – unless you count Cross’s penchant for self-indulgent monologues and repetition of stupid lines like “the nanner puddin’s coming at the end .. I’m saving the nanner pudding for the last ya’ll.” Aargh.

Almost as bad as forgetting to introduce them was Cross’s habit of treating the assembled songwriters on stage like a supporting cast for his monologues. This is nothing new if you’ve ever been to a Phil Cross songwriter’s showcase; he tries, as I wrote last year, very hard to make everything a special speertchul moment. Yesterday was particularly bad, though. At one point he commanded all the songwriters to stand while he stumbled through a tribute to Dottie Rambo. It’s not that she didn’t deserve it but that he seemed to be winging it, which gave his speech a certain sloppiness and meant the tribute sort was sort of rambling and disjointed. And in the end it all wound up really being about him, how HE called this lovely woman back in April and told her about HIS showcase and she said I’ll be there, I’ll be there, I wouldn’t miss it. Ok, so maybe he doesn’t do eulogies well. Fine. But then who did he choose to perform a tribute to gospel music’s most prolific and influential songwriter? JOHN PFIEFFER, with this untuneful horn, bleating and honking his way through “He Looked Beyond my Fault.” 

As the day wore on it was increasingly clear that the only common thread woven through all this was Phil Cross himself. At the beginning he let us know that this was HIS idea and HE went to Charles Stanley and talked him into sending his choir and orchestra, and at intermission Cross hectored the crowd for not being grateful enough to the sound guys (!) and even had the audacity to shill for advance sales of a dvd of the event as a way to offset the expenses he himself incurred in producing the show. Pitch your product, but he wouldn’t have to make buying it an ethical obligation if the product itself were of higher quality. 

On the stage, Cross’s ego and self-satisfaction seem to know no bounds, made all the more intolerable for the fact that he clearly thinks he’s comes across as “just folks” and this salt-of-the-earth guy who just happens to be a brilliant songwriter – at least in his own mind. Of course the average fan in the seats would probably be hardpressed to name anything he’s written besides “Champion of Love,” and even that was a co-write with his ex-wife. He also clearly fancies himself a keen judge of up-and-coming singer/songwriter talent, and several groups at yesterday’s showcase were obscure, unknown, or new regional acts. Not surprisingly, when he introduced them, it seemed more about him than them, bringing on several of these regional groups with some version of what amounted to “I found these yokels in the backwoods, cleaned ‘em up and gave them a ticket to Louisville … now gimme a handclap of praise for it!” Cross deserves props for supporting people lower down the food chain, but as evidence of Cross’s judge of talent, they were not convincing specimens. They were exactly what you’d expect out of regional singers and songwriters, which is not a knock on them – they’re just doing what regional groups do – just a glaring relflection on Cross’s bad judgment.

This songwriters showcase was expanded to 3.5 hours this year, and I don’t have a hard time believing people asked for more the way Cross said (over and over). But I wonder if this uneven raft of talent and higgedly piggedly group of writers is exactly what people had in mind (putting Scott Inman and Wayne Haun on the same songwriters showcase, for instance, is rather like sitting me next to Andrew Sullivan at a bloggers roundtable). Maybe what people really were asking for when they said more was better. This really could and should have been a solid 90-minute showcase of top-tier talent singing mostly first-rate songs from the top of the sg charts, for or with the song’s writers. As it turned out, there was far too much padding from regional groups and and too much unilluminating and self-aggrandizing chatter from our host. Less Phil Cross, please.

You see, there are two classes of songwriters. There are artists, whose names and faces are known throughout the industry, who happen to write

[Snip]

Then there are “Professional Writers.” These are individuals who don’t stand on a platform night after night, but who supply many of today’s Southern Gospel artists with songs so that they can do just that. Despite their success rate, their names rarely appear on those very same ballots I just mentioned. Makes sense….fans don’t award who fans don’t know. Unless they read the fine print they’ve likely never seen these names. And with digital downloads steadily overtaking CD sales, it’s even less likely that they’ll know who wrote their favorite song. Radio stations have a hard enough time telling us who sang the last song we heard, much less who wrote it. Of course, the die-hard fan can always learn all there is to know about a project by reading record reviews on their favorite web sites. Well, almost everything there is to know….it seems that many reviewers think it’s only important to list notable writers’ names that lend credibility to the project. Early on in my career, I joked with many of my songwriting friends that we should all have “Ann Dothers” carved on our tombstones – since that’s the way our names so often appeared in print….“This project features songs written by such notable writers as ‘Big Name Artist/Writer A, Big Name Artist/Writer B, Big Name Artist/Writer C….and others.” Can someone please pass a law stating that a press release or an album review must either mention all the writers or none of the writers?

Read the whole thing.

The psychological and emotional density of the line is fairly self-evident, but at the nuts and bolts level I’ve always liked that echoing of an internal rhyme with “attempt” and “imitate” … not so much a traditional rhymed pair as a rhyming of consonance reinforced by sibilant Ts. In prosody, it’s what called a half or slant rhyme (in case you forgot from your reading of Emily Dickinson in high school or college … Dickinson being the naughty mistress of half rhyming … “tell all truth,” she says, “but tell it slant”).

Which got me to thinking about other smart slant rhymes, which got me to thinking about (what else) gospel music, and so, to “He Loved me with a Cross” and the line:

I could not imagine what
Loving me would cost

What’s so clever about this line is the way the writer, or in this case, the writers (Lindsey, as it happens, and Sue C. Smith) tinker with the rhythmic structure of the lines to come up with that neat little internal slant rhyme on “not” and “what.”

Metrical conventions would typically have led a writer to render the line:

And I could not imagine
What loving me would cost

The iambs line up more naturally that way. But switch it up so that “what” falls at the end of the first line, and you get a much more lyrically rich expression of the same sentiment, reinforced by the slant rhyme and intensified by the pregnancy of the idea left dangling for just a beat between the two phrases: could not imagine what …?

This is the kind of thing – moving one word in such a simple way – that achieves more in a few keystrokes than hours of rewrite and revision. But of course because it’s so counterintuitive to the conventions of songwriting and the seasoned musical mind, it’s also the kind of thing you have to wait to strike you in the middle of the night, or mid-sentence, or stooping over to tie your shoe.

Aha. Brilliant.

“How can someone look in the mirror and know they didn’t do something and their name is on it? For money? For credit? It’s a lie.”

This being the music industry, money is of course a factor, since the writers of hit songs can earn more than the singer over the long term. But today’s singers also press for writing credit because it gives them more of a cachet, presenting them as more of a “real artist” in comparison with a star who doesn’t write a note.

[snip]

Shropshire says that many artists will only allow songwriters to work on an album in return for song credit, and “if they do write, they ask for more publishing than they honestly contributed … it is the way it is.”

As with so many other music-industry trends, the King helped this one along too.

The practice has been prevalent for decades. Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, maneuvered to give the King songwriting credits on early hits like “Love Me Tender” even though he never wrote a word. James Brown was sued by an associate over song credits. Lauryn Hill settled a lawsuit by a group that claimed she improperly took sole production and writing credit on her Grammy-winning album “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” And Diddy seemed to acknowledge claims that he wasn’t really writing his raps in the “Bad Boys for Life” song with the brushoff line: “Don’t worry if I write rhymes, I write checks!”

The whole thing is here.

Obviously, lyrics don’t exist in a vacuum. They come to us through the vehicle of melody and instrumentation and arrangement – in short, the power of music. It’s easy to forget this when debating what good songwriting is and isn’t, especially online where we debate by writing, which usually divorces a lyric from its melody. This is one reason why I often try to incorporate a discussion of composition, arranging and orchestration when I write about music.

But even this is an imperfect measure (often executed imperfectly in my hands). It’s possible, of course, to introduce sound clips in online writing about music. Ron Rosenbaum did this in his Cancer Country piece, but unfortunately even Rosenbaum’s exception proved the rule, because he never once discussed any element of the musical style (the way, for instance, five-seven chords and steel guitars add pathos to the ideas expressed lyrically in country music). Instead he focused on country music’s “idiom” whose “excellence in elliptical emotional compression rivals the best contemporary American short-story writing.”

True, but this just assumes that country music SOUNDS the way it does musically because it’s country and western, when in fact many of the lyrics he wrote about (perhaps all of them) worked – or failed to – in no small part because of the music to which the they were wedded.

So music matters in songwriting at least as much and often more than the lyrics themselves. We know this so well, and yet the point is often lost on us as listeners, not only because (at the most general level) we are a intensely verbal society but also because it’s much easier to study, close read, analyze and deconstruct lyrics (written words) – to wring meaning from them and disassemble them in order to understand how they work – than it is to understand why or how those five-seven chords and a run up to the one hammered out by a bass guitar and a piano can create that certain feeling in the mind, body and spirit that they surely do … but do so fairly mysteriously.

Thus we tend to privilege the lyric disproportionately, I think, because it’s the easier of the two dimensions of popular music to grasp hold and make sense of. Consequently, we tend to think of great songs as Big, Important, Lyrically Profound Works of Art that place deep-seated demands on us – morally, spiritually, ethically, spiritually – as listeners. This is true in some cases of course, but just as often it’s not.

Given that songwriting is at least as much about musicality as it rhetoric, diction, syntax, metaphor, and other elements of written style, a great song might well be a lyrically simple one. Take “I’ll Fly Away.” Separated from the music, lyrics about flying away to heaven can seem almost juvenile in their singsong meter and obvious rhyme scheme and their reliance on the predictable Christian imagery of a heavenly flight to celestial shores. But the song’s tune and arrangement are masterfully simple – as opposed to simplistic: a catchy melody and clappable rhythm organized around ascending chord progressions and high, bold whole notes that combine across the expanse of the chorus to suggest the very experience of spiritual flight.

Now, combined with this music, the lyrics seem – not simplistic – but perfectly imagined … clear and unclouded, hopeful and upward looking. But ask even gifted and insightful writers why “I’ll Fly is Away” is “good” and they’ll probably say something how powerful the unadorned lyrics are and then launch off into a vague encomium to the spirit speaking through the simple faith believing of a child etc. This may well be true, but it still leaves unexplained how the song remains poised perfectly between simplicity and dunderheaded simplism.

Marty Funderburk calls songs like “I’ll Fly Away” puff pastry. The Big, Important tunes are “steak songs” (Funderburk was clearly very hungry when he wrote all this).

Some days you sit down and write a song of epic proportion that covers every theological base with a seven-fold “amen” on the end. Anyone who knows me knows I live to do that. Nothing is more satisfying than a huge power ballad that drives another nail in the coffin of doubt. I couldn’t be more pleased with 2 songs I have out there right now – “It’s All About the Blood” (Brian Free & Assurance) that I wrote with Tammy Dunaway, and “Once Upon a Cross” (Mark Trammel Trio) that I wrote with Gina Boe. I would consider those “steak” songs. On the other hand, Jerry Kelso and I wrote the title cut of Triumphant Quartet’s new project, “You Gotta Love It.” I would consider it a “puff pastry.” It’s light and airy and disappears in your mouth about the time you sink your teeth into it. But it’s so much fun and a tad addictive.

Pithy as this may be, it strikes me as a bit reductive. Funderburk seems to proceed from the assumption that most people think “good” = Important or Profound and thus bases his defense of less lyrically serious music on something like the old axiom that all work and no play makes Marty a dull Christian. There’s nothing wrong with this idea (certainly evangelicalism will only benefit from continually cultivating a lighter side, dumb tenor jokes or not), except that (you guessed it)  it inadvertently privileges lyric over music.

In explaining why his song “It’s All About the Blood” is a “steak” song (and here the bloody imagery begins to get a bit too thick for me), Funderburk describes a lyric that “covers every theological base” and “drives another nail in the coffin of doubt” (I for one liked “It’s All About the Blood” better when it was called “It’s Still the Cross” … so does that make the BFA tune country fried steak or a twice baked potato?). But one need only to hum “It’s All About the Blood” to the tune of, say, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” to see that lyrics exist symbiotically with music.

I don’t think Funderburk actually intended to short shrift musicality. Indeed, I assume phrases like “seven-fold amen” and “light and airy and disappears in your mouth” are ways of gesturing toward the role of musicality (as opposed to lyrics in isolation) of creating a song’s effect. But when compared with sharp descriptions of lyrics that seal the tomb of doubting, his use of oversimplified food imagery to account for musical effects is telling.

The upshot is that simple is not the same as simplistic and the difference can often be measured in musical – rather than purely lyrical– terms. Good is not only a function of writerly craft but of music composition. While we know how to talk at length about lyrics, we are not nearly as comfortable discoursing plainly and illuminatingly about what makes good music good. This, you might say, is food for thought.