SIX WEEKS TO SUCCESSFUL CHRISTIAN SONGWRITING with John Chisum MODULE #6 - REFINING, RECORDING, & RELEASING YOUR SONG INTRODUCTION Hi, everyone, and welcome to Six Weeks to Successful Christian Songwriting! I’m John Chisum here for Nashville Christian Songwriters and it has been my privilege to coach you through this online experience. I’ve loved spending this time with you and I hope you’ve found these lessons clear and helpful. We welcome your feedback and hope to continue to empower you for years to come as you write your heart out for Jesus! This is our final module, Module #6, where we’re going to be talking about Refining, Recording, and Releasing Your Songs. Pretty exciting stuff! You’ve been working hard and I hope that it pays off as people begin to notice the new power in your songs! It’s kind of like when you’ve been going to the gym a lot and people start noticing you’ve lost weight and your biceps are looking bigger—it’s kind of fun! Before we get into this module, though, I’d like to take a minute to recap our course and highlight a couple of important things. I have so much more to say about all of these topics and, frankly, I edited out a lot of material because I felt like the lessons were getting too long. Guess that stuff will just have to go into the next course! I want to acknowledge again the Berklee School of Music teachers and authors and recommend you get all they have, as well as Rob Sterling’s book The Craft of Christian Songwriting. His book, especially, helped bring some contour to this course and helped me identify some language for things I’ve !1 of !35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. taught in my own way through the years, but lacked the kind of identifiers I really wanted. I heartily recommend his book to you. Upon reflection, I see great value in each module we’ve covered, and realize that my primary goal has been to help you begin to think like a real songwriter. There IS a certain unspoken philosophy that my professional songwriter friends have and operate from, a philosophy that I see written about in bits and pieces here and there, but which I hope to write more completely about in the future. The great athletes, business people, artists, and entrepreneurs all operate from a base philosophy of whatever it is they do. We Christian songwriters, however, often just “fly by the seat of our pants” and try to bluff our way through the process. That, my friend, is the distinction between an amateur and a pro. I don’t know the level of your commitment to this writing thing, but I do know that writing better songs is going to require something of you. Anything worth doing excellently requires something of us in time, commitment, money, and increased effort. You will undoubtedly improve if you have some raw talent and a lot of commitment to the process. It’s my hope that you feel drawn deeper into your commitment to write better songs and that these modules have been helpful to that end. I’ve loved coaching you this way and hope that we’ll stay engaged through Nashville Christian Songwriters for years to come. I want to remind you that this is a coaching course and not a comprehensive course. Given the fact that nearly two hours of material in each week just begins to scratch the surface on how deep we really could go on these topics tells you that there’s a LOT to be learned about great Christian songwriting. !2 of !35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. Our hope has been that we could equip you with the essential tools you need to get a jump start and take some quantum leaps from where you’ve been in your understanding and then take it from there. It’s also a great idea to keep in mind that HAVING the tools is different from USING the tools. Coaching is as much about encouraging you to up your game as it is about telling you how to do it. SO I hope you’ll come back to these modules again and again to refresh your memory on the tools, but also to refresh your inspiration and determination to keep writing. Artistic endeavors can be lonely and songwriting is a solo activity until you build up a bevy of cowriters. Even then, family and friends don’t always see the value or support you as you often wish they could, so you find yourself “going it alone” far too often. Be encouraged, my friend—God sees! In fact, my friend Andi Rozier at Vertical Worship in Chicago said something profound to me a few months back when we were talking about how writing songs can be transformative in our own lives as we dig deeper into our relationship with Him to write. And said, “God called you to be a songwriter because He wanted to spend more time with you.” I love that. That’s the “transform your life” part of our subheading for this course—Transform Your Life | Learn Your Craft | Live Your Call. Christian songwriting is transformative, if approached as a discipline and as witnessing to the world around us of the inner work of Christ. So when it comes to the point we find ourselves at in this course, recording and releasing your songs, how are we to think of it? Is this really what we’ve been preparing for, or is there deeper value in the process we’ve been through to get here? Can we value the work of God in our own hearts to the point that we be unaffected by the response of others, positively or negatively, to our creations? !3 of !35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. I would say probably not completely. After all, we wrote these out of our hearts with at least some inspiration from God, assembled them line by line and section by section with all the rules and principles in mind—what if no one likes them? The likelihood of no one liking any of them is slim. People will like some and not others for all kinds of reasons. The slippery part is when we start basing our self worth on the approval and adulation of others, judging ourselves as failures or losers if someone (or no one) likes our songs. Further, success is defined in all sorts of ways. To make an idol out of professional success is foolish, because very few achieve it. Success for most of us starts with being transformed by God as we write, then sharing that testimony with the people around us as we share the fruit of it in our songs. From there, it’s all in God’s hands. Phil Mehrens and Steve Marshall wrote a wonderful song called They Are Yours about this a few years back that captures this sentiment well. I’m only quoting the chorus here. “They Are Yours” Words and Music by Phil Mehrens / Steve Marshall (Chorus) They are Yours, Lord They are Yours Like our hearts, take these songs They are Yours They are Yours, Lord They are Yours All the music Every word They are yours Phil Mehrens - Sunday Best Music (ASCAP) Steve Marshall - Fossil Creek Music (ASCAP) !4 of !35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. Proof of the call to write isn’t the acceptance and approval of others. It’s only the approval of God we desire as we follow in obedience, trusting He makes the way for us and for our songs. Obedience is its own reward. Now on to the last module in our course. In Section 1 we’re going to talk about rewriting and refining your songs and about co-writing—something I’ve been trying to get to for several modules now. In Section 2 we’ll hit on recording your songs and how to get the biggest bang for your buck if you hire this out or how to do your own writer demos at home. In Section 3 we’ll wrap it all up with a discussion on how to release your songs and the next steps you’ll need to take in promoting them. So, short intro this time, but that’s okay—we’ve covered a LOT of ground in this course, so now it’s time to move on into bringing it all together and writing a LOT more VBFD’s and tap into the great prosody and reciprocity we’ve been talking about and then get those songs out to the world! See you in Section 1! SECTION 1 - Refining, Rewriting, and Cowriting Alright, hello again! We’re in Section 1 of Module #6 in our course. I’m John Chisum and I’m glad you’re working your way through these modules and hope you’re getting tons of great information and inspiration from them! We’re talking about Refining, Rewriting, and Cowriting in this section, so let’s get with it! !5 of !35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. Maybe the WORST misconception aspiring songwriters have is that their songs are great in the first draft. That has NEVER been true once in my entire career or experience. Never. While it’s true that skilled writers can write quickly and it SEEMS like they wrote the song instantly, there’s always at least SOME refining that needs to be done, even if that writer refines on the spot.