Austin Songwriting Symposium – 2011
Jan 6 2012

I haven’t blogged too much about music or songwriting recently, but I signed up to attend the Austin Songwriters Group 8th Annual Songwriting Symposium this weekend and tonight was the first night…well it’s now past midnight as I’m writing this post.  My voice teacher, Gene Raymond at Octave Higher, forwarded me a notice about it only a week ago and I figured ‘what the heck, I should go.’ So far so good.  They had songwriters from Texas and Nashville singing their original music tonight.  It was like having a semi-private concert given by very talented song writers in a smoke-free room where everyone was really interested in listening to the singers.  In other words, people were focused on them and not talking to each other, trying to pick up dates, or drinking to excess.  They were all so good and all of them said that no one goes into songwriting for the money.  A guy named  Jim Photoglo made a funny joke about marriage, sex, money, and songwriting but it’s probably not appropriate to write here.  I’m looking forward to a guy named Sonny Throckmorton and a gal named Kimmie Rhodes talk about co-writing songs tomorrow (or shall I say later this morning).

Congressman Lloyd Doggett showed up since he’s a big supporter of the Austin music scene and gave a little speech.  There were many references to some great country singers like Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, etc. because most of the music the singer/songwriters played this evening was country music.  Whenever I hear country music, I remember a guy I worked with at Mr. Gatti’s pizza in high school who told me when I told him that I hated country music that it was because my heart hadn’t been really broken yet…and he was right.  I get teary eyed when I hear good country music now.

I signed up to pitch my songs to one of three publishers who will be there on Sunday morning.  We get 15 minutes with a publisher.  I hope I’m brave enough to hum a few bars when it’s my turn because our songs are still in varying degrees of completion.  I wish my songwriting partner could be there, but he’s too busy playing live gigs!  We are hoping our schedules will allow us to finally record some of our stuff this year.  I mean…come on…we have a facebook page for our two person band, so we have to accomplish something, right?  Please go like our page:  METAPHOR MANIA.  I think we need 25 people to like it to remove the numbers from the URL so…do the right thing and wish me luck in pitching…I could use some positive affirmation right about now.

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