>> Let's talk about brand identity and how it
relates to writers who
are going to be writing for other artists.
How, I think that you got a lot of experience in that.
Let's talk about a specific moment
where you did something like that,
where you wrote for someone with
brand identity or the identity of the artist in mind,
and how it came to life.
>> We're going to be talking about
a really specific song called "A Matter of Time."
That was actually my first cut ever.
It was cut by this artist named Kathy Mattea,
who's a country artist who had a really big hit in
the late '80s, early '90s [LAUGHTER].
It happened in 2006,
so we're talking decades
after that initial time in that artist's career.
She was a more mature older woman.
She wasn't a 20-year-old person anymore.
It was actually this huge,
weeklong project that they were doing at Berklee.
I was still a songwriting
student at Berklee at the time.
She was going to come.
Anybody in the entire school inside or
outside of the songwriting department
was eligible to pitch a song,
and she was going to pick one to sing.
Then they also had George Massenburg
was going to produce it.
For those of you who don't know who George Massenburg is,
he basically invented parametric EQ [LAUGHTER] as well as
[LAUGHTER] produced your favorite song,
"Africa" by Toto, stuff like that.
Then Elliot Scheiner was the engineer who had
done Steely Dan records, just huge records.
It was this big, huge thing.
Everybody pitched a song. It was all live.
We got to watch her, listen to the songs live.
She was just going through them and talking about them,
whether they were going to work for her,
or weren't going to work for her.
>> How many songs was this approximately?
>> I'd say maybe 50 songs
that got submitted. They chose my song.
I co-wrote it with,
the the other writer's name was Jared Salvatore.
We really thought about who she was,
and I think ultimately that's why the song was cut.
I was surprised at the time because it
just made a lot of sense to me
to find out more about her.
Because frankly, I didn't even know who she was.
>> How did you do that?
How did you do the research?
What things were you looking at,
past performances,
reading articles about her, that type of thing?
>> She had a personal website and a blog.
Hurricane Katrina had happened maybe
two months previous to this.
Devastating hurricane.
She had put a blog post up about going to
Louisiana and volunteering with
the Salvation Army doing relief work.
I knew that she was really passionate about this cause.
I also was reading about the fact
that she was religious as well.
I guess I just read through
her entire blog and just extracted the keywords.
It was older woman,
had a whole younger career.
Now, her whole identity was more of a mothering identity.
That she was religious,
and that she was really community centric,
and wanted to help people.
>> Got it.
>> That was enough for me to say,
I'm going to write a song.
It's going to be a lullaby that a mother or
grandmother is singing to a child about the hurricane.
Then I'm going to sprinkle in a lot of
religious lyrics to make that happen.
>> Did you ever try to put yourself in her place?
When you wrote, were you writing as if you were
her or were you just writing with that overall sentiment?
>> I feel I could have done a much better job
thinking about her voice, in particular.
Because when you listen to the demo
versus the final production,
you don't really hear a lot of Kathy in that demo.
The demo is much more like
a Mariah Carey power ballad situation.
But I think that the writing itself,
the actual structure of the song,
and the lyrical content,
and the melodies overshadowed that.
I could have done a much better job of taking
into consideration her range.
Because we had to puzzle
piece that thing together so she could
sing it because it was not within her range.
>> But she chose it.
The underlying composition, and the words,
and the emotion of it really resonated with her.
>> It was nuts watching them pick.
It really came down to two songs.
But I was surprised to how little
everybody else thought about it.
They were like, she's a country artist,
so I'm going to write a song about
drinking beer at a bar and guns.
She does not drink alcohol and she's anti-gun.
It's just this assumption
that I'm going to write this woman a country song,
but that's not who she was at all.
She would listen to 20 seconds
of a song and just be like, "Nope."
She wouldn't even get through it. She like,
"I don't actually believe in that,"
so next, next, next.
We were one of the last few songs.
There was another one that was about time passing.
It was a father time thing.
She was really moved by that song.
Then they played ours,
and she [LAUGHTER] literally wept.
She cried [LAUGHTER].
She just lost it in the thing.
I knew, I was "we did something really good there."
I've had a songwriting teacher who she used to say,
"No tears in the writer,
no tears in the listener."
It was the actual manifestation of that.
Wow, she actually cried, and then she cut it.
>> Real practical advice is know who you're writing
for and do your homework. What else?
>> I think you have to remove yourself.
We're talking about that sonic brand, everybody has one.
Whether you want to acknowledge it or
not, everybody has one.
There's the thing that you do
and you have to stop that. It's not about you.
Somehow you have to know thyself so that you
can stop thyself from being yourself at those moments.
The research part is just the first step,
knowing the other person is a big part of it.
Knowing yourself is the other part.
Where do those things intersect?
How do you serve the purpose of
that artist's identity and
making sure that they see themselves in those songs?
Because otherwise, they're not going to cut them.
>> It was also timely.
The song was about something that she was communicating,
that she was passionate about so it was also
matching where she was in that moment,
not just who she was overall.
It's a little bit of timing and trying to nail where
their mind or their emotions
might be at that point in their career too.
>> That's an important distinction because it's not
about who the artist was.
It's who they are today
and what they care about right now.
It was the intersection of
so many things that made that work out.
>> I don't think a lot of people talk about
this when it comes to writing for others,
removing yourself from it.
It's one thing, "Oh, I'm going to pretend to be that person,"
but getting into the identity of who
that person is in that moment is rarely discussed.
I think back then you
intuitively were picking up on that.
That's why the song got chosen.
It's a really good lesson.