I spent a good chunk of time this morning updating honeybowtie.com, and specifically linked several demos to the Songs page. Since I mentioned to some folks I saw a few weeks ago that I would be sure to send a link to some MP3s of our Nashville demos, I thought I’d go ahead and post it here.I only got three songs added (one was already there), so here’s what’s up there right now:
- Get It Wrong, a pop-py tune we co-wrote with our friend Lair Morgan. The demo is sung by Dawn Martin.
- Traces of You, a slow- to mid-tempo ballad. Demo sung by the lovely and incredibly talented Wendy Jans, who is also a wonderful songwriter.
- You’ve Lost Me, a sorta raucous country-bluesy tune. Sung by Susan Clinton, who happens to manage Bayou Studio — where we recorded the demo.
And there’s also Mango Sun, which is a reggae tune we demo’ed in Chicago last year and pitched last August for a film placement. Nothing ever came of it, but some of our friends have told us stories of waiting more than 18 months to hear news on a pitch, being sure it was dead, and then getting a cut. So I guess ya never know.
Song demos up on honeybowtie.com
All sound good. I think I like Traces of You the best. You write much better country songs than I do. I wrote a short one once. It went a little something like this:
Well, my truck left me
And my dog’s been cheatin’ on me
with another woman
My wife, she’s got a flat tire
But I….I still got my cow
MoOOOOOoooO
MoOOOOooooO
Sorry… 🙂
In case you forgot and are still interested, here is a link to the people that make the sheet music program I use (including the Virtual Singer thinger that sings your lyrics). http://www.myriad-online.com/enindex.htm
Oh, wow. Oh, *wow*. Kate, this is some *good* stuff. High-quality songs, high-quality demos.
The best song is “Get It Wrong.” It’s damn catchy. But “Traces of You” is beautiful, too, and I like the lyrics to that one the most.
I’m so proud. So, so proud. 🙂
-J
Wonderful!! Thank you for including me. I especially like “Traces of You”. I love “Mango Sun”.
I listened to them again this morning, and I can somehow really hear somebody like Vanessa Carlton singing “Traces of You.”
-J
Cool! I’ll play around with those this weekend. Thanks for the feedback, and hey, don’t give up on those country-song-writing dreams. The traditional stuff is coming back, so your song may be marketable yet. 😉
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I’m delighted to hear your feedback. 🙂
We played Traces of You and Get It Wrong for a publisher critique last night, and he certainly did have some suggestions. I don’t agree with all of them, but that’s part of the process, you know? It’s like we need a writers’ version of the Serenity prayer: to learn how to be humble enough to accept criticism gracefully, smart enough to know which parts to ignore, and disciplined enough to work the good suggestions into the piece.
Anyway, he pointed out the phrasing problems in the prechoruses of Get It Wrong, which were also bugging me (although I maintain that if the singer had handled them better, they wouldn’t sound nearly as rushed); he clearly disliked the bridge in Traces of You (which is one of my personal favorites, actually, but maybe he’s right about it not fitting the song or serving a purpose); he and several other participants commented that they would have liked more of a melodic lift during the chorus of Traces of You, and I can see there’s good in that suggestion; and so on.
But we also got really nice compliments on the melodies overall, the originality of some of the rhymes, the conversational nature of most of the lyrics, and some other things. So all in all, it was a very worthwhile session.
Thanks for your feedback! And yeah, I love Mango Sun. I wish something would happen for that one — I’d be just delighted to get such a happy song placed somewhere, somehow. 🙂
I get what you’re saying about the criticism. I go through that, too, with my beta team — I know for sure that if I send out a story and multiple people comment on the same thing, it’s a problem. But if only one person comments, and especially if it’s a criticism that sounds intuitively wrong to me, then I need to be able to go back to one of my other betas (usually Christie or Luna) and say: “so-and-so says I should change x. What do you think?” Often it will be something that they also thought was wrong, but couldn’t think of a way to phrase, and then I know. Sometimes there will be something wrong, but not the thing the beta pointed out, and we’ll figure out through talking about it what the real problem is. And sometimes (rarely, but sometimes) the beta is just plain wrong about the thing they commented on, and it helps to hear someone else say that.
I’ve thought for a while that if you could get something like that set up with songwriting, that it could be very helpful. Any chance of it?
-J