Do You Like This Song?

I love writing songs. I love being able to tell a story that can be sung. When I was challenged to write a song by a member of my brother Robin's country band back in 1991, I got the bug. I had never written a song before, unless you count changing the lyrics to Christmas songs and making parody songs to send to my brother Steve who was serving in Vietnam while I was in high school.

I really didn'tlike country music until 1990. That' when I first started to listen to country music. I liked Alan Jackson country & George Strait country music. Listening to their songs helped me to learn how to write lyrics.Since then songwriting has become part of my everyday life.

The first song I wrote wasn't that bad, but it wasn't that good either. But, it was a song and once I realized I could do it, I was addicted. Now, I don't know how to play a guitar or any other instrument, but I do come up with my own melodies. I wrote about eighty songs over the next 2 1/2 years and people were telling me I needed to go to Nashville and get into the country music business.

I didn't have much money and I could only make a handful of demos. I stayed in Nashville about 5 1/2 years and came close to getting my songs on a couple of major artists' CDs, but got aced out of the final cut. I found out that the best song doesn't always win. A lot has to do with who you know and your own reputation. It's how you've been able to network yourself and how much success you've already had.

Because I didn't have much commercial success at songwriting in Nashville and most of my songs haven't been heard by anyone but my wife, I decided to build a series of Squiddo lenses of my songs. I mostly write country songs, Christian songs, patriotic songs, parody songs amd sports songs. Some of the songs I'll feature will be complete demos with music and singing, but most of the songs will be just me singing into my computer.

I've often called songwriting a very expensive lottery with the lottery tickets being your demo recordings. Because I have a lot of songs and not much money, please don't judge the song by the lack of musical content and the quality of my singing. The only reason I am including mp3s of me singing is to give the listener an idea of the way the melody goes. It's the story, the lyrics and the song structure that I would like to have feedback on.

I always felt that I really hadn't demoed my best songs and so any constructive criticism I get might encourage me to get a demo made of a particular song that gets favorable comments from an impartial audience such as this. Like I said , I still write songs and "I Can Still Dream". Hey! That's the title of one of the songs I will probably feature as a lens.