Introduction
I have been writing songs for 40 years, since I was 15 years old. When I was 15 I wrote foolish and derivative songs. The only one I remember from that first year was called “Rainbow Girl.” I could quote you the chorus, but I’m ashamed to.
When I was sixteen and seventeen I was put in touch, through personal friends, with music publishers April-Blackwood Music, and took the greyhound up from the Philly area to Manhattan, & made my way to their offices in what I suppose must have been the Brill Building (didn’t mean anything to me at the time), & sang some of them for the boss, Dave Rosner, who’d just taken over from Neil Diamond. They “bought” two of them, which means they paid me 50 bucks advance against a 50% interest in their royalties.
They were called “Life On A Kitestring” and “New York Streetlamp Night.” The Buckinghams were going to record one. Gene Pitney was going to record one… Nobody ever did. For years I’d get an annual statement from Columbia, stating that I owed them 50 bucks.
I kept on writing songs. I was hired to write a song for a short-subject movie. It was a promotional movie, really, about a horse race held in (I believe) Atlantic City, called the Matchmaker Stakes. It was a race for fillies of a certain (young) age, the prize being stud service from some desirable stallion. I wrote a song called “Worth Running For.” It was well-crafted, if I do say so, and the movie-maker liked it and recorded me doing it, and it opened at Radio City Music Hall ahead of some Paul Newman/Joanne Woodward flick, so I’m told. I never caught it in a theater myself. If I were to play it today, women would rip me to shreds.
I went on to do another horse-racing song for another horse-racing short subject. This one we recorded in a real studio with a little band I put together.
I went back to April-Blackwood once more, & played them my latest songs. Dave Rosner told me: “If you want to see these songs get done, you’ll have to learn to do them yourself.” I guess he meant that they were more personal than professional. Whatever he meant, I took him at his word, and have been striving to learn to do them myself ever since. I’ve recorded 4 albums of them, available “upstairs” at doughazard.com.
I wrote an almost-good song when I was 18– good enough for me to still remember, but nobody else. I wrote a song when I was 20 and another when I was 21 that I still perform, and that are among the best-loved items in my repertoire. (Both appear on my “Three Falls” CD.) I write a few songs a year. Perhaps I start a few and finish a couple. If I write 2 songs in a year that I still like 5 years later, that was a good year.
All of this peronal history is just by way of asserting that I have thought about songwriting a lot. As a craft, as an art, as a business even… but finally, mostly, as a mystery. So, I plan to muse in this space upon questions pertaining to that mystery, such as: Who are the great songwriters? What separates them from the crowd? What makes a great song? Why are bad rhymes often better than “good” ones?
My plan at this early point is to address these questions by considering the songs of the writers that I like best. So, next time, beginning right at the top: John Prine.