Also available on: Apple Podcasts · Spotify
Hit songwriter, author, and educator Jason Blume shares the long road from studying psychology to having songs recorded by Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, and the Oak Ridge Boys. We get into brutal feedback, rewriting a song seven times, choosing opportunity over a bigger publishing advance, and how creators can put themselves in a better position to get lucky.
Key Takeaways
Persistence needs adjustment. Continuing to do the same thing is not enough. Jason’s breakthrough came when he started asking why his songs were not connecting and what he needed to improve.
Feedback is more useful when you separate it from your identity. One bad song did not mean Jason could never succeed. It meant that particular song needed work.
You can create better conditions for luck. Taking a temp job through an entertainment-focused agency eventually put Jason inside RCA Records, while choosing the right publisher created access to future opportunities.
The biggest offer is not always the best opportunity. Jason accepted a smaller advance because the publisher had a record label and a broader network that could create more valuable connections.
Staying relevant requires staying curious. Jason encourages songwriters targeting today’s market to actively study current songs, melodies, lyrics, phrasing, and production rather than only relying on the music they grew up with.
Follow Jason Blume:
Go to www.jasonblume.com to sign up for a free weekly newsletter with tips, lessons, bad jokes, and occasional pitches. When you join you’ll receive a free instructional video: “3 Things You MUST Do for Success.”
Also at www.jasonblume.com there are 135 lessons—all FREE—that Jason wrote for BMI.
Jason’s books, 6 Steps to Songwriting Success and This Business of Songwriting are available at Amazon.com.
Audio lessons—equivalent to a full-weekend workshop—are available at Jason’s website.
Join the Facebook group: “Songwriting With Jason Blume” and follow Jason on LinkedIn.
Cat lovers: Join the Facebook group: Jason, the Kauai Kat Man and sign up for the free mewsletter, “The Fluffington Post” at https://www.jasonblume.com/cats.html
Need more perspective on building a creative career that lasts?
Sign up for The Monthly Scramble for featured episodes, collaboration ideas, reviews, and more creative success stories from artists, storytellers, and creative entrepreneurs.
Related Episodes
How to Keep Releasing Music Without Burning Out (Leah Nawy)
Another songwriter-focused conversation about storytelling, consistency, self-belief, and developing a sustainable creative process.
Persistence is the Real Talent (Jason Hollis)
Both Jason Hollis and Jason Blume built decades-long music careers through persistence, relationships, changing roles, and continuing despite years of uncertainty.
Host: Michael Zimmerlich
Post-Production: EarthtoMoira
Music by: Daphne Greene
A podcast by Omelette Prevail, a creative company connecting creators, brands, and ideas through partnerships and collaboration.
Transcript:
00:00 Cats, Creativity, and Early Music
Mike Zimmerlich: Hey, Jason, how’s it going?
Jason Blume: Really good. How about with you, Michael?
Mike Zimmerlich: Doing good, thanks. Thank you so much for being on the show. I really do appreciate it. It’s such an honor to talk with you. You’ve had such an incredible journey in your career, and it’s always sometimes a challenge to decide where to start first. But I’m going to actually start without anything to do with music.
One of the things I found really intriguing was the fact that you have photographed over 6,000 cats for the Kauai Humane Society. I assume that you probably like cats.
Jason Blume: It’s now more than 7,000. Once you get past 5 or 6,000? Here’s the deal. When I came to Kauai, I wanted to do some kind of volunteer work, and they needed somebody to photograph cats. I like cats. I mean, I wasn’t nuts with them, but I like them. And next thing I knew, there I was.
I was a cat photographer, and that was actually before I started caring for 17 homeless neighborhood cats every night. But with this being a podcast about creativity and such, I have to say, it’s amazing how sometimes the universe comes together to take what it is that you love and turn it into work or turn it into success.
And what wound up happening is I wrote a book about my experience with the cats and kittens that I photographed, and it’s called Happy Tails: Life Lessons From Rescued Cats and Kittens. And it’s just one of those things.
Who would’ve imagined when I said, “Yes, I’ll volunteer to photograph,” that it would lead me to having a book published? And by the way, it’s in Cracker Barrel stores, of all places. So yeah, it’s just one more example of how doing what you love and following your passion can go places that we don’t expect.
Mike Zimmerlich: That’s truly incredible. Did you find your passion for photography came later in life, or were you always interested in photography?
Jason Blume: I think it did come later. I think I had a mild interest, but I really love it now.
Mike Zimmerlich: So of course, probably your earlier passions came from music. You went to college and got a bachelor’s in psychology and songwriting. So was music always something that...
Jason Blume: Actually, my degree was strictly psychology.
Mike Zimmerlich: Okay.
Jason Blume: I took enough music classes to have it officially be a minor, but I never really went through what was necessary to do that. But by probably my junior year at Penn State, I was playing in coffeehouses, I was writing songs, and I took as many music classes, every one that I could cram in.
I took composition classes, and it was a great opportunity to get voice lessons for credits. I started out playing mandolin when I was probably 12. But before that, I had started in third grade playing clarinet, and then I moved on to other woodwinds.
When I look back on it, I think that had a really profound effect because those were melody instruments. I wasn’t playing chords. I wasn’t playing background or harmonies. I was almost always playing the melody, and I think I’m really a melody guy.
What’s ironic is I started out songwriting thinking I was more of a lyric guy. But I really love melody, and I think it’s the top three reasons why songs become successful: melody, melody, and melody.
It doesn’t mean that we don’t need a great lyric. Of course we do. But it doesn’t matter what the lyric’s gonna say if it’s not attached to that burn-in-the-brain kind of melody.
So that’s how I got started. My father played mandolin every night of my life, and he was really talented. Self-taught, could play anything by ear just instantly.
I grew up with that, and I look back and I say, “I had no talent for woodwinds.” I’m not a total idiot, so after years and years of lessons and practicing, yes, I could play. But when I picked up the mandolin, it was as if I’d been playing all my life. There I had more ability.
Ironically, I talked about being a melody guy, but when I played mandolin initially, I was playing chords, which you don’t normally think of. But I was writing songs, and mandolin was my instrument until I picked up guitar when I was about 16.
06:00 Choosing Songwriting Over Psychology
Mike Zimmerlich: That’s incredible. So obviously music was a big part of your life. All through college, were you doing all this studying because you knew this was going to be your profession? Or you weren’t sure yet about what you wanted to do, but you just knew you loved music and you loved to make music?
Jason Blume: I assumed going through college that I was then gonna get a master’s degree in psychology and be a psychologist. I wanna get back to that, but I wanna back up when you said about music always being part of my life.
I have a very talented sister who is six years, six months, and six days older than me. When I was nine years old, my 16-year-old sister signed a major record deal as part of a girl group. She was signed to Roulette Records, and what that means is that at nine years old, I was watching their rehearsals. I was listening to their song choices. I was hearing their recordings. So I think by then I was hooked already.
But back to college and a degree in psychology, after college I got a job in a psychiatric hospital. I joke that psychology and working with mentally ill people was the perfect training for the crazy music business. But seriously, I assumed that was gonna be my career path.
All through that I was performing and I was writing songs. All through college, but also while working at the psychiatric hospital, I was a strolling mandolin player at an Italian restaurant. I also would go up on a little stage and play guitar and play mostly non-original songs, but some originals.
So I was doing both, but assuming I was gonna be a psychologist. Then I went on vacation.
Well, something happened right before vacation. The director of the psychiatric hospital called me in and said, “You really do a great job here, and we’d like to offer you a situation. We will pay for your master’s degree if you guarantee a certain number of years working for us afterwards.”
I had a vacation planned, and I said, “I’ll let you know as soon as I get back from vacation.” It was sort of like a no-brainer. Of course I’m gonna get a free master’s degree and continue working at a place that I really liked working at.
I went on vacation, and I woke up one morning, and I was walking on a beach. This is sort of woo-woo and weird, which I tend to not be all that woo-woo, but a pod of dolphins were sort of walking beside me. They were keeping pace with me as I was walking in the surf. They were maybe 10 feet away. That has nothing to do with the story, but I think it’s interesting.
Anyway, I’m walking and just really searching my soul, and it hit me as clear as anything I had ever known that I would never forgive myself if I did not pursue songwriting. At the time, I wanted to be a recording artist also, and I knew my answer.
I came back from my vacation, and the first day, I gave my two weeks notice, packed up everything that would fit into my little Datsun Honey Bee, and I had $400 and maybe a few dollars more. I don’t remember. I think maybe $467. No credit cards.
I got in the car, and I moved to Los Angeles to be a superstar. I figured I didn’t wanna have unrealistic expectations, so I gave it a year. I decided that in one year I’ll have a Mercedes parked in my driveway.
And you know what? It did not take a year. It only took a week.
Mike Zimmerlich: A week?
Jason Blume: Listen, I got a job taking rich people’s Mercedes to the car wash. So there I was after a week with a Mercedes in Los Angeles, and a BMW, and a Jaguar.
It took a little bit longer than I expected, my overnight success.
11:00 The Workshop That Changed Everything
Jason Blume: The very first thing I can point to that I would say there was a clear success, it wasn’t big, but it was seven years after I moved to LA and took every class, every workshop.
I have got to tell a workshop story that was life-changing for me.
I had been in LA at least, I think it was five years at that point, and I was taking, like I said, every workshop, every class. I was only working about 15 hours a week initially because I didn’t want to take all my energy and my time away from songwriting.
I didn’t care about money, so I lived in one room, no kitchen, no bathroom. I shared the bathroom down the hall with the sex workers and the drug addicts that lived in the other rooms, and I was happy. I mean, I was writing songs. I was doing what it is that I wanted to do.
Five years into that, I was in a songwriting workshop. The way it worked, you knew a week in advance when your song was gonna be played for a panel of music pros who each, on the panel, could easily change your life.
It was a mega-hit producer and songwriter and publisher. So I knew for an entire week that next Tuesday night my life is going to change. I didn’t know which one of them I would allow to have my song because they were all gonna fight over it, because this was just the most amazing song.
I played it in clubs. Friends of mine played it in clubs. People loved the song.
So I played it at the workshop, and I had spent the whole week trying to decide what color Mercedes I was gonna buy. The first person listened to the song and said, “You know, this is a good example of a song that would never be on the radio. Never. I mean, just never.”
I’m sitting there in shock. That’s it. My song would never be on the radio.
But I’m figuring that number two and number three panelists, they’re gonna have ears. They’re gonna recognize the brilliance.
So number two said, “Well, I certainly wouldn’t have said it that way.”
I thought, “Well, great.”
And she said, “But, you know, this really is an excellent example of...”
I thought, “Great, I did an excellent example.”
“...of everything amateurs do wrong.”
I am sitting there in shock, literally like kicked in the stomach. And I’m still believing that number three is going to love my song. He’s the one I was gonna give it to anyway because he was producing Earth, Wind & Fire and had to leave early from the workshop to go to the studio, where I knew he’s gonna cut my song that night.
I knew my life was gonna change, and it did, because he said, “Okay, I agree this is a song that would never, never be on the radio, and let’s talk about why.”
He said to the people in the audience, “You’ve all got a lyric sheet in front of you. I want you to circle the lines of lyric that made you say, ‘Wow, that’s an incredible line. God, I wish I’d written that line,’ and then raise your hand.”
No hands went up.
Now, up to this point, there were only really two reasons why I wasn’t already a superstar. Number one, I didn’t have the right connections. If only the right people could hear my songs, they would get it. Number two, I hadn’t gotten lucky.
So he said, “Who will share the lyric that blew them away?”
Nobody’s hand went up.
Was that because I didn’t have connections or because I didn’t have luck? It never, I am dead serious, it never had crossed my mind that the problem might be my songs. This was not even a possibility.
Then, twisting the knife, he said, “You’ve now heard this chorus three times. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. Who can sing me the chorus?”
Not one hand went up.
Because I didn’t have connections? No. Because I wasn’t lucky? Maybe I had not written a memorable melody or any lines of lyric that were exceptional. They were okay. They were fine.
Now, I knew my life was gonna change this night, and it did, because, this is not a joke, I drove home on the 101 freeway honestly thinking about how I would kill myself, because I had given up everything.
Relationships, security, a great job, family, everything, to move to LA. And I just had people who I trusted tell me that my best song would never be on the radio. Never. And all I wanted was that. That’s all I wanted, to be a successful songwriter, and you’re telling me I will never have what I wanted.
But that’s not what they were saying. They were saying that that one song would never be on the radio.
The way my life changed that night was when I realized there were reasons why my songs were not getting the attention I thought they deserved. Maybe I needed to work on writing wow lyrics, and maybe I needed to analyze why some melodies burned into people’s brains until they could not get them out of their head, and mine didn’t.
What were they doing? What were the common denominators? There had to be some.
And that’s how my life changed. I started really looking at the songs I loved, the songs that I wanted to emulate. Not that I wanted to be just like them. I wanted them to be mine, but I wanted them to use the tools and the techniques that could get my songs onto the radio.
Did that mean that my next song or the one after that was perfect? No. But I was now on a path.
Finally, like I said, after seven years in LA, I got a little independent cut, an artist on a new teeny-tiny label, and it opened up doors for me. I look back and it led to every single thing in my career.
And here’s the important lesson. Are you listening, people? Here it comes.
I played that song for a publisher, and he said to me, “There’s only four things wrong with this song.”
I thought, “That’s not that bad. I can fix four things.”
He said, “The verses, the chorus, the words, and the music.”
It’s like, whoa.
Mike Zimmerlich: Wow.
Jason Blume: And he said, “What you’ve got is a great idea, a great title. Now you need to go write a hit song.”
He gave me some guidelines. He told me what was missing for him.
So we’re gonna flash forward. I brought the song back four times rewritten, and he said, “You know, it’s really getting better. It’s much better, but you’re still missing...” And he talked about some elements.
I decided that maybe I needed a collaborator on this song. I did not typically collaborate back then.
I brought in a collaborator, and by the time we were done, I had done seven versions of this song. Seven demos.
I didn’t have any money, but I had the perfect collaborator because he owned a recording studio, and he could play all the instruments. I could sing, but we actually wound up hiring a singer. I’m going way back, 1986.
We were hiring a singer for $25 or $35. She wound up getting a record deal, but that’s another story.
It was the seventh version, lucky number seven, that he said, “You know what? You nailed it. Finally.”
It was a country song, by the way, the first country song I’d ever written. I was in LA.
He FedExed it to his Nashville office, and the next morning I got a phone call congratulating me that I was gonna have a single on this artist. It was an itty-bitty independent label.
What I didn’t understand back then is that it was impossible back in 1986 for an independent label release to get above the glass ceiling of maybe number 60-ish on the Billboard charts.
22:00 First Breaks and Nashville
Jason Blume: It was literally impossible and never happened back then. So the song went to number 63. Although back then we had Cash Box Magazine also that had a chart. Number 46 on Cash Box.
She performed the song on television shows. She was on the Grand Ole Opry. I mean, I’d never published a song. I’d never had a song recorded.
This was really big, even though I think it only earned $87, which is another story. But it opened the doors.
Having a song on the charts in Nashville with a bullet, this was before it peaked at 63, gave me a level of credibility.
The person who produced that record, his name’s Don Goodman. I didn’t realize he was a songwriter who’d had six number one country singles.
Bear in mind, I have written one country song in my entire life. He’s had six number ones, and some of them are iconic songs with Reba McEntire and George Jones. Songs that were not just hits, but became really woven into the idea of country music.
He loved the song and said he wanted to write with me.
So, oh my God, I was beyond intimidated.
What I did is something I recommend. Rather than walk into the session and hope I’m gonna be creative that day, which I might or might not be, and hope that I’m not having a panic attack because, oh my God, I’m writing with a superstar and I’m a nothing, I spent two weeks before that trip every day doing what I called song starts.
Meaning collecting titles, phrases, snippets of lyrics, whole verses, whole choruses, melodies that I would sing into a little recorder, anything so that I could walk into that session, and if I felt brain-dead or I had a migraine, I would have something to contribute.
So I went into the session with one of my song starts, and it was a finished lyric. Well, it was a verse, chorus, and a verse, chorus.
Don did not show up for my writing session. I had flown to Nashville, maxed out my credit card, and he blew me off.
And to this day, I am beyond grateful to Don Goodman.
I sent him a thank-you note for blowing me off, because his publisher went down the hall, came back with some guy, and said to me, “This here’s A.J. Masters. A.J., this here’s Jason Blume. Y’all go write a hit now.”
I brought out that lyric, and A.J. and I wrote the melody, and we wrote a bridge. It was like 10,000 times better.
Honestly, I’m sitting here with chill bumps saying it to you. The song was infinitely better than anything I had ever written.
A.J. and his publisher said that they would demo it. I had to go back to LA. They demoed it in Nashville, and they sent me the demo.
I was really confused because what they sent me was a finished record.
I mean, it was like, “You’ve gotta be kidding me. This is a demo?”
I was clueless that that’s what Nashville demos sounded like. That was simply where the bar was.
I’ll have to tell you a good story about this before I get into what happened with that song.
I was back in LA. We’re flashing forward some years.
I’m back in LA, and I’m writing a song with somebody, and I pick up the most recent Garth Brooks album that they have laying out there on the floor. I’m just leafing through the credits, and I’m like, “Wait a minute. Am I hallucinating? All of these musicians on Garth Brooks’ album just played on my demo session in Nashville.”
I was like, “What?”
I had no idea that that was the level of musicianship that was simply the standard in Nashville. When these mega-successful studio players had a day off from doing masters, they recorded demos all day. They would do six songs in a three-hour block.
Mike Zimmerlich: Six songs in three hours?
Jason Blume: That was standard at that time in Nashville.
Bear in mind, they’ve never heard the song before. All they’re doing is listening to a very rough recording or a live recording of me sitting there playing guitar and singing.
Before the session, I’ve met with one of the people, and they’ve done a chart, a lead sheet for the song. All it has is the chord changes and very, very little other instruction.
It might say something like “full stop” at this point, or “breakdown.” It was very little, and the musicians created their own parts.
I had no idea that these brilliant people who were playing on every hit session that you could imagine were just making up the parts on my demo, and not getting credited as writers, and not getting paid anything extra when the song was a hit.
That’s just the way it worked.
So now I’ve got this drop-dead incredible demo of the best song I’ve ever written, and I’m imagining that, oh, here comes an important lesson.
See, A.J. is signed to this publishing company. I don’t have a publisher.
So if anybody doesn’t know, if you don’t have a publisher, you are the de facto publisher. The song is split right down the middle between the writer’s share and the publisher’s share.
If you don’t have a publisher, you own both sides, both shares. So I owned both sides of my half of the song, and A.J. owned his writer’s side, and his publisher owned A.J.’s publishing side.
Therefore, his publisher had an obligation and a vested interest in pitching my song, even though I owned my publishing.
At this point in time, I wanted a publishing deal just only slightly more than I wanted to be able to breathe. This was everything I wanted, a deal that would let me quit my day jobs and let me write songs that I knew I was meant to do, not sit behind a desk all day.
So I would have gladly delivered my share of the publishing to this publisher on a silver platter with my firstborn on top if they would have given me a publishing deal.
But luckily, I had a wonderful attorney who said to me, “Don’t be ridiculous. You are under no obligation to give them anything. What you own is very valuable, and they’re gonna pitch the song anyway because they have to. A.J. is their writer.”
He said, “But I’ll tell you what. Since you’re so eager to really establish a relationship with these people, how about we offer them that in the event that they secure a major label recording of this song, then as a thank-you bonus, you will give them a sliver of your publishing?”
And they were like, “Great.”
So now I’ve got this amazing demo, this great song, and I’m expecting it’s gonna be recorded in a week, maybe two weeks.
32:00 Oak Ridge Boys and a Publishing Deal
Jason Blume: Three and a half years later, the song has been rejected by every artist and producer and record label in Nashville.
I have absolutely no idea what changed, but somebody at the publishing company played the song for the Oak Ridge Boys, and they liked it.
They said to me, “We think they’re gonna record it, but can’t be sure. They have it on hold.”
Okay. That means that we were agreeing not to pitch it to anybody else until they recorded.
And lo and behold, Grammy-winning number one artists the Oak Ridge Boys recorded our song.
And here comes the unbelievable part.
It was slated to be their next single following a number one single. Everything they did went to number one.
But there was just one little issue.
When A.J.’s publisher sent me the Oak Ridge Boys’ version of the song that was gonna be their single, I laughed hysterically. It was a practical joke. It was so horrible.
I don’t even wanna use the word “harmonies,” because that would be too nice a word. The attempted harmonies sounded like chalk on a board, and I was just laughing at how horrible this was, this joke.
And that was the real single. That was what was going to be released.
I felt like, okay, this has got to be the emperor’s new clothes, the emperor’s new song.
How could nobody hear how horrible this recording was? But I’m not gonna be the one to tell them.
So now I own my publishing on an Oak Ridge Boys soon-to-be single following a number one.
I met with six publishers in Nashville. Remember, I’m still living in LA. I’m not a country songwriter. I’m a pop writer.
I’ve only written a handful of country songs at this point, maybe three.
Now every publisher who has either ignored me, not even returning my calls or whatever, they’re all offering me deals. They are taking me out to fancy restaurants and telling me why I need to sign with them, because I would be bringing the next Oak Ridge Boys single to the deal.
You sign me to a staff writing deal, and I’ll give you the Oak Ridge Boys’ next single, but you’re gonna pay for it.
Yes, I’ll bring it to the deal, but my attorney negotiated a hefty payment for bringing that to the deal.
But I didn’t care. All I cared about was signing a staff writing deal, having publishers behind me who would push my songs, who would tell me who was recording, how to get to them.
All the things that a great publisher can do are what I wanted desperately, desperately, and suddenly they’re all offering it to me.
I should mention, I couldn’t even tell you how poor I was at this point in time. It’s a long story, but I had gotten so deep in debt, I could not fathom ever getting out of debt. I just couldn’t imagine how it could ever happen.
So one of the companies offered me an advance of $5,000 less than anybody else.
At that point in time, $5,000, I can’t even tell you how big that was to me. It was like the difference of $100,000 now, or even more. It was life-changing money to me.
Why in God’s name would I turn down the offer that was an additional $5,000?
The answer is, anything that you’re given in these deals is an advance. It’s not a salary or a payment.
Mike Zimmerlich: No, you have to pay that back in some form.
Jason Blume: Of course. Right.
And if you don’t earn enough royalties to pay it back, you don’t have to pay it out of your pocket, but you are gonna be saying, “Do you want fries with that?”
Meaning when you sign a staff writing deal, it virtually always is for one year, but then the publisher has multiple options that they can pick up. It’s up to them if they renew you for the future years.
So I thought, “You know what’s more important to me than $5,000 that I’m gonna have to pay back is to go with the company that I think is gonna offer me the best opportunities to have hits.”
Why did I sign with the company I signed with for less money?
They owned a record label, and it just didn’t take a genius to think they are gonna be able to connect me with their artists. I’m gonna be able to write with artists signed to their label.
I wasn’t psychic, but that’s what happened.
Little could I have imagined when I signed that deal that they would sign to their record label Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, and the rest is history.
Mike Zimmerlich: Wow. Incredible.
Jason Blume: I know. I know it.
So there’s my winding road to how in the world did I get a deal, and how in the world did I get to be Britney Spears’ first co-writer, along with my collaborator Eugene Wilde.
I also was the first person, along with Gary Baker, we did a three-way with Kevin Richardson of the Backstreet Boys.
If I had been signed to any other publisher on Earth, those things would not have happened.
Like I said, it’s not that I was psychic. It’s that I was able to stand back and say, “Where do I think I’m gonna have the most opportunities?”
By the way, it wasn’t only that they owned a record label, although that was a huge determining factor.
It was that I wasn’t a country writer. I should mention, this deal was being done in Nashville, even though I lived in LA, because suddenly I’m hot in Nashville. I’ve got the next Oak Ridge Boys single, and nobody cared that much about me in LA.
So the company I signed with in Nashville had offices in LA, in New York, London, all around the world.
I could imagine that I would have people pitching my songs from the London office, the LA office, the New York office.
Because I had no intention of primarily writing country songs, and I never did, by the way. I wrote really every genre.
While I was in Nashville, and after two years, by the way, I moved from LA to Nashville because my publisher sat me down and said, “You’re really good, and so is everybody else. You’re spending half your time in Nashville, and everybody else is here 100%. Either commit to it or go back home to LA.”
So it’s like, “Okay, I know I need to move.”
And that worked out pretty well.
41:00 Persistence and Making Your Own Luck
Mike Zimmerlich: It’s truly amazing. I admire so much about your journey, and one of the things I’ve noticed is this aspect of persistence.
You persisted along the whole way in many ways. All the way to the beginning, when you literally had a panel of people that you respect in the industry basically tell you that this would never see the light of day on radio.
Jason Blume: Mm-hmm.
Mike Zimmerlich: And being persistent and working, “How can I be better? What can I do to be better?” To the point of rewriting a song seven times.
Jason Blume: Mm-hmm.
Mike Zimmerlich: Seven times before it even got anywhere. And it took years.
We’re talking about a very long period of time before these opportunities really started to happen for you. And even then, as you mentioned, you looked for what were the greatest opportunities for yourself.
Jason Blume: You know what? It really took longer than I’ve even shared yet, because by the time I had the Oak Ridge Boys single and signed the publishing deal, that was 11 years after I moved to LA.
And then it took five and a half more years as a staff writer before I had real success.
And after five and a half... Oh, this is a story I’ve gotta tell.
After five years, remember, at the end of every year, the publisher calls you in and says, “I’m either renewing your option or I’m not.”
I wasn’t making any money for the company or for me.
When we negotiated the staff writing deal and I had an Oak Ridge Boys single coming out, we specified the amount of money that my advance would be each of the next seven years.
So in a sense, it wasn’t a bad thing for them to have it keep going up, up, up, because they weren’t gonna pick up the option if I wasn’t making good money for them and for me.
I think in today’s world, they would never have picked up my option more than a year or two because they don’t really have that kind of way of working anymore.
But they believed in me.
However, they kept reducing my advance. Every year, I would get less and less than what they had contractually agreed to.
The question would be, “Look, do you wanna stay for half the money, or do you wanna leave? Those are your options.”
So I wound up working a part-time job so that I could afford to still be a staff writer.
And wow, did I ever make connections and learn a lot from that part-time job.
I became production coordinator for a big record producer, and it was next door to my publishing company.
So at the end of my writing day, I would go next door, and I would handle the paperwork and the union contracts, and hiring the musicians and the background vocalists for artists like Randy Travis and Aaron Tippin, and things like that.
I sort of forgot to mention, and it’s part of the story, that before I moved to Nashville, I had been in LA for 13 years, and part of that journey brought me to RCA Records, where I wound up in the A&R department.
What I wanna share about that is I am a strong believer that we have got to get lucky in this business, and there are things that we can do to shift the seesaw in our direction to get luckier.
I’m not saying that we have 100% control over how lucky we’re gonna be, but we have some, and we can shift the odds, and we have to.
So when I decided that I was tired of being so poor living in the one room in LA, and by the way, eating cat food when I ran out of money, and I did not have a cat. I just went out and I bought cat food because it was all I could afford.
When I got tired of that, I knew I had to work maybe for a temp agency.
Rather than leave that to chance, I thought, “You know, if I’ve gotta work eight or 10 miserable hours a day and deal with the freeway traffic, I wanna work someplace with the entertainment business, if possible.”
So I researched, and I found there was a temp agency that specialized in delivering temps to the entertainment business.
A lot of what I did when they took me on as a client had nothing whatsoever to do with the music business. It was entertainment. I’d work for a television station in a windowless chamber filing papers all day. There were a lot of jobs like that along the way.
And then the gates of heaven opened, and they sent me for a three-day assignment to RCA Records.
The problem was I was in the country promotion department, and this is before I ever wrote a country song, long before, and I thought country music was an oxymoron.
Country music? Please. Bunch of whining, cheating, drinking, stupid three-chord songs.
My first hour at RCA Records, my job was to take the debut single by a brand new act, put it between two pieces of cardboard, stick it in an envelope, put a pre-printed label on it, and mail it to the radio stations so that they would hopefully play the single by this unknown artist named The Judds.
Because I was in the promotion department, they played The Judds album all day long so that everybody could keep hearing it and make decisions about what should be the other singles off the album.
I can’t even tell you what this did to my conception of country music.
These were the best songs I had ever heard in my entire life. The stories, the pictures, the detail, the emotion.
Then add into that Wynonna’s unbelievable voice back then. The purity was incredible. Then put on top of that Naomi’s perfection harmonies, and I was like, “Where have you been all my life? Oh my God, this is country music?”
To me, it was more on par with Linda Ronstadt, who I thought was unbelievable.
So that song that I wrote for the independent label, rewrote seven times, got it recorded, I actually wrote that song for The Judds.
That was the whole idea, was, wow, now I’m in. I meet them. I know them.
Because, by the way, my three-day assignment at RCA lasted for about eight years, and I kept moving from one department to the next.
But after about two years in the country music department, I became the Los Angeles country music expert when they moved me into A&R.
So therefore, I was the guy screening the songs that came in in LA for Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, Alabama, The Judds.
This was the golden age of country music at RCA, and I was immersed in it.
The point is, I nudged myself in the right direction of luck by signing with a temp agency that dealt with the entertainment business.
I nudged myself to luck by signing with the publisher that would give me opportunities as opposed to a bigger advance.
And that’s what I teach people.
More than how to write a verse or a chorus or whatever, it’s persistence.
Actually, the persistence part, I don’t know how to teach it. I know that I was inflicted with it.
I am a stubborn person who just, if I want something, I don’t give up.
I told you at the very beginning that I published a book with my photos of cats and the life lessons we could learn from them.
What I didn’t tell you, it’s a gift book. That was the 13th gift book that I wrote, and numbers one through 12 got rejected by the publisher.
So I was not willing to say, “Oh, well.”
I remember my father at one point saying to me, “You know, I can’t stand seeing you so poor in LA. How long do you give this nonsense until you get a real job?”
And I said to him, “You know, you’re right. I can’t do it forever. You’re right. I’m gonna give it 100 years, and if I have not been successful in 100 years, I’m going back to school.”
And that’s who I am.
It’s hard to make somebody feel that, and that’s not right for everybody.
I think there are people who need a greater level of security, a greater level of a guarantee. And for those people, there are jobs as accountants and lawyers and whatever. If what they need is a certain lifestyle, I don’t judge that. That’s great.
I think part of being in the music business, or any creative business, requires an ability to be in free fall and not know, will the next success happen? Or if it does, when will it happen?
And I have seen many people who act as if the success will never stop, and their successes have been way beyond mine.
They’re working day jobs now because they thought it would never end, and they spent like it would never end.
I think you have to accept, it’s like this is your mission. If you choose to accept it, then you’ve got to accept that very few careers last very, very long in the entertainment business.
Songwriters tend to have a shelf life, and I’m not sure. I guess it’s that tastes change. Music shifts and changes so drastically.
If you think about it, what did Shania Twain musically have in common with her predecessors, Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn? It was like night and day difference.
So the people who were Tammy and Loretta hit songwriters were not gonna be competing in a world where Shania Twain’s music sounded right.
Just like today, music has changed since that.
You have so many hip-hop rhythms that are infused in country music.
I’m just trying, while we’re talking, I’m brainstorming: why do songwriters who are incredible tend to have a limited shelf life?
I’ve heard it said that people naturally write the kind of music that they loved and listened to in high school, and that’s great.
But unless you graduated from high school six months ago, it’s not gonna fly.
So I tell people, “If you’re serious about writing for today’s market, you better immerse in the hit songs of today. Put them under your microscope. What are they doing melodically, lyrically? What kind of phrasing are they using? What’s the instrumentation?”
You’re not gonna be hearing fiddles and pedal steel guitar if it’s country these days.
And pop music, Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Bruno Mars, whoever we’re gonna talk about, Drake, they don’t sound like The Beatles. They don’t sound anything like the Motown songs.
Music changes, and I think we have to change with it or accept that it’s moved on without us.
57:00 Memoirs and Final Advice
Mike Zimmerlich: I completely agree with you. And I do want to mention, obviously you’ve taught so much about songwriting over the years, and you actually have written a number of books.
Jason Blume: Yes.
Mike Zimmerlich: I’m sure that we’ll have those links in the show notes for anybody who wants to...
Jason Blume: Great. Thanks.
Mike Zimmerlich: But I also understand that you have been working on a memoir for yourself as well. Again, you have such an amazing background.
Jason Blume: But you’re gonna be surprised, and readers are gonna be surprised. It’s actually two different memoirs.
The first one ends when I’m 23 years old. So it is not a look at my music business career. It’s a whole different story, and we don’t have time to get into it.
But it is an incredibly fascinating story, and it does include my origin story in a sense of growing up with my father playing mandolin and playing woodwinds, and my sister getting a record deal, things like that.
But that’s not really what the book is about.
Back to our topic of persistence, I don’t even want to admit how many years I spent rewriting this book, how many editors I hired, how many hundreds upon hundreds of pages I threw out.
When it finally came time to look for a literary agent for the book, I sent out more than 70 query letters before I got one yes.
So again, persistence, persistence.
Now, memoir number two that I’m writing right now is the whole look at the music business. Well, not the business, my journey.
And some of it’s not pretty, and some of it is very juicy. People will be very shocked.
But that’s been a lot of my focus the last few years.
Mike Zimmerlich: Well, I’m very much looking forward to it. Again, just an incredible journey.
I do want to start wrapping things up here, but I do have a couple of fun questions for you.
Jason Blume: Sure.
Mike Zimmerlich: So the first question I have for you is, what was the very first concert that you ever went to?
Jason Blume: The Who.
Mike Zimmerlich: A good one.
Jason Blume: Yeah. I was 15 years old, and I got to watch a guitar getting smashed onto the stage.
But I wanna tell you, growing up in Philadelphia, God, we had unbelievable concerts coming through there.
I’m not exaggerating when I tell you I probably saw every major act that came through in every genre.
I saw Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper. I saw Carole King and James Taylor, and Yes, and everybody, every superstar.
I worshiped Cat Stevens. Can’t count how many times I saw him. Joni Mitchell.
It was an amazing place to be.
I was in the audience when David Bowie recorded David Live at the Tower.
So my taste is really so much wider.
I’ll also add, I probably saw every major legendary jazz artist that there was. Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, all of them.
Mike Zimmerlich: That’s amazing.
Jason Blume: Yep.
Mike Zimmerlich: But The Who’s a good one. That’s a good first one.
Do you have a song that you really like that was not written by you?
Jason Blume: I’ll tell you the song that I revere. It’s “The Joke” by Brandi Carlile.
If people have not heard it, what I would urge you to do is Google the live at the Grammys version.
Her performance is just astounding. But the song, the writing of the song, to me, it exemplifies everything that songwriting can be in terms of depth, in terms of evoking emotion through story and melody.
Ugh. Check it out, people.
Mike Zimmerlich: I’ll have to definitely check it out once we’re done.
Okay, last question for you. If you were only able to give one piece of advice, what would that one piece of advice be?
Jason Blume: Don’t do it.
No, no, no. That’s not it.
Mike Zimmerlich: And not persistence either, because we covered that. So something else besides persistence.
Jason Blume: Really, I think the best advice that I can give is that while you are persisting, stay open to changing and to getting input.
“Okay, it’s not enough to persist. What do I need to do that’s different? What do I need to learn? What are the tools, the techniques that maybe I’m not using yet?”
So what I’m really saying is stay open to learning how to access what really matters to you, what’s in your heart, what’s in your soul, and then expressing it in a way that can reach millions of other hearts.
That’s the goal.
Good luck, and get lucky. There’s my second piece of advice.
Mike Zimmerlich: And get lucky. Make your luck too.
Jason Blume: Absolutely.
Mike Zimmerlich: Well, Jason, thank you so much again for being on the show. I really do appreciate it. It was such an honor talking with you.
Jason Blume: Well, thanks. It’s been fun.