A Thank-you Note to Mark Burnett

Dear Mr. Burnett,

I hope you and your family enjoyed a lovely Thanksgiving.  I thought you’d like to know that at our Thanksgiving table, The Voice was the subject of a great after-dinner conversation.  As we shared our enthusiasm for the talent that remains, we couldn’t help but add our dismay about those who had left the competition. For a few minutes, we could put ourselves in the coaches’ chairs. 

So this open letter is first and foremost a big thank you for bringing us The Voice.  Not only are you breathing new life into television’s great musical/variety tradition, you are doing it in an enormously positive way.  As I think you mentioned in your interview with Oprah Winfrey, the difference with The Voice is that contestants are there not to be judged, but to be supported.  The distinction you’ve offered between coaching and judging is an enormous one, and it’s a great model.

One small request, however, and it means extending the embrace of The Voice just a bit. I think you would be doing an enormous service for music education – especially for your younger singers and audience members – if you could somehow include a credit to the songwriters. 

I was thrilled to see your recent announcement about signing Ryan Tedder as a producer and songwriter for The Voice, so I know you’re aware of the enormous contribution songwriters make.  I’ve written a few things (including some posts you’ll find at the right) about how the world of digital music downloads has minimized the contributions of songwriters simply due to the fact that they aren’t being credited routinely.  Think back to the labels that existed on LPs or cassette just 20 years ago, and CD inserts after that which always included the names of songwriters.  There is no standard for crediting on downloaded music (even from The Voice, I’m sorry to say).  As a result, consumers – and even music professionals like your coaches – too frequently refer to a song as ‘belonging’ to the artist.

While my earlier posts can add some detail, I’ll give you just a few recent examples that spun my head around. A few weeks ago, Matthew Schuler sang Hallelujah written by Leonard Cohen, but which Christina identified as ‘Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah’.  Yes, Jeff Buckley did have a bit hit with the song, but over 300 artists have recorded Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, and crediting it to Mr. Buckley is actually misleading the viewers.

My other example is a bit closer to home for me, since in my early years in music publishing, I was with the company that published Harry Nilsson’s songs.  Yes, Without You is strongly identified with Harry Nilsson, as it should be.  But it’s the record that is Harry Nilsson’s Without You, not the song.  In that context, you could also describe it as Mariah Carey’s Without You – or any of the 150+ other artists who have also recorded it.  But the song belongs to Pete Ham and Tom Evans of the group Badfinger, who first recorded it in 1970.  (Trust me, it will still a sore point with the management of the publishing company I worked for that Harry Nilsson’s biggest hit was for a song he didn’t write.)

I realize it may be hard for your coaches to get over the habit of referring to songs by the recording artist. (Even the recent song list graphics posted to Twitter and Facebook by The Voice credit only the artists who recorded the songs.) But I think you could do a huge service to music education by adding a simple Chiron credit to the writers. I think your editors currently put the song title on the screen when you’re transitioning from the rehearsal/coaching footage to the performance.  Adding the name of the songwriter there would be a huge step in the right direction. 

I’ll be looking forward to these closing weeks of The Voice, and I hope you realize that you’re adding a wonderful element to our holiday season.  Many thanks to you and your colleague for that!

All the best to you,

Jeanne McCafferty

Jeanne McCafferty is an editor, writer and book designer.  

You can see samples of her work and learn how to contact her at www.jeannemccafferty.com.  
She is on Twitter @IrishCabrini.

Back on the Case: The Voice and Songwriters

I’ve kept quiet for a few months now about how the coaches on The Voice – and their team members – sloppily and incorrectly attribute a song’s ‘ownership’ to the artists best known for performing it.  (You can take a look at the blog posts of May 10 and June 14 to read my earlier rants on this topic.) 

Once more, I have to say that Blake Shelton is the most shocking in this regard, being a Nashville artist.  Nashville has long been known for placing songwriters and good songwriting at the center of its music business, so his crediting only Kelly Clarkson and Jason Aldean, the artists who had the hit on the song Don’t You Wanna Stay, was a bit shocking to me.  Yes, Clarkson and Aldean performed it, and really well, but it was written by Andy Gibson, Paul Jenkins, and Jason Sellers.

But what got me off my duff to compile the lists below was the reference to I Wish It Would Rain as only ‘by The Temptations’ and a later reference to contestant Preston Pohl’s tone as being so close to David Ruffin.  The song was written by Roger Penzabene, a Motown staff writer, and Motown’s songwriting team of Barrett Strong and Norman Whitfield.  Lots of folks acknowledge Holland-Dozier-Holland as Motown songwriters, but there were others.

The earlier posts I referred to mention the problem that songwriters have today, given that downloaded music is the dominant sales point: there’s no consistent place for songwriters’ credits to appear.  Some talented folks aren’t getting the recognition they deserve.  My suggestion was for The Voice to add a “Written by” line to the Chiron of the song title that appears at the beginning of a contestant’s performance.  That would be a big step forward in acknowledging that these writers are where the music begins.  

So, here are the credits for the last two rounds of The Voice, the most recent first.  I’ve organized it by song title, then by the songwriters, and then indicated who performed it on The Voice.  Apologies in advance for any typos in the names.

Knockout Rounds

Song	Songwriters	Performed on The Voice by
Already Gone	Kelly Clarkson, Ryan Tedder	Grey
Cosmic Love	Florence Welch and Isabella Summers	Mathew Schuler
Don’t Know Why	Jesse Harris	Stephanie Ann Johnson
Genie in a Bottle	David Frank, Steve Kipner, Pamela Sheyne	Nic Hawke
Hard to Handle	Otis Redding, Al Bell, Allen Jones	Ray Boudreaux
I’ll Be	Edwin McCain	Austin Jenckes
Last Name	Luke Laird, Hillary Lindsey, Carrie Underwood	Shelbie Z
Let Her Go	Mike Rosenberg	Cole Vosbury
Living for the City	Stevie Wonder	Josh Logan
Mamma Knows Best	Jessica Cornish, Ashton Thomas	Amber Nicole
More Than a Feeling	Tom Scholz	James Wolpert
No One	Alicia Keys, Kerry Brothers, Jr., George M. Harry	Tamara Chaunice
No Woman, No Cry	Vincent Ford (credited to)	Preston Pohl
Stompa	Serena Ryder, Jerrod Bettis	Jacquie Lee
Stronger	Jörgen Elofsson,  David Gamson, Greg Kurstin, Ali Tamposi	Tessanne Chin
The Way I Am	Ingrid Michaelson	Caroline Pennell
We Can Work It Out	John Lennon, Paul McCartney	Jonny Gray
When I Was Your Man	Bruno Mars, Philip Lawrence, Moe Faisal, Ari Levine, Andrew Wyatt	Will Champlin
You Oughta Know	Alanis Morissette, Glen Ballard	Kat Robichaud
You’re No Good	lint Ballard, Jr.	Olivia Henken

Battle Rounds

Song	Songwriters	Performed on The Voice by
As Long as You Love Me	Sean Anderson, Justin Bieber	Caroline Pennell
Counting Stars	Ryan Tedder	James Irwin
Domino	Jessica Cornish, Lukasz Gottwalk, Claude Kelly, Max Martin, Henry Walter	Grey
Don’t You Wanna Stay	Andy Gibson, Paul Jenkins, Jason Sellers	Shelbie Z
Done	Neil Perry, Reid Perry, John Davidson, Jacob Bryant	Olivia Henken
Harder to Breathe	Adam Levine, Jesse Carmichael	Josh Logan
House of the Rising Sun	Traditional	Jacquie Lee
I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing	Diane Warren	Kat Robichaud
I Wish It Would Rain	Roger Penzabene, Barrett Strong, Norman Whitfield	Preston Pohl
Listen	Henry Krieger, Scott Cutler, Anne Preven, Beyoncé Knowles	Amber Nicole
My Song Know What You Did in the Dark	Patrick Stump, Pete Wentz, Joe Trohman, Andy Hurley, Butch Walker, and John Hill	Mathew Schuler
Next to Me	Emeli Sande, Hugo Chegwin, Harry Craze, Anup Paul	Tessanne Chin
Not Ready to Make Nice	Martie Maguire, Natalie Maines, Emily Robison, Dan Wilson	Destinee Quinn
Radioactive	Ben McKee, Dan Platzman, Dan Reynolds, Wayne Sermon, Alexander Grant, Josh Mosser	James Wolpert
Refugee	Mike Campbell and Tom Petty	Jonny Gray
Some Kind of Wonderful	Gerry Goffin and Carol King	Ray Boudreaux
The Best I’ve Ever Had	Gavin DeGraw and Martin Johnson	George Horga Jr.
To Love Somebody	Barry Gibb and Robin Gibb	Austin Jenckes

In Praise of a WORKING Writer

By almost any writer’s standards, Terry Teachout is having a very good year. 

To wit, in reverse order: Duke, his biography of Duke Ellington, was published October 17^th to generally great reviews.  The previous week, on October 11^th, The King’s Man, his third collaboration with composer Paul Moravec, premiered at the Kentucky Opera in Louisville. On September 18^th, Duke was included on the non-fiction long list for the National Book Award, a month before its official pub date. 

A sequence of events like this is what many a writer’s dreams are made of. This past spring wasn’t too shabby, either, with Satchmo at the Waldorf, the stage adaptation of his bio on Louis Armstrong, garnering two nominations and one win (for the lead actor) at the Connecticut Theatre Awards. And mind you, this was all produced in the midst of the deadlines required by his ‘day job’ as a critic.

Now, to be clear, I do not actually know Mr. Teachout, but I have known of him for quite some time. He first beeped onto my radar screen in the mid-90s when I was directing the marketing and press activities involved in introducing Berlin Classics, a then-new German classical label, to the American audience.  Teachout was on my monthly press and radio list, which numbered a few hundred at that time. (I wince to think of how few of those classical-format radio stations survive and how few of those press contacts are with publications that still feature professional – or, indeed, any – arts criticism.)

When my days with the label were over, I would occasionally see Teachout’s distinctive name pop up here and there, but he was off my radar until I read his lovely tribute to the irascible and charming lyricist Gene Lees (best known for Yesterday I Heard the Rain and Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars), whom I’d known from one my first jobs in music publishing. Reading his column on Lee’s passing in the spring of 2010, I learned Teachout had made quite a leap and was now the drama critic for The Wall Street Journal.  Not long after that, I joined Twitter and his was one of the first accounts I followed. That’s when my real awareness of and admiration for him as a writer began. 

Over the course of 2011, I noticed the demanding travel schedule he kept, and then began to get a handle on the extra-curricular work he was producing.  That year we Twitter followers read of the premiere of his second opera, Danse Russe, and his work on adapting to theatrical form his acclaimed 2009 book Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, which would become Satchmo at the Waldorf. And at some point he announced that the Ellington biography was his next book.

In the spring of 2012, he shared on Twitter his elation at receiving a MacDowell Colony residency for the coming summer. (That was a happy note in an otherwise difficult spring, marked by the death of his beloved mother after a months-long illness.) We followers were able to track the breakthroughs he achieved on Duke at MacDowell, and when he returned to his real-life schedule, we were witness to his triumph at getting to the final draft later in the year, his delivery of the manuscript, his relief when his editor accepted it, his (muted) appreciation for the copy editor’s notes, and then, earlier this year, his unvarnished appreciation for the cover design and the work of the book designer. Somewhere in that mix, he also worked on the revision of the Satchmo play, which opened at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre in October, 2012.

This body of worked produced over a few years is substantial enough, but it becomes utterly astonishing when you realize that he has accomplished all this while carrying a work load that would have most people curled into a fetal position.  Teachout is perhaps the only drama critic in America who considers the entire country his beat, so he is not only covering New York theatre, but Chicago, Boston, Washington, Los Angeles and regional theatres across the country.  In addition to his reviews, he also writes a weekly column for the WSJ, blogs regularly at his Arts Journal post, and keeps his hand in the music world with liner notes on the side.

Now, to the uninformed eye, a critic’s job seems like a walk in the park.  You get to watch/listen to stuff you like – for free! –and then all you have to do is write about it.  Having known a number of critics over the years (mostly music critics, of course, but a few film critics, an art critic, and even a television critic), I can tell you that whole for free! thing goes out the window when you see the foot-high pile of discs that comprise the assignment due tomorrow, or the slumped shoulders of a film critic heading off to his third film in two days, or a music critic trying to figure out how to cover three far-flung performances of a weekend. 

The fact that Mr. Teachout has been able to meet his deadlines and achieve all that he has with his own books and libretti is admirable enough, but doing it with the kind of soul-sapping travel schedule he maintains puts him in the ranks of cultural super-heroes as far as I’m concerned.

Amidst all this, he has done an enormous service to writers by sharing on Twitter the joy of writing on those days when the words and ideas just flow – sometimes like Niagara Falls, sometimes like a burbling creek – the days we all dream of.  But he’s also shared the frustration of those days when the words just don’t come. No matter how far you open the spigot, there’s not a drop. But the most indispensable thing I have learned from Mr. Teachout, especially when he tweets about his to-do list or the mountain of due dates he is facing of a week, is this: get the butt in the chair.  

In fact, that’s the greatest lesson writers can take away from any experienced writer:  Apply generous amounts of butt glue when necessary, but get the butt in the chair. 

I’ll be reading Duke later this week, or maybe early next. It’ll be my reward for meeting one of my own editing due dates. And when I go out to buy it, I’m also going to stop by my local art supply store to see how much they charge for the big containers of butt glue, because I’m going to need a lot in the coming weeks.  And I think I’ll write on the top of the container – in big Magic Marker letters – Teachout Success Formula. 

Thanks for the inspiration, Mr. T.

 Jeanne McCafferty is an editor, writer and book designer.  

You can see samples of her work and learn how to contact her at www.jeannemccafferty.com.  
She is on Twitter @IrishCabrini.