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STRATEGY FOR THE DAY: be whimsical on the off-beats

I have another great bunch of people in my songwriting class. Why am I so lucky??? The gods must be pleased. Music styles range from folk to punk-rock, experience ranges from just starting out to very accomplished. I even have an attorney who is representing artists and wants to know more about songwriting so he can judge the quality of prospective clients' work! What a concept. (He also writes himself and has a strong sense of melody. There's hope for the music business yet. Now if we could just teach a couple of accountants the rudiments of lyric writing...)

A group of students from my previous class are trying to work out a way of continuing on together. I'm really pleased about it because this is exactly the kind of small, supportive group I pushed for when I was president of Los Angeles Women In Music. I created a program called Goal-Setting Groups. These were groups of 4 or 5 mostly songwriters who met once a month to give support and feedback, setting short-term goals for which they were responsible to the group. For example, if you said you were going to finish a song by the next meeting and you didn't, then there was a discussion about what was getting in your way, what you could do to get past that and achieve your goal. We had two very successful groups. I know how helpful these can be having been part of one myself called Wine, Women, and Song. It was also occasionally referred to as Women Whining About Song but sometimes whining can help, too! We met once a month for several years. For all I know it may still be going. I had to drop out when I started work at Rhino Records and got too busy to do anything other than my job. The music business in Los Angeles is very cold, uncaring, competitive, and solitary. A group like this can go a long way toward helping an artist survive.

It's been unbelievably hot here and fire season has started already. Even at the beach, everything is baked dry. Can't wait for the fog to roll in again.

Copyright 2004 Robin Frederick. All rights reserved.