Tin Pan South celebrates country music’s songwriters

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Nashville, Tennessee – April 19, 2013 – Earlier we reported about the opening of the Tin Pan South songwriters festival in downtown Nashville. A festival that celebrated music’s songwriters, the people behind all the hit songs you hear on the radio. And yes, artists like Jake Owen and Charles Kelley, have written or co-written songs but there are a lot of artists that don’t and this festival puts the spot light on the people that perfectly manage to set a mood, describe an emotion and tell that story we all love to sing along with. Many of which you won’t know the name but when they start playing one of their songs you instantly recognize it and wonder why you never knew.

One of those names is, 68 year old, J.D. Souther. Who? You’ll ask…

Well, I will bet you that you’ll know many of his incredible songs because this man has written or co-written almost every Eagles songs! Think of songs like “New Kid In Town”, “Heartache Tonight”, “Victim Of Love”, “Best Of My Love” and “Sad Café”.
However, he also wrote Linda Ronstadt’s “Faithless Love”, “Simple Man, «Simple Dream” and “Prisoner In Disguise” and the Dixie Chick’s “I’ll Take Care Of You”.

About two of these songs song J.D. jokes:
‘One of my songs, “I’ll Take Care of you”, was recorded by the Dixie Chicks. I was in Cuba with a bunch of songwriters in 1998. With the permission of the ministry of education we got a cultural permit to take 20 songwriters from America to Cuba to write with 20 Cuban songwriters. It was a great trip with a really strange bunch of people. But when I came back I found a plaque in my house that said that the Dixie Chicks sold 12 million records! So no disrespect for the Eagles but they immediately became my favourite singing group. Now after the last Eagles album I’m not sure’.

‘People always ask me what my favourite song is. And I give them a standard answer that they’re all special to me. So I took a moment and someone else said: “Simple Man, Simple Dream” (a song later recorded by Linda Ronstadt) because it’s the shortest!’

You can have a look at two live video from J.D. Souther’s Tin Pan South performance below.

Kristian Bush, the male part of country music duo Sugerland, is also a well know writer. He took the stage and told the audience about their first single and how he and Jennifer Nettles got together to write it:

‘I never co-wrote before but Jennifer and I sat down and I said “I got this idea for a band. Here’s the name of the band and here’s a couple of songs” and she goes “Oh”. So we sat down and tried to figure out what we had in common and found that we spend most of our lives wanting to be musicians. It’s a terribly unlikely job. It’s lonely and you get paid nothing. And the chance you’re gonna make it are probably non existent. But we sat across from each other co-writing, which to me felt like we needed a white board….so I thought half the song was gonna be upside down because we would both be writing at the same time….Yeah, that was back then. But what we had in common was that our parents had to put up with that crazy dream of ours all the time so we wrote “Baby Girl” that day and it became out first song ever played on the radio.

The funniest song Kristian ever co-wrote, with Jeff Cohne (who wrote songs like “Postcard From Paris” – The Band Perry and “Giddy On Up – Laura Bell Bundy) is “Flip Flops” of which you can also see a video below.

Other artists that stood out were:
Kristen Kelly – She’s a new artist. Go check out “He Loves To Make Me Cry”, it’ll give you chills!

Dave Barns – Writer of Blake Shelton’s “God Gave Me You”

Striking Matches – A young male/female duo that’s written songs for the TV hit series ‘Nashville’. But what really impressed the audience was their guitar playing. Amazing! You can see a video of them below as well.

Ashley Monroe – People got to know Ashley as part of Pistol Annies, Miranda Lambert’s group, but Ashley can definitely hold her own. She co-wrote «Flat on the Floor» which was recorded by Carrie Underwood, as well as Jason Aldean’s 2009 single, «The Truth» and Miranda Lambert’s 2011 single “Heart Like Mine”. She released album ‘Like A Rose’ on March 5th and made sure the audience got to hear some of it live. You can see her live performance of “Two Weeks Late” below.
When asked about her upcoming wedding to John Danks, starting pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, she proudly showed me her beautiful wedding ring and mentioned that it had both the birthstones of her mom and dad incorporated in it. She also said that Miranda has taken over as wedding planner. So that will be a lovely wedding and great party.