Wow, is this still going on? Where are we?

Polly, Jim, Bill, what you have generally in the studios in Nashville is that you are working with four or five producers at the same time. If you have a guitarist, bassist,keyboardist and drummers, who ALSO produce demos, and sometimes hit records, you have several producers that bring that certain something to each of their own parts and make suggestions to other parts, usually based upon hit records they have recently played on.

On Wendsday of last week we had a session with Danny Parks, our usual guitar player. He had just come from a session with Ronnie Dunn, who has just left his group Brooks and Dunn for his solo career. So you have some pretty high level people.

Haze is from that type of background. And he and Polly are somewhat isolated in their area so I understand where they come from. In some cases as Jim mentions, we actually have very little to work with.We get someone narrating a lyric into a tape recorder and we have to kind of make up a melody to go with it. At times they don't send anything except a copy of another song and ask us to "do something like that."

So should some of the studios get co-writers credit? In theory yes. In practicality, no. They are involved in the recording and it is simply not asked for. And to be totally honest, a lot of these songs are not exactly anything you want your name on.

But if you are up front with the client and they understand all the options, they can find their own melody or let a pro do it for them, I don't see the problem. Like everything in music, it all comes down to communication.

MAB