Recording - March 2020 - 67

did soul music in Nashville. But he liked this
white guy that sang these pop songs, so he
signed me, and I'll be forever grateful for that.
Continued from page 65
and get the room. You know, at Capitol, the
echo chambers are famous. And United Audio
now will offer Capitol Chambers.
He's talking about live echo chambers. How many
of you guys know what a live echo chamber is?
Okay, quick history lesson. Back in the day, even
before they had EMT Plates, reverb was done in a
room that was basically built to the specifications
of an elevator shaft, with a sloped ceiling, very,
very smooth walls-usually like Italian plaster or
something-and they would put a speaker on the
floor and hang a microphone from the ceiling. If
you clapped your hands, you'd hear [Michael imitates the sound of reverb]. But to make the reverb
shorter, you had to throw moving blankets on the
floor, or lower the microphones closer to the
speakers, and you would bring that sound back in
console. But Capitol Studios in Hollywood has,
arguably, the last live chambers left anywhere in
the world, and they rent them out via high quality
audio lines. So you can actually use the Capitol
Chambers while working in other studios.
And we have a small one under my parking lot
in Nashville. It's 8-by-10. We did the very same
thing. We had a guy tune it, and it is the most
incredible little chamber. It's very short-about
1.6 seconds-but it's hauntingly beautiful. It
sounds great.
I can't wait to come visit!
How old were you when you wrote your first real
song?
Oh, goodness. Probably in my 20s. I came here
[to L.A.], and I wrote a song called "'Til It's
Time to Say Goodbye," and it made the top
charts just in L.A. You know, we had the Gavin
charts. You remember the Gavin charts? So I
was bubbling up on the Gavin charts, and I
made it to Billboard at 40, then that was it. That
was the sort of first successful commercial song.
And I ended up on the American Bandstand with
Natalie Cole singing it back in 1975. So that was
the first big song. I finally got something that
was memorable; it had a great melody to it.
But before that, I wrote a song when I was 19
called "God Made Woman for Man to Love."
And a guy in Nashville heard it, and he signed
me to my first record deal-Buddy Killen. So
Buddy Killen was a famous record producer in
Nashville. He was co-owner of Tree Publishing,
and he signed me to Tree. So I'm 19 years old; it
was a little shape of things to come. I didn't
know how big Tree was until I looked it up, and
I'm like, "Oh my."
Buddy was a maverick. He was amazing, doing
Joe Tex in Nashville back in the '70s. Nobody
66 RECORDING March 2020

I got to tell ya, I'm gonna make a little confession.
This is the first time I've heard Buddy's name in a
very long time. The phrase "independent A&R," I
stole that from Buddy Killen. I remember reading
it somewhere. He used the phrase I think in an
interview in Billboard. And I remember when I
started this company and my friend Rob Chiarelli
said to me, "Well, what is the company going to
do?" And I said, "Independent A&R." So thank you,
Buddy.
He was a rule-breaker. He broke all the rules. I
asked him at the time, "Should I move down
here and write with these guys?" And he goes,
"No, you don't want to write with these guys;
you're doing fine."
It's a tough town. You know, the level of craft in
Nashville is so high. I don't know if this is exactly
true, but Ralph Murphy used to say to me, "At any
moment in time, there are about 9,000 songwriters living in Nashville that had a charted hit." So
the competition is insanely high, and nowadays
you have got to be in a camp, which is pretty true
for pop music...
And there are a lot of gatekeepers-you guys
should know. Like, I want to get a song to Ras-

"Nashville; it's the only town where
you can die of encouragement."
-Jonathan Cain
cal Flatts. Well, Rascal Flatts will never hear
your song; it gets heard by a gatekeeper. And if
the gatekeeper doesn't think it's worthy, then it
never gets heard by Rascal Flatts.
For example, we were trying to get "Faithfully"
to Garth Brooks, so I cut this great countrywestern version of "Faithfully." With no piano,
it was all acoustic, with fiddle and mandolin.
And I found this guy that sounded just like him,
and I thought, "This is gonna be a win." But he
had it on hold, and he recorded a lot of other
crazy songs. I couldn't figure out why he wouldn't sing that, because I knew he liked Journey.
So it's hard-even when you're Jonathan Cain.
Really, I got turned down at Sony. I wanted a
publishing company to pitch to, and they had
just bought EMI. They said, "We have 40 writers we don't know what to do with, and we can't
sign you." I went, "OK, what did they write?"
Nashville; it's the only town where you can die
of encouragement. But I'm still here. And I built
a studio in spite of it. So I thought, "I'm gonna
build my studio, and they are gonna come to
me. If they want to play this way..." Because
that's what I love. So I left my print there, you
know, and I have a place where I can go and
make my music and I don't have to answer to

Jonathan Cain proudly holds up his Lifetime Achievement
Award at the TAXI's Road Rally, while Michael Laskow
congratulates him.

anybody. So they're comin' to my place, goin',
"Wow, Jonathan had a pretty good idea here."
I started listening to the file of songs you sent to
me the day you sent them, then I finished the rest
of them the next day. Every single song just
wreaks of craft. I mean, you are a craft person.
Back in the day-in the '70s and '80s-it's almost
like the bar wasn't as high. Incredible songs came
out of that era, don't get me wrong, but the bar
wasn't that high. The gatekeepers weren't as
strict, and stuff had more of a chance than it does
today.
But you could still get a cassette heard by somebody. I mean, Mariah Carey got
discovered-somebody gave her cassette to the
right person. Steve Perry was the cassette that
came to our manager through a pot dealer. He
delivered his bag of weed, and there was a cassette in the bag. It was Steve Perry. I'm not
making this up. [laughter] So our manager put
it on and his mouth and jaw dropped and he
said, "Well, that's the voice I'm looking for." So
he plays it for the guys in the band and they're
like, "Ehhh, we're not feelin' it. It sounds like a
girl." Our manager Herbie brought Steve to
Neal's hotel, and he said, "Neal, I'm sending up
Steve Perry; you write a song with him." So they
went up there, an hour later they came down
with a song called "Lights." And then Neal said,
"You know what, Herbie? He's pretty cool; I
think we should check him out, man." Funny
story.
They say the best way to get better writing songs
is to simply write more of them, and that's great
advice. But I've known hundreds of songwriters
who have been writing for decades, and yet they
never seem to get better, because they keep
repeating the same mistakes. Do you have any
sage advice for these folks that might feel stuck in
that rut where it's like, "You know, I keep cranking
it out, but it just doesn't get better." How did you
get better? How did you hone that craft?
I studied the songs. I study them, and I look at
opening lines. I kinda take songs apart, early on
especially. Like when Elton first came out and I
was listening to "Your Song," I thought, "That's
the song I should've written right there." But
Bernie's lyrics would go from one scene to the
next. It's almost like having an open house; you
are staging an open house and you're asking the
Continued on page 69

Recording - March 2020

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