Recording - March 2018 - 65

Whatever. Does he get a third for that?
No. [laughter]
Continued from page 62
who represents 12 or 15 other writers and
maybe gets a call to pitch songs, and they're not
gonna take one song from all of his 15 or 20
writers. So who gets the song pitched-and
they never tell you what songs are going in the
meeting? And Paul said, "Welcome to the club.
You are your own best publisher." And I said,
"What?" And he said, "You'll always be your
own best publisher."
Now, this is going back 20, 25 years ago. He
said that no one has a piece of his heart in that
song that you've created like you do. A
publisher might love it, but at the end of the
day, he is really serving as an agent for many
songs. You're the only one that's ever gonna
truly believe, or go back in your catalog over the
years-maybe 10 years after you've written

Which, by the way, I really want to stress the point
that this book is as educational as it is entertaining, I made a note about that in my notes that; as
you read this book you're learning stuff that you
won't find in any textbook from some professor.
You're getting stuff like that that is experiential
from somebody who has been in the trenches.
I've got to say one thing. I don't know if you all
know who Don Passman is. He is arguable the
most powerful attorney in the music business.
And Don and I started together; he did my first
deal when he was just out of law school. Unfortunately, he was representing the publisher. We
have been friends forever. In fact, he wrote a

very nice testimonial for the book, and he called
me and loved the book. He said, "It's so you,
and it so honest." And I said, "Well, why did
you have to screw me so bad on that first deal?"
We still joke about that.
He's a great guy. I think everybody's read
Passman's book, right?
He literally wrote the book on this business of
music, which I think is in its ninth printing
now.
Unbelievable. And he's a true gentleman...
Man, all I can say is thank you, Steve and congratulations. What a great career! What a great guy!
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Steve Dorff! [applause]

"One of my things on my musical
bucket list is to score a James Bond
movie."
something, a song that you truly believe in-
and try to still make that happen. No publisher
is gonna go back 10 years and pick an obscure
song out of your catalog and say, "Oh, this is a
great song for Garth Brooks."
So I took that to heart, and it was a real valuable lesson. It's very true, because I've
experienced it. I've gone back over my catalog,
and I still do, and I pick songs that for some reason or another fell through the cracks and
didn't find a home, but I believe in them, and
years later I had success with some.
It sounds like from reading the book that the vast
majority of the cuts that you've had were happy
accidents, either caused because you were in the
right place, right time or because of previous
things that happened in your life. Or relationships
where you were your own best advocate.
Yeah, your own best advocate is right. It's like
when you go to a doctor and you have an ache
or a pain and they can't find anything, you
know what's going on. And I know what's going
on with my songs; I know the ones I truly
believe in. And it's happened for me over and
over. I just had a Top 10 record with Garth
Brooks on a 16-year-old song that I basically
didn't even remember that I wrote when I got
the phone call. The guy I wrote it with called me
up and said, "Hey, Garth's cutting 'Baby, Let's
Lay Down and Dance.'" And I said, "What's
that?" [laughter] He said, "You wrote it with
me." I said, "Really? Oh, I thought it was 'Lay
Down and Dance.'" He said, "Yeah, Garth wants
to call it 'Baby, Let's Lay Down and Dance.'" I
said, "Great."
65

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - March 2018