"There's thinkers and feelers in songwriting," says Richard Leigh, Grammy Award-winning songwriter, visiting the Louisville NSAI Seminar in June. He went on to explain, using my song as a guinea pig: "The lines in the first verse are thinking lines and feeling lines are in the chorus."
It brought home to me something I had overlooked in the verses: an awareness of feeling throughout the song. He further said that "feeling lines come from the heart and thinking lines come from the mind." He usually tries to slip in a feeling line in between thinking lines, he said.
Since Richard writes songs like "Somewhere In My Broken Heart," maybe he's onto something.
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Aretha Franklin wanted it, Rodney Dangerfield never got it and Tanya Tucker has been looking for it for 20 years. Respect doesn't always come easy. Tanya was even asked, early on, to go home and have babies in lieu of a singing career. (She took time out to have a second baby last year.) Music City News featured her in June, she co-hosted the 26th Annual TNN Music City News Country Awards with Alan Jackson and she was the 1992 CMA Female Artist of the Year. Not a bad year for someone who has been nominated many times, but missed out on the take-home prize.
Hanging in there and a lot of perseverance, finally paid off for Tanya and her fans.