Lessons from a songstress in waiting

By Michael Corcoran - Austin American Statesman Staff

She paid her dues. Now she'll teach you how to market tunes.

When Sandy Knox tells her Saturday morning songwriting class at the University of Texas about the virtue of patience, she illustrates it with a story from her own experience. It was 1982 when she went to the Houston apartment of Billy Stritch to write a duet for Stritch's two female singers, Sharon Montgomery and Rebecca Plant. The session yielded a song both were proud of, and the cabaret trio of Montgomery, Plant & Stritch started wowing crowds with the vocal standoff between two women in love with the same man.

"Does He Love You" would go on to become a huge No. 1 hit for Reba McEntire (with Linda Davis), but not until 11 years after it was written. In the song's downtime, Barbara Mandrell put it on hold, but then had a serious car accident that put her career on hold. Then, Stritch's late '80s/early '90s girlfriend Liza Minnelli had designs on the song, but couldn't find the right partner. Also, there was the night Tony Bennett heard "Does He Love You" and asked Stritch if he could make it masculine enough for a Bennett-Sinatra duet.

"There were just so many false starts with that song that I forgot about it for a while," said Knox, a 41-year-old native Texan who moved to Austin in early '99 after 15 years in Nashville. "I always say that 'if you write from your heart, the song will find a home,' but they don't tell you when."

The music ladder

Before the Reba blockbuster gave her financial security, Knox's life as a songwriter was of the struggling variety. During her first couple of years in Nashville. She worked at cosmetic counters, cleaned houses and waited tables while the Music City hierarchy passed on her pitches. Her first industry job was as a receptionist at MCA, but by 1990 she had worked her way up to being a staff writer for Blue Water Publishing. For three years, she lived off a $1,000-a-month advance against future royalties.

It's that long and winding road (now there's an idea for a song) that Knox maps out at her five week professional songwriting course that, for $52, teaches tune structure, song-plugging terms and techniques, networking with other writers, tips on making demo tapes and, most importantly, how to turn personal experiences into musical compositions.

Knox - who specializes in lyrics, while a co-writer usually comes up with the music - said the best material comes from experience, and holds up a painful example: "She Thinks His Name Is John," a song with an AIDS theme, Thinking of her brother, who died of AIDS in 1984 after a blood transfusion, Knox scribbled out 16 pages of lyrics and eventually whittled it down to a 3 1/2 minute pop number. McEntire's recording of the song peaked at No. 15 on the Billboard country singles charts, which was not bad for a tune Knox said was the exact opposite of the anatomy of a hit record. "It's too slow, the girl dies, and the subject matter is one that a lot of people aren't comfortable with."

Flush with fate

Knox always kicks off her course by spending the first class answering questions and talking casually about her life and the business of songwriting. She tells how her first Nashville connection came because her neighbor knew someone who knew Roger Sovine, then of legendary Tree Publishing. It was August of '83 and Knox had just moved to Nashville, but there was a phone company strike, and it would be eight weeks before she got phone service. So she called Sovine from the ladies' room at a nearby restaurant and left a message that she would be sending demos. Since she didn't have a phone number, she had to follow up two weeks later from the same restroom. There were toilets flushing in the background when Sovine got on the line with a warm greeting. "I swear I thought the receptionist told him 'Tammy Wynette's on line one' and he picked up line two by mistake," she said. Sovine asked Knox to have lunch with him and noted producer Tom Collins. "Roger listened to my demos and told me, 'well, you've got something, but you're not quite there yet.'

"I tell my students that if they have a problem with rejection they might not want to think of songwriting as a career. The first few years all you hear is how this song's not right or how it needs a little more of this or that, and you can't take it personal," she said. "It's really hard because your songs are personal."

Ask a writer to name his or her favorite composition, and they'll usually say they can't; it would be like naming their favorite child. For more than half her life Knox has given birth to many of those musical kids, but in recent years it's been the biological clock, not the metronome, which has ticked most prominently in her life.

"I've been so career-oriented, so determined to become a successful songwriter that I just woke up one day and wondered what happened to my life," Knox said. "I've never been married, never had kids, that I know of, and there aren't a whole lotta prospects out there.