Chapter 16

Creating Goals and Meeting Deadlines

In This Chapter

Setting goals for the featherweight, middleweight, and heavyweight songwriters

Dealing with pressure and deadlines — head on

Practicing your talents as a goal setter

The business of songwriting is, like so many other businesses, a matter of being at the right place at the right time with the right song. The true definition of “luck” is when opportunity meets preparation. This chapter is about making a habit of “getting lucky” by doing the work and being prepared — creating goals for yourself, achieving goals set for you by others, and ultimately meeting deadlines overall.

Creating Goals

When athletes use the word goal, they’re referring to their trajectory reaching its intended target. Their score depends upon an achievement toward a goal in which effort is directed. In other words, if you know where you’re going and put in the effort towards that purpose, you’ll have a better chance of meeting your targeted goals. If you’ve not yet completed a song but have that burning desire to be a songwriter, think ahead and dream up or imagine what you’d like to accomplish — then set it as a goal.

Getting set to write for the first time

Put together an action plan — some kind of goal-oriented schedule that you hold yourself to. Your individual action plan will depend on your personal goals, but the process is an important step in getting started as a songwriter. A beginner’s action plan might look something like Figure 16-1.

Put a timeline on your imagination. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t meet every goal on time. A schedule like the one shown in Figure 16-1 is meant to be a creative tool, not a pressure cooker.

Even as a beginning songwriter, I was very goal-driven. Although I hadn’t yet learned the value of writing down goals in any kind of action plan, I’d always set my sights on a particular target. I told my seventh-grade class that I’d written a song before I had actually written it. Although I don’t recommend this technique, it was perhaps my way of creating an unmovable goal for myself — if I didn’t produce, I’d have been the laughingstock of Piper Elementary! Even though I didn’t know the first thing about writing a song, I followed my instincts and used my rudimentary guitar skills to come up with “Hully Gully Bay” (sample lyric, “Where the sea is choppy and the shore is rocky and those hully gully sea gulls are wingin’ our way”). The point is, I created a goal for myself and, through necessity, wrote a song.

—Jim Peterik, performer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist for both Ides of March and Survivor, plus writer of hits for .38 Special, Sammy Hagar, and others

Venturing out with your songs

If you’re past the stage of figuring out the how-to’s of songwriting, you’ve written or co-written several or more songs, and you’d like to get to the next step in your career, goals become even more important. Your next action plan might look something like Figure 16-2.

It’s not enough to merely write out an action plan. Try to read it over weekly (or daily) to monitor your progress. Keep the plan in front of you at all times to keep track of the goals achieved and remind you of those that are still hanging out in the ethers.

For me, goals were always a big motivational tool — they were not always that cosmic. My first goal was to be popular with the opposite sex (music has a way of transcending social standing and physical appearance). My further goal was to make enough money with my passion of songwriting to afford a brand new Datsun 240Z. Of course, trying to enhance the world through creating great music can be the ultimate goal of any songwriter, but never underestimate the power of material goals in tandem.

—Jim Peterik, writer of 18 Billboard Top 10 hits

Setting goals as a pro

If your songwriting career is finally up and running, you can most likely check off the items on the following list:

You’ve just signed a nice co-publishing deal.

Your home demo studio is up and running (you’ve even paid back your brother the money he lent you for the equipment and returned his guitar after buying a better one).

You have an entertainment attorney you’re happy with to negotiate any deals that come along and answer your legal questions.

You even have a song on the debut album of a brand-new artist.

You have a hold (a hold is when a label is interested enough in your song to ask you to stop shopping your song until they’ve decided if they’ll be recording it or not) with a time limit of one or two months imposed (sometimes the hold is even put in writing and can be from another label on a brand-new song of yours).

Because you’re on your way to being a big-time songwriter, you may figure that setting goals is a thing of the past. Not so fast! Goals will now become more important than ever. Figure 16-3 shows what the action plan of an established songwriter might look like.

I have amassed a huge catalogue of songs through the years, and one goal that I’ve set before myself is creating a master computer file of all the songs I’ve written and all the vital info for each one. It’ll be something I can refer to when I get a call from someone looking for a particular kind of song. My major goal is to continue writing the best songs I can, but my secondary goal is organizing my back catalogue so that it’s more easily accessible — because songs don’t do anyone any good sitting on a shelf!

—Jim Peterik, writer of 18 Billboard Top 10 hits

All the goals you set before yourself in the featherweight and middleweight phases of your songwriting journey have paved the way to even higher goals. Remind yourself every day of the reasons you got into songwriting in the first place and continually set new goals for achieving all the success you desire — and deserve.

If you’re the sensitive type who’s prone to getting easily discouraged or disappointed in yourself, try not to set your goals unrealistically high. Still dream, but keep your visions in the realm of possibility to avoid unnecessary discouragement. However, there’s something to be said about not putting limitations on your own success. Reach for the stars in strength, if you so desire, and try to let the disappointments just roll off your back.

Meeting Deadlines

Deadlines are a necessary part of the business of songwriting, so you may as well try to make them your friends. People are conditioned from preschool on with the reality of time limits — remember pop quizzes and ten-minute essays? It’s no wonder that people seem to thrive on this kind of pressure later in life. People often take as much time as they’re given, but the passion and urgency can be lost if they take too much time. You probably won’t have to think hard before memories of being under the gun and sweating deadlines start surfacing in your mind. Making these inevitable situations work enables you to have more fun with deadlines and be creative in the process.

I was a student who took a casual approach to school (usually doodling song ideas in notebook margins) until exam time came around, at which point I would cram like crazy. Give me a solid deadline, and my work will generally be sharper and more focused. If you have the reality of one of your songs about to be recorded, you’re already imagining how embarrassing it would be if that song isn’t great, so you’re raising the bar and using the pressure to your advantage.

—Jim Peterik, writer of 18 Billboard Top 10 hits

Having all the time in the world can be a song’s undoing. When you have too much time and opportunity to change, second-guess, and solicit too many opinions, you can ruin a perfectly good song.

There are many areas in the field of songwriting when time factors and deadlines may become an issue. Here’s a list of but a few:

Publisher’s deadlines: Often your publishing contract will specify a set number of songs that you must deliver each contract year. If you fail to meet that quota deadline, they may fail to pay you your final advance payment for the year or forget to renew your contract entirely.

Movie deadlines: If you’re lucky enough to be commissioned to write a song for a motion picture, you may also be unlucky enough to develop an ulcer as you struggle against an unrealistic shooting schedule. Not only do you have to read the script, view the rough cut of the movie (that’s the version that looks like it was edited by a machete), and write the song, but you generally have to demo the song (and demo it really well!) — all in about one week’s time.

I’m certain that given enough time and opportunity I would have over thought and ruined some of my best songs. When Sylvester Stallone contacted Frankie Sullivan and me to write the main title for his upcoming Rocky III movie, I enjoyed the pressure of the deadlines we were presented with. When you keep the finish line right in your sites, it tends to sharpen your focus. The question is frequently asked as to how long it took to write “Eye of the Tiger.” The correct answer is about a week. Perhaps the more insightful answer is that the song had been silently taking shape for a lifetime, and finally in 1982, opportunity met preparation and a song was born.

—Jim Peterik, writer of 18 Billboard Top 10 hits

Album deadlines: When top-selling artists like Carrie Underwood and Faith Hill are looking for songs for their new albums, you can bet that every writer in Nashville is trying to come up with something fresh that will pique the artists’, or their producers’, interest. However, good as that song may be, if Faith and her team have already chosen the songs for her next album, unless your song is the next “Breathe,” you’re a dime short and a day late for that one. In contrast, there’s also such a thing as being “early on a project” — where it’s so early in the song-searching process that your song may be forgotten by the time the songs are being selected for the record — so it’s best not to be too early or too late. Usually your publisher or song plugger (see Chapter 18 for more on a song plugger’s role) will have the most current info on who’s looking and when the deadlines for submissions are. Also there are various “pitch sheets” that you can subscribe to (such as Row Fax by Music Row Magazine) that give you a week-by-week snapshot of the artists currently looking for songs, specifying the kind of songs they need, whether co-writes are being considered, and what their timetable is for sending tunes.

I had an extremely embarrassing brush with deadlines early in my songwriting career. I’d just been signed as a writer with Warner Brothers Publishing, and I was overly eager to impress. My mentor at the company informed me that a prominent singer/guitarist was looking for material for his upcoming album. I had a song started called “San Pedro’s Children” and was told that if I could finish it and demo it by the following week, I had a good shot of getting it cut. I finished it quickly, demoed it, and sent it in. Then I waited. The only thing that bothered me was that, because of the time constraints, I had to rely on my rudimentary grasp of the Spanish language (two years of study in high school) to create the section where the Mexican children could be heard singing God’s praises just before the song hit the last chorus. On the demo, I started the section, “Viva Diablo con Noche . . .” and so on. I figured who’s gonna know anyway, and it sure sounded Spanish-y. Well the artist loved the tune. So much in fact that he was soon in the recording studio singing those words, “Viva Diablo . . .” when one of the engineers of Mexican descent interrupted the session and asked John why he was singing, “The devil lives at night?” The singer then ripped my publisher limb from limb and he, in turn, tore into me. How does this story end? I took the time I should have taken earlier and got a proper Spanish interlude for my song with the help of the Spanish Council of Chicago. The song was completed the following week and the story had a happy ending. But every time I see a photo of this artist, I picture him with the veins popping out of his forehead over the audacity of that new kid signed to Warner Brothers.

—Jim Peterik, writer of 18 Billboard Top 10 hits

Practice Makes Perfect

Pinpoint what stage of the game you most likely fall into — whether it’s just getting started or as an established songwriter. Then get organized and set your goals for the next 12 months and commit to achieving them one by one. Print those goals and post them somewhere you will see them on a daily basis — and read them often. Songwriting is a creative process, but you still have to treat it as a business if you plan to make a decent living out of it. The more you structure your time, stay focused, and remain disciplined, the better your chances will be for success — and you’ll tend to have other songwriters out there saying, “Man, you sure get lucky!”