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Ken Joyce
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Following A Music City Star
Writer lands deal for train song
By Ken Joyce
The Nashville Star commuter rail licensed a song written by this father-son team for their TV and radio spots.
Are you ever too old to start writing successful songs? Apparently the answer is “no.”
I’m retired and turned 67 last January. The previous fall, I had come up with an idea for a song. My son, Scott Joyce, is a songwriter and is always inviting me to critique his work, so it was a natural step to try to write a song myself.
Nashville, Tennessee’s new commuter rail, The Music City Star, runs about 200 yards from our house in Mt. Juliet (a Nashville suburb). I’ve always loved trains, so I wanted to write a song about the Star.
Having watched Scott play piano for Kenny Chesney, Jo Dee Messina and Blake Shelton over the past 10 years, country-western was the music with which I was most familiar. I decided to make the song a love story. The resulting lyrics are about a “9-to-5 plugger” who drives to work in Nashville in his pick-up every day, paying through the nose for gas. One day as he’s pulled up to a train crossing, late for work and cussing his gas gauge, the Music City Star flashes by. The next day, the guy decides to buy a ticket on the train. He sits down beside another commuter, a girl with “a smile that dazzled the mind.” Their daily commute, over time, develops into a romance and they end up getting married.
I have no musical talent, so the next step was to ask Scott to come up with the music for the song, and I suggested he use the tempo of “The Wabash Cannonball.” We then agreed that it might be cool to have some train whistle sounds at the beginning and end of the song.
I found an old recorder and an unused tape, got in our mini-van with my Shih Tzu Molly, and lay in wait for the Star. When it came along, I hung the microphone out the window. I drove alongside the train, recording its whistle with one hand, and trying to control the dog and avoid on-coming traffic with the other.
Fortunately, Scott has the equipment in his home studio to produce a song, which avoided considerable cost when we made the demo. While I had a fantasy that Craig Morgan would pick our song as his next hit single, my practical side told me a more realistic possibility was to offer it to the train people themselves as an advertising tool.
I sent a letter with the CD to the Regional Transportation Authority, which operates the commuter-rail system, sometime before Christmas that year. Didn’t hear anything for a while; figured we had struck out. Then came a phone call: “We really loved your song; we’ll get back to you.”
Weeks went by. Silence. The next February, I decided to call them. “Oh yeah, we still like the song. Let me check with my boss.” The boss called. I made my pitch. She was noncommittal. More silence. Then I got a call in March with a cash offer: they wanted to use the song for advertising. Scott and I confered. We wanted to license them the song, but keep the rights. We told them so, and I thought the deal was dead. But they came back: “OK, you can keep ownership of the song, and we’ll give you an up-front fee for the advertising rights forever.” We agreed. We still own our song, it was used in radio and TV spots, and we can still dream about Craig Morgan making us rich! |
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