I'm An American Idol...Songwriting Contestant...Sort Of

Well, I WAS. It all started like this...

I have a friend who I've known was a songwriter. I hadn't seen him doing much, but a few months earlier at church he'd mentioned that he and his wife watch American Idol and that this year Simon and Co. were looking for the "hit single" that the star would sing at the end of the show. The American people would choose the song through a voting process.

Well, my friend started the song, but couldn't finish it. I had a few songs I wanted to work on and suggested that we get together and work them out. Eventually we got to his Idol song which was about 2/3 done. He really only needed an end to his verses and a bridge. I sang something off of the top of my head and he thought it was really cool, so it stayed in the song. After an hour or so we had thrown together enough parts to get the song to an almost finished place. He took it home and worked out a bridge the next day and we reconvened to record it and then upload it to the Songwriting Idols portion of the AI website.

I wish I could find the original instructions, but they wanted something that related to the "journey that the Idol contestants went through", that was upbeat, blah, blah.

We didn't make the top 20. It was sad. The production value of our song was really low compared to those selected. From what I've heard, the ones selected weren't so great either (sonically nice, but lyrically melodically just ok). Is it sour grapes on my part or are ALL the songs sort of cheesy? They did ASK for cheesy.

Ok. I'm over it now. But when they first posted the songs I clicked through all of them hoping that I would somehow glide to the top, get the $10,000 signing bonus, and be world famous. I wasn't.

It was fun to see how quickly we could bring a song together, and I couldn't have done it without the help of the Songwriting Apples website that has kicked my butt into gear as far as writing is concerned.

Thanks Apples. We don't fall far from the tree do we?