Welcome! / Playing To Our Strengths

Hi I’m Jud. It’s taken me a minute to get this website up but I’m excited to be here to share my musical world with you. I plan to use this site to think out loud…to educate and advise young people trying to find their way through the music business and trying to be writers and artists and producers…to look back into “the day” and forward into tomorrow. And of course to play lottttts of music!

Today’s thought: play to your own strengths – and other people’s. I’m sitting in a session recently with my cowriter “D”, throwing lyric ideas around. I had already written the music with a third person, but I write lyrics as well, and I tend to be very hands-on…I never want to shirk my responsibility to the other writers or do less than “my part”. But I know from experience that D tends to work best when after we talk for a while about the song, she can go off on her own and connect with her amazing muse. So today, instead of being “Mr. Hands-On-To-The-Max”, after we spent about an hour throwing ideas back and forth I came right out and said – “Hey D, I know how great you are on your own with this stuff…do you want to just take it home and rock with it?” Needless to say, she jumped on that offer.

So you have to let go a little and let other people do what they do…give up a little control…and realize that sometimes doing less really is doing more. It’s not shirking your responsibility – it’s managing the collaborative side of creativity to the max.