Songwriters Pay to Play Their Works, Then Pray : Seminar on Creating, Selling Pop Songs No Place for Fragile Egos

Before a songwriter can make the whole world sing, he or she has to find one person to listen--one person with some clout in the music industry.

The chance to be heard by powerful ears was bait enough for about 110 aspiring songwriters and performers who spent Sunday at the second annual Orange County Music Makers Market. The daylong program at the Buena Park Hotel & Convention Center enabled local songsmiths to have their tapes played for talent scouts whose job it is to find marketable material for record companies and music publishers. There also were seminars by experts on the nuts and bolts of writing and pitching pop songs--and an $85 registration fee to discourage dilettantes.

The listening sessions were the real lure. Three of them went on simultaneously, and aspirants shuttled from room to room, waiting for the verdict from one song scout before hurrying off to see how their work would fare with the next one down the hall.

This corridor of critiquing was no place for fragile egos. The songs were played openly, so that anyone attending the event could sit in and listen. The judges stated their opinions on the spot. Usually, they listened to just the first minute or two of music, the opening verses and chorus, before deciding whether to pass on a song or declare it a keeper.

One of the scouts, Carla Berkowitz of Chrysalis Music Group, the song-publishing affiliate of Chrysalis Records, took a good-natured, accentuate-the-positive approach during a two-hour session in which she evaluated 50 songs. But when she didn’t like something, Berkowitz didn’t sugarcoat her comments.

“For a song to be a hit, you need more going on lyrically,” she said after hearing a pop confection called “Sunday a Holiday.” The song expressed delight with a lover but didn’t flesh out the sentiment with enough interesting particulars to suit Berkowitz. “He likes her, but who cares? I have to be honest,” she said. “It’s real pleasant, but it’s not something I think the whole world would want to hear.”

“Am I getting meaner and meaner as the songs go on?” she asked. “I’m really just being honest.”

While she went on to the next song, Michael Lovullo, author of “Sunday a Holiday,” quietly got up and left.

“It kind of hurts at first,” Lovullo, a San Clemente resident who is about to get his degree in finance at Cal State Fullerton, said as he stood in the hall outside the listening room. “But it’s really good. To have an objective opinion helps, and as far as trying to market your songs to the general public, that’s what you really need. “If you’re going to be on the radio you’re gonna be exposed to everybody. Some biker dude is going to say, ‘He sings like a chick.’ ” Better to hear the considered opinion of an expert, Lovullo said, even if it isn’t favorable. And what will happen to the song Berkowitz didn’t like. Lovullo said he probably would just start working on another one, with her comments in mind, rather than take the time to retool “Sunday.”

Like most of today’s music industry scouts, Berkowitz was looking for hit potential rather than searing expression. The art-versus-commerce issue came up as she rejected “Murder Weapon,” a song by a Yorba Linda rock band, New Faith. Set to a fast techno-pop beat, the song was about a drug-addicted killer living on Death Row.

“Do you really think that the radio is going to play this song?” Berkowitz asked.

Steve Wilson, a member of New Faith, replied that the alternative rock station, KROQ, already had.

“This song doesn’t turn me on, and it scares me,” Berkowitz said. “It definitely hit me emotionally. I’ve got a reaction. If that’s what you’re trying to do, you succeeded.” She declared the song “really artistic. . . But as a publisher, professionally, I wouldn’t touch it.”

The session did yield seven songs that Berkowitz liked enough to take with her for further consideration. “I might like it today, and I might hate it when I get back,” she said. Over the past 1 1/2 years, Berkowitz said, her company, which places songs with recording acts and film-makers, has bought three songs that she first heard at sessions like the one Sunday.

“This is a business of rejection. You steel yourself for that,” said Dennis Roger Reed, a singer-songwriter from San Clemente. For Reed, a tall man in cowboy boots, this was a day of good news. His country-bluegrass tune, “Red Clay Road,” won high praise from Berkowitz, as well as applause from other songwriters who were listening while she critiqued it.

It is also a business of high hopes. On Sunday, Mark Wood’s were among the highest.

First, the scout from Enigma Records decided to keep one of Wood’s rock songs for a second hearing. Then Berkowitz declared one of his romantic pop ballads a good prospect, “a real singer’s song. There’s so much room here, so much you can do with it.” Wood, delighted, went right to a pay phone to call his wife with the good news.

At 32, he makes his living playing the local club circuit as a solo act and bandleader. “I can play clubs forever, but the next thing is to have (a recording career) start happening,” said Wood, who, like a lot of talented local performers, can tell tales of near misses in the quest to get signed. Hoping to move that next step along, Wood approached Berkowitz after her listening session was over, toting his songs in a metal-reinforced briefcase.

“I have lots of stuff,” he told her.

“Let’s take it just one at a time,” said Berkowitz, who already had his ballad in her sack of keepers. “The relationship has begun.”