Phil,
Welcome to the music business. It is not just you,it is everybody! I have sat in panel discussions with the top producers, record labels, publishers, with monster hit writers out there like Bob Dipereo, who once asked, "You guys always say "send us something different, but we do that and you say it's too different!"
Once Karen Staley, (Keeper of the Stars, Let's go to Vegas), once said to the head of MCA, Tony Brown, "You guys only listen to a verse and chorus, why don't we just write a verse and chorus, if you like it, we'll finish the song."
This has always been the case. And all depends on who you talk to. I have great friends who are the top song pluggers in town, Sherril Blackman and Steve Bloch. They tell me they couldn't get a song with a "dirt road and tailgate" even heard. Another friend of mine, Larry Singleton,says his song plugger says "Don't even send anything if it doesn't have a tailgate and a dirt road in it." I would tend to go with my guys,because I know where the sales figures are and know that trend is winding down. But whatever. You are always going to find that.
Everyone has different contacts, different perspectives, different applications. Someone pitching songs to Europe, or Canada, might like the older style traditional songs because that is where those countries are. But someone trying to impact inside the town songs, are going to find them dated. Different application.
The NSAI evaluators are going on their own experiences and backgrounds. And also what they hear all the time. people who are older (past 30-35) are going to feel that what they are doing is "current', yet someone under 30 is going to have a totally different impression of what is current.
When I was an evaluator, we would usually get people over 30 who were writing songs like ten years before. They wouldn't understand it if they hadn't been writing with a half dozen 25 year old artists who were laughing about people pitching them those same songs and talking about how "Old School' they were.
Frankly Phil, it is hard to write under your age group. That has always been the problem. The older writers, Rodgers and Hammerstien, or MEREDITH WILSON (the Music Man) would have had a hard time writing for the BEATLES after Sargent Pepper. They were in a different world then. But one of their biggest early hits were "Till There Was You" from the Music Man, that Meridith Wilson wrote. After Revolver and into Pepper, they quit doing that because they had grown into their own as writers.
Now it's much more difficult because artsits ARE ALL WRITERS before they get record deals. As a matter of fact, now the way you get a record deal is by getting CUTS FIRST. Exactly how many Jamie Johnson, Craig Wiseman, or Jeffey Steel songs do you think you can knock off there Phil? Because that is your competition. That is who is getting the cuts. And they are writing the songs that get cut WITH THE ARTISTS THEMSELVES.
This is just reality. And the shifting dynamic in the music business. Everyone has to deal with it, adapt to it, or die.
I am making this prediction right now and you might as well understand it, learn it, love it, live it.
WITHIN TWO TO FIVE YEARS, THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER CUT ON AN ARTIST OUTSIDE THEIR INNER CIRCLES.
Even now, their "inner circles, friends, people in their own publishing companies, producers, THE PEOPLE THAT SIGN THEIR CHECKS are the only one's getting cuts.
DISCOVER AND WRITE WITH ARTISTS. Everything else is a long gone practice.
MAB