Right place, right time. I have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Wrong place at the wrong time describes most of my fishing trips. I go fishing when I have time to fish not when they are biting. I like to fish where the grass and weeds aren't too tall and it is easy to get the fish out of the water. Now you can see why I'm not catching too many fish.
I have attended many NSAI (Nashville Songwriting Association International) chapter meetings. I have been a NSAI coordinator for three of four years so I've been to at least forty meetings. These meetings are a great place to go. You are around other songwriters who are on the same journey. They know what it is like to get up in the middle of the night, and find a pen and paper to write down an idea. This is a good place to go on your journey. Kinda like you can't go wrong going to church. Every sermon may not be for you but some of them are going to be for you.
I received an email letting me know that the Kansas City chapter was having a Zoom meeting on a Saturday in April. It was a zoom meeting because the the Covid 19 pandemic. I never receive invitations to the KC chapter meetings. It was a week from Saturday and I was going to be off. The email informed me that if I wanted to get a song evaluation at the meeting to send an mp3 and lyrics to the meeting coordinator. So I sent in the lyrics and music to a song called Sing.
The Kansas City chapter is a bigger chapter than the Manhattan chapter. I would guess they had 12-15 people on Zoom. About five people played their songs and my song Sing was one of them. It was a good meeting and I enjoyed it. There was a guy at the meeting who said he worked for Ammar Music Group and he was their A&R Director. (A&R stands for Artist and Repertoire) He is responsible for finding and signing new music talent. He told the KC songwriters that we could request permission from him and he would be willing to listen to three songs. No more than three songs.
So I wrote his name down on a piece of paper and thought I need to do this. I have played my songs for music publishers before but this sounded like a great opportunity. I was in the right place at the right time. A music publishing company is looking for commercial songs and they asked me to send in three songs. It was a great feeling but I didn't know yet where this would lead.
On every opportunity that comes our way, we always have choices. We can grab the door handle and open the door. We can wait outside the door and hope it opens by itself. I was going to open the door not knowing what was on the other side. I'll share more of this story later.