I was a member of West Coast Songwriters Association from 2010 through 2012 and took part in their 2012 annual conference held at Foothill College in Los Altos, CA. The point of the conference was to pitch songs to L.A. and Nashville representatives and to learn about industry processes. I made the recordings in the WCSA 2012 collection at home, just me and my guitar, added some songs I'd previously recorded at home, and added all the recordings from the album “In The Land Of My Heart” that I'd recorded at Whiskey Hill Studios but not yet released, burned them all onto CDs and took them to the convention. I had a very mixed experience there, coming home with my head spinning after pitching songs and getting oodles of confusing feedback. Most of the feedback consisted of reps telling me, in a nutshell, that I needed to have happy endings to my songs. I spent the next year trying to rewrite several songs to satisfy those criteria and eventually only kept a few changes for most of the songs, mostly returning to what I wanted to write in the first place and learning that it's much less important to me to write a commercially successful song than it is to write from my heart then let go of the results. The following collections contain all the songs I'd put on that CD. 

After spending that year spinning my wheels rewriting, I let my membership lapse. I think WCSA is a good organization with earnest goals but just not a good fit for me. Some of the songs in the Demo collection below are early versions with much different lyrics than you'll find on the song pages on this site. For example, I made lots of changes to the lyrics of Photograph, prompted by the feedback from the conference, but not in the direction that the feedback encouraged. Ultimately the song ended up with pretty much the same message stated differently, and there are things I definitely like about this early version of Photograph, although I'm quite happy also with the final version. Just goes to show there are lots of ways to say what you want to say. And even though a lot of the rewriting I attempted on these songs came to naught, I learned that editing and rewriting are as important to the songwriting process as the original inspiration is.

The acoustic versions in the WCSA Demo make an interesting contrast to the more fleshed out versions that you'll find on the individual song pages. These are played the way I wrote them and performed them when I was doing my singer/songwriter thing in 2010-2013.