Buddy Jewell

Buddy Jewell

The numbers are impressive.

In only eight years Buddy Jewell sang more than 4,000 demos for Nashville songwriters, 663 in one year alone.

In 2003, he was one of 8,000 singers who auditioned for Nashville Star, making it into the field of 125 semi-finalists and going on to win the nine-week TV series.

Just weeks after winning the show, his self-titled debut CD on Columbia Records entered the Billboard country album chart in the #1 position, becoming the first debut project by a country artist to do so in seven years. After producing two top five singles, “Help Pour Out The Rain” and “Sweet Southern Comfort,” the CD is approaching the million sales mark.

“If She Were Any Other Woman,” the first single from his new CD, Times Like These, was the top-selling country single for 12 consecutive weeks.

And though he spent nearly 20 years running into dead ends on the road to a record deal, looking back now, Jewell can see that all along he was probably taking the best possible route he could have found to success. Singing all those demos, for instance, played a large role in helping him become the kind of professional singer who could eventually win Nashville Star.

“I honestly think it was an invaluable experience,” says Jewell. “I’ve got some old tapes from when I first moved to Nashville and I was singing stuff that was too high, out of my range. When I hear it now I know that through those years of demo singing, I learned where the sweet spot in my voice was and how to sing the songs in those keys. I discovered the boundaries my voice had and found my little niche.”

One measure of his progress as a singer over the years, Jewell says, was how much time he needed to learn each song before he sang the demo.

“The longer I did them the less time it took to prepare,“ he says. “Early on, if I had a three-song session, I had to study it for three days. Later, I could start listening the night before, or even a couple hours before, and still have enough time to learn them.”

Jewell credits a system he developed for helping him memorize the vocal nuances of a song and then deliver those subtleties in the studio when he sang a demo. He got the idea from a similar system used by John Wesley Ryles, another veteran Nashville vocalist and popular demo singer. In place of musical notation, the system employs a code of symbols written over the words to the song on a lyric sheet. For a singer who doesn’t read music it can be a valuable tool.

“I remember in the beginning I was working totally from memory,” Jewell says. “Then I developed my little system of dots and slashes and arrows to help me remember the melody and when to hold a note out. It made me faster and much more proficient. It got to the point where I could pop in a CD and listen to a song on the way from one session to another.”

For the most difficult songs, Jewell devised another method of learning that gave a new meaning to the phrase “sleeping on the job.”

“If it was a particularly hard song, I would copy it on a cassette tape six or seven times and just lay there in bed and fall asleep listening to it,” he says. “If I had a big session with five or six songs, I would listen over and over in bed at night. I’d sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with the tape or CD still going.”

Not only did his vocal abilities benefit from those years of singing demos, his songwriting skills improved as well.

“It strengthened me as a writer,” Jewell says. “Singing on all those songs, I saw what worked and what didn’t work. “I sang my share of great songs and not so great songs.”

Among the hit songs Jewell sang as demos were George Strait’s “Write This Down,” Lee Ann Womack’s “A Little Past Little Rock” and Gary Allen’s “The One.” And whatever he learned from singing hits of that caliber no doubt helped him write his first commercially successful song, “Help Pour Out The Rain,” which he penned alone. Chosen as the first single from his debut album, the song reached the #3 spot on the Billboard chart after only 17 weeks, making it the fastest climbing single by a new artist in 2003. Jewell says he was especially pleased by the song’s success because prior to its release as a single he had been unable to get a publisher to pitch the tune.

“It was a song nobody was interested in,” Jewell says. “I couldn’t get arrested as a writer. I tried getting publishing deals but I usually got turned down because what I was writing was too country. I don’t mean to knock the publishers because at the time the female artists were hot and it was a pop-oriented sound that was popular and I didn’t write that way.”

After emerging as the victor on Nashville Star, Jewell signed his first staff writing deal with Sony/ATV Music, one of Nashville’s largest music publishing companies. However, now that he has a publishing deal, he has less time to devote to songwriting due to a busy touring schedule.

“The sad thing about that, is that now I have the opportunity to write with just about anybody I want to,” he says. “But the chances to write are fewer and farther between.  I have to schedule days off when I’m going to be in Nashville to sit down and write either by myself or with a co-writer.”

Which does he prefer?

“I enjoy writing by myself because I’ve only got me to deal with, “ Jewell says. “If I really like a line I don’t have to fight with a guy over it.”

While writing with someone else may not be as appealing to him as writing alone, Jewell says the song often benefits from the varying perspectives co-writing brings to the creative process.

“You have to walk into a co-writing session really open-minded,“ says Jewell. “I’ve had some really cool things happen where I wanted to take a song in one direction. But because I was open-minded enough to listen to what the other writer had to say, the song went in another direction and ended up being a much better song than it would have been, had we stayed the course of what I had envisioned for it.”

Diplomacy, says Jewell, is the key to successful co-writing.

“You need to find a way to tell the other writer when you don’t think a particular lyric is a really good line,” he says. “You’ve got to find a delicate way of saying, ‘Well, let’s try something else here. Let’s go ahead and put that line down for now, but let’s consider tweaking it later on.’ I think sometimes the creative process gets stifled because you spend too much time getting hung up on one line and the song just sort of dies on the vine.”

Such creative roadblocks are best circumvented, Jewell believes, by keeping the wheels in motion.

“You’ve got to go on and keep writing and just skip over those throwaway lines,” he advises. “It’s like taking a test. When you take a test you should answer all the questions that you have answers for and then go back and work on the ones that you’re not sure about. That’s proved to be the best process for me.”

What advice does Jewell offer aspiring singer/songwriters now that his years of effort have paid off?

“There are two things I usually tell people,” he says. “First, you’ve got to be yourself. I know that if rockabilly was the flavor of the day I could probably sing rockabilly music. Would I be happy doing it? No. That’s not who I am. Eventually that’s going to turn and bite you if you’re trying to be something you’re not. The second thing I tell people is if you really feel that this is what God put you here to do, you can’t give up.”