Mike,

Like everything I talk about, I just do it a lot. I actually do have some carpal tunnel when I play guitar but not much from typing.

I grew up in "Band ara" of the 70's and 80's. You would have band rehersals, someone would come in with a groove, guitar lick, drum fills, keyboard passage, and everyone would develop and write it. Singer usually wrote the lyrics. Everyone I knew of in that era, from the Beatles, Stones, on into the later era, Journey, Styxx, etc. all had that same focus.

As I branched out and learned more about the craft of writing, I would study the past. How Broadway plays were written, how the Tin Pan Alley days. Even studying the great works of the past, there were no single writers names in much of anything. Even the people who got known for being great solo writers went through phases where the co-wrote a lot. Carol King and Mike Stoller, James Taylor learning from Paul McCartney. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle. it was always multiple people involved.

As I moved to Nashville I never even much realized about writers verses artists. They were simply always interetwined. You always wrote with other people. Didn't mean you didn't write alone, in a lot of songs, one writer or the other will provide a majority of the song, there is very little 50/50 writing.

It wasn't until I started getting on forums like this that I even realized that a lot of people didn't think that way. Sure there were the Dylan's and Springsteen's but they were so few and far between as to not even be a factor. And I would deal with hundreds and thousands of people who came to Nashville with the whole "I do everything myself" attitude. Those are the ones nobody wanted to work with and as you listened to more and more music from those people, you felt like saying "Man, you should have gotten out of the house more..."

So it is an odd argument and the only place I have seen it work is in theory. It is like baseing your life, your families future, your own lively hood around winning a lottery. Could it happen? Sure. Will it? Very doubtful.

When I hear the whole lone wolf approach I just can't see how that works in practical application. It just doesn't work in real life. You have to make people want to be a part of your world. Far too many people will try to approach publishers, and the publishers of course, want to have nothing to do with them. Why? Because if other people don't want to work with you, why should I?

I guess it is not the perfect way and doesn't work for everyone. But it is the majority of anything in the history of music. I know not everyone would want that. But if you do any study of real life, you find out that you can't change the facts.

MAB