A Quote by Michael Bacon

I was a staff songwriter for Combine Music Publishing in Nashville for seven years. I'd sit around with a groups of friends with a Yamaha piano and a tape recorder and crank out songs.
I was writing for a publishing company in this old building right next to the RCA Victor Studio in Nashville. We were on the top floor, and Combine Music was on the bottom floor. I was friends with all those guys.
I moved to Nashville to be a songwriter. I found out that was a job, that someone would pay you to sit in a room with a guitar and make up songs! It is the greatest job in the world. I wrote three or four songs a day. That's what I lived for.
My first songs, I would just record them on this little tape recorder, and then I didn't start recording songs I really liked until my friend gave me a 4-track (recorder) and that's when my ideas really started coming together.
My earliest attempts at writing were when I was seven. I would sit at the piano and transcribe the songs I heard on the radio. I'd change little things in the music and write different lyrics.
I think the Yamaha has a giant quality. When you combine the Yamaha with other organs, you get this crazy rectangular sound. It's kind of flat and thick.
But it's funny, I really was quite introverted as a child. I just liked music, so mum and dad bought me a piano when I was seven - I actually got up to Grade Seven at the London College of Music on piano.
In 1985, I went to work for MTM Records, Mary Tyler Moore's Nashville record label, and stayed three years. After that, I spent two years as an independent promoter, then worked for MCA Nashville Records, DreamWorks Nashville, and Universal Music Nashville.
I remember being a little kid sitting in the living room with my brother and some friends from around the neighborhood, and I would sit at the piano and as they were running around the room doing different things and being silly, acting out, I would actually play the score for it - the music that went along with it.
I get so many ideas for songs, but I'm so seldom disciplined enough to sit down and crank them out.
It's such a relief for me to sit in front of a tape recorder and not be using it to learn my lines.
'Band Played On' is a good one. Barbara Orbison, who was Roy's wife, was involved in publishing in Nashville because she oversaw Roy's publishing, and she had a company in Nashville. She had a whole bunch of writers assembled, and they got together every day and wrote, and they write for everybody in Nashville.
Maybe I'll start from the initial idea, what motivated me to do that. In 1953, I had access to a tape recorder. Tape recorders were not widely available. There was no cassette tape back then. It was a Sears Roebuck tape machine. I put a microphone in the window and recorded the ambience.
In the '60s my friends were interested and we were hearing electronic music coming in on community radio from Europe, so that's where it started. And I had a tape recorder and started making things with it.
I'm so jealous of my friends who came from these super musical households where they were learning piano at three years old. My parents didn't really play loads of music around the house. We had the radio, but they weren't teaching me about music.
I would be content if I had nothing but a tape-recorder. I could still write songs and record them.
I would be content if I had nothing but a tape-recorder. I could still write songs and record them
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