When I first searched for, and found, this songwriter's forum it was never my intent to have my songs reviewed by others in terms of critique. And certainly not my intent to review their songs. I mean, that's certainly a nice feature to have available, but it's not my main purpose for being here by far.
Neither is my purpose for being here to simply show off my songs looking for a pat on the back.
The reason I sought out a songwriter forum is to find like-minded musicians and artists who might be interested in exchanging ideas, and even better yet, potentially collaborating in the development of larger ensembles that would be impossible to create alone.
I'm very glad to see people collaborating on here. That is very encouraging. I even have songs that I wouldn't mind seeing done over by other people where I'm not even part of the fished ensemble. I don't consider myself to be a professional musician or singer. I'm willing to do both to the best of my ability, but if my amateur performances are holding other musicians back from attaining a higher level of performance, I would be happy to stand aside and let the song soar. Just watching it soar at the hands of really good musicians would be a reward in itself.
However, it does appear that this forum is almost "obsessed" with the importance of Feedback. I can certainly understand why this is important for some people, but it's just not something that I would personally focus on. I confess to being kind of selfish in this regard. If I like a song I'm working on then I want it to flourish as I have imagined it to be. Not as someone else thinks it should be. In fact, if the song is changed around that much then why even bother calling it "mine"?
I may as well just bow out altogether and just say, "Fine, do it your way".
In fact this reminds me of the very famous song, "I did it my way".
Whether other people like my songs or not is of secondary importance to me actually.
Having said all of the above, it's always nice to hear that there are other people who do "get it" and appreciate "my style". And those are the people I'm interested in collaborating with. Why would I want to collaborate with people who want to do things totally different from me? That wouldn't be any fun at all.
So my goal is to seek out other musicians who are the same "wavelength" that I'm on. That's why I'm here.
The review process might ultimately be helpful in finding potential collaborators. I'm definitely not going to want to collaborate with people who find a lot of problems with my songs. Why would I want to do that? Clearly we aren't on the same wavelength. And that's fine. In fact, that's very good to know before entering into a collaboration.
I would much rather collaborate with someone who actually enjoys the the song and might want to contribute to it as-is, rather than changing it all around.
So I suppose the feedback on songs can actually be helpful in finding like-minded collaborators.
I think toward that end, I'll create a spreadsheet containing the names of people who review my songs with positive encouragement. And that will be a list of potential collaborators.
The people who suggest that I should change my songs around dramatically will be struck off the list.
They clearly are not interested in "my style".
Why would I be interested in changing my style?
As an example, I know people who don't like Leonard Cohen. Should he then change his style all around to suit the people who don't like his songs?
I think not.
