Songwriter Laura Veltz (“The Bones,” “Speechless”) grew up in a family band that didn’t make much money.
Thus, when her passion for songwriting was about to generate a big paycheck, she suddenly realized she didn’t know what do with it.
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“I had a hit song and, basically, a panic attack at the same time,” remembers the five-time Grammy nominee.
Fortunately, her publisher — Big Machine Music GM Mike Molinar — put her in touch with Music Row Wealth Management advisor Tracy Hackney, who gave her a three-step path to follow as the money started coming in. She followed that simple plan obsessively, and roughly 18 months later, she was in good enough shape to become a client.
Veltz and Hackney ultimately established a podcast, Songwriter Soup, that focuses on the business of songwriting. In tandem with its fifth season — which launched Oct. 5 with guest Joybeth Taylor (“Choosin’ Texas,” “Empty Words”) — their side enterprise is now a 501(c)(3) organization, allowing them to dive into the content without getting bogged down over growing a business.
“As a songwriter and as a financial planner, Laura and I both have wanted to give it away,” Hackney says. “That’s the mission. It’s like, how do we scale what I do, the knowledge I have when it comes to working with creative people and money matters? And what she does — how does she share that and just literally give it away?”
Given that they’re working for free, they’ve been able to attract an impressive series of Nashville creatives willing to share their professional stories,their experiences with the money side of songwriting and their emotional battles with a job they love that can end in a heartbeat without a warning.
Taylor, in her episode, delves into the commitment she made by tying her creative future to Ella Langley when neither of them was commercially successful, and into her Zen-like attitudes about hits and misses. In a previous episode, guest Ashley McBryde loosely recounted the career moves she made as an artist and songwriter, highlighting the financial aspects and work conditions that drove her decisions at each point as she transitioned from a creative with a day job into a full-time music-maker.
Soup guests have also included Lori McKenna (“Humble and Kind”), Luke Laird (“Head Over Boots,” Luke Dick (“Burning Man”), Jimmy Robbins (“half of my hometown”) and Andy Albert (“Somewhere Over Laredo”).
The guests are pros who’ve mostly succeeded in a business full of misconceptions, many of them a direct result of the mystery around how music is made. To master their craft, they frequently spend little time thinking about money. While their focus on the next hook or improving their guitar skills may pay off in the writing room, it doesn’t do much for organizing their pocketbooks. Hackney, in fact, estimates that only one in 10 songwriters is good at handling the financial part of their career.
“Most songwriters feel so lucky to be doing this job that they’ll sign anything,” Veltz says. “They’ll partner with anyone, they’ll do anything just to get to do this in any legitimate way, just to be in the room where it happens. And unfortunately, the love of that not only puts us in compromising situations as businesses, but it also allows us to be the victim of a lot of predatory behavior in the music industry.”
Hackney was a musician before he went into personal finance, touring as an electric dulcimer player in 1990s alt-rock band Bare Jr. That background was essential to his wealth management career, as well as to Songwriter Soup. When he made the shift into finance, his first employer, Northwestern Mutual, was able to tell him how many leads, meetings, lunches and phone calls would be required to net 10 clients in an average month. The reliability was shockingly different from life in the music business.
“It was a recipe,” he says. “That does not exist for the music industry. No matter what line — whether it’s songwriter, artist, journalist, record label executive — like, there is no [defined] path.”
Songwriter Soup grew from a book that Hackney and Veltz co-wrote, but they recognized they would likely reach more people if it became a podcast. They enlisted creatives that they knew for a series of interviews, but didn’t know fully how to shape them into a final product. Hackney brought in Apple Music Radio producer Kevin Sokolnicki, who took it to the next level and became a co-host. The format is loose — usually driven by Veltz’s songwriting-insider questions — with Hackney steering some of the conversation in a way that clarifies the topics for non-songwriters who might be listening. Sokolnicki speaks rarely, but he typically provides some sort of big-picture observation that ties the episode together.
The guests know in advance that Songwriter Soup isn’t intended to promote new product. It’s there to educate the next generation of music creatives, who get firsthand insights about the unique emotional and financial paths they’re chasing. And since no one’s asking them for money, they can feel safe that they’re not getting ripped off. But in addition to having an effect on aspirational songwriters, it’s influenced some of Veltz’s peers.
“I get messages all the time,” she says, “that are like, ‘I didn’t sign that deal because of this episode’ or ‘I tried this back in the ‘80s and it never connected, and for some reason I feel better now 40 years later.’
“That means something to me. I love writing songs, but this is a very close second in terms of fulfillment.”