Whereas with writing a song, I can do that sometimes in fifteen minutes or a couple hours.” It was more like going to college for four years and doing a dissertation. It took me about a year to really go back and comb through the stories and remember the details. Writing the book and telling those stories and doing it in a fun and entertaining way, where people think it’s an easy read – which I’ve been told it is – that was difficult. I’ve been doing that my whole life, ever since I was a young child, and not even realizing it. “Writing music to me comes as natural as breathing. “Writing the book was much harder than writing songs,” he confesses. He said that being an author as opposed to a composer was very different. His career is documented in his new book, I Wrote That One Too….A Life In Songwriting From Willie To Whitney. I think the true testament of my career has been to be able to navigate all that and still enjoy and love what I do, and come through it and have some more successes.” There’s a very fine line between great success and dismal failure, and I have experienced both, and the disappointments are part of the business. “I’ve just always tried to do what I do, and that’s write music and try to navigate the sometimes stormy seas of the actual business side. I’ve kind of stayed with my process.”Īnd, for Dorff, that means focusing on the creative side of his work – while also keeping in mind that it is a business. So, for me, it’s old school, but I still tend to just do my process. Most of what I do is kind of written or shaped before my hands ever hit the keys. But, for me, I still sit at the piano and actually write. I think production techniques and the younger songwriters who have so much technical wisdom at their fingertips, it’s probably changed. “It really hasn’t changed, at least not for me. In a entertainment landscape that has changed seemingly by the second, Dorff says the art of songwriting remains pretty much the same as it was when he started his career in the 1970’s.
Then, of course Burt Bacharach, who’s one of my very top influences. Who makes him do a double-take? “I think some of the older standard writers that I grew up listening to, like Jule Styne and of course, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, and all of the great theater writers.
To get in on the first ballot was very surreal.”ĭorff says that when he looks at the list of writers that he will be joining on June 14 in New York City, he is awestruck. “Oh man, it’s more than a dream come true,” he says emphatically.
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