Being a songwriter can be a really heady experience. Winning a contest or award can send you to the heights of joy, and having a whole crowd boo you off a stage can be devastating. Here are a few tips for keeping your ego intact in most situations.
DO YOUR BEST
Whether you win or lose, if you do the best you can, you have won something at any rate. Most of us figure out early on that just making the finals or even an honorable mention in any contest is plenty of thanks, and that after that it is often more about popularity or whatever is the flavor of the moment. If you do win, keep that in mind, too, and just be happy that you have that award to add to your resume, now, even if others might not see it in a bright light. If you put in a really good effort, and learned a lot by what you did or did not do, you still gained some knowledge, and hopefully some ideas on how you can do even better next time by seeing what your competition did and what you could learn from their methods of getting to the same spot. You might even try to get to know some of them and swap stories-you may even find a future collaborator that is on the same level you are, or find out just who that great vocalist they used was so you can ask them to try working for you on your next song.
TAKE NOTES
Most of us find that we can learn from any situation if we can come back later and look at it objectively. Taking good notes of what you did and what happened may not make sense at the time with emotions running amok, but once you get home and have a good night's sleep, you might notice a few things that can help you later. For example, if you had a great gig, and the sound was fantastic, who was your sound person? Was it the usual guy/gal you hire, or the house person? What did they do? You might actually go up to them afterwards and take note of things like the model of the board, the settings, speaker placement, size of room, where you were in relation to other instruments, size of speakers/monitors, mics used and so forth so you can try to duplicate this later. If the contest you entered was a disaster, who were the judges? Do they often show biases? Which styles do they tend to prefer? What won, in case you run into them again and want to get a prize, not just the warm fuzzy feeling for having entered if they really hate female vocalists who like to hit high notes? Get as detailed and silly as you like-you may be surprised at just how stupid some biases are, and may decide that it simply isn't worth entering your singer/songwriter work if all that wins are slick production pop pieces. Even if you win, note what didn't win-sometimes you can find that biases work in your favor, too.
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