Rachel Thibodeau

Rachel Thibodeau has been writing songs in Nashville for twenty nine years and still writes five days a week.

Thibodeau sat down with the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast on the Saturday of the Fernandina Beach Songwriters Festival, both of them running on a late night and talking about it. Brad had gone through nine or ten interviews the day before and kept hitting the same wall. Nobody outside the business understands how songwriters get paid, and Steve Bogard had started explaining it the day before. Thibodeau picked it up from there.

A normal writing day is two to four people in a room. The ten names on a song that people joke about usually happen because a song moved from one writer to another and each added something. When she moved to town, the artist was rarely in the room and writers pitched finished songs to labels, producers and artists. Now the artist is usually there, which she prefers, because she can learn their story and write it back to them. She knows she has something when she is still singing it to herself weeks later. Her advice to new writers is to join NSAI, which fights for royalty rates in Washington, and to go to writers rounds until you have a class of friends around you.

The money is the part she wants people to understand. A hold pays nothing. A recording does not guarantee payment either. Streaming arrived with no rate set for it, and by her rough figure a million streams returns the writer something like a hundred and fifty dollars. She tells people not to pick songwriting to get rich, and says the people still doing it are the ones who love it. She also stepped back when her daughter was born and then went into the studio to produce with a three month old in a sling. Tom Douglas told her The House That Built Me was written thirteen years before Miranda Lambert recorded it, which is why she is still thankful for holds that fall off.

Before either of them had any success, she was signed to the same publishing company as Luke Bryan, and they wrote a couple of times a week for years. The songs he went on to record are the ones she says have taken care of her family. She met the band Troubadour Blue at this same festival a year ago. On the Monday of this one she wrote a song with Stephanie Smith and sang it on stage that night for the first time. A woman of sixty came up to her afterward and said writing had always been her dream but there was no way to do it now, and Thibodeau told her about NSAI and sent her off to find co writers.