Contemporaneous, was the word of the day last week when two different writers asked me the same questions within an hour of one another.

The question, mildly blended here for clarity, was: " I have a song that I demo'd with a male singer, but I think it would be good tune for a female artist with a few small lyric changes, can I still pitch it to a female?".

Try to avoid having the word girl, boy, guy, gal, man, woman in your lyrics as one of your rhyming partners. If you choose to include such works place them within your lyrics in a way that is easy to switch for instance "my gal don't love me" can be "my man don't love me") …

But if you have "Ain't gettin' love from my Girl, blah blah bla blah blah bla swirl/world" What the heck are you going to change the gender to that will rhyme with girl/swirl/twirl/unfurl?

(okay, I know those are the obvious rhymes- but I know what rhymes with orange, do you?)

None the less…if you have a song that you feel you can change easily without mucking up your rhyming scheme then what I suggest you do is send the demo and include a cover letter explaining that you recorded the song with a male vocalist but you feel the song is suitable for a female artist with a few lyric changes. THEN include your recommended, or rather, your authorized lyric changes which allows them to read the changes while listening to the tune. Make it as easy as possible for them to get the picture. The other reason I suggest you do this, is to ensure that the artist and or their "people" don't make the lyric changes themselves for a few reasons. One - you hate the changes they made and two, so they don't call you back and say "we are recording the tune and planning on using it as a single...but we want a cut of the royalties for our rewrites".

I assure you that will happen and it is important to know that if you spend some time thinking of how your song could be revised to suit the opposite gender, there is no reason you can't send a "male" song to a female artist or visa versa.

I also find this true in production values. All of us have songs that we wrote years ago which sound quite dated as the songs have sat there for years. I feel if the production was very good on your "old" demo; it's not unreasonable to include a cover letter stating that although the production values are not contemporary, you believe this song deserves some attention. A good ear can hear past the 'wah wah' guitar or vocorder.

Your other alternative is to hire both a male and a female to do the vocals. I have some songs on catalogue which have both a male vocal and a female vocal, an up tempo and a slow version, an acoustic and a full mix version.

Pro writers know it is important to expand their opportunities and so do several versions of certain songs.

Til next week. Happy pitching!

~Jana