Page 16 - BiTS_09_SEPTEMBER_2020

BiTS: When you moved to LA, what sort of music were you playing?

BF: What kind of music? It was somewhat roots in nature. It was very James Taylor. A little bit more
popish. James Taylor, that acoustic smooth, easy stuff and a lot of it was I was young, so the lyrics
weren’t really all that deep. I wasn’t a rebel and I wasn’t into politics or anything so I just kind of
went with the simple love songs and songs about personal angst and just kind of started from there.

BiTS: Yes, yes. When you go about writing a song, Bill, how do you do it?

BF: You know, what I like about the song writing process is for me it’s never the same journey
twice. There will be times where I’ll just figure out a cool little lick on the piano or on the guitar or a

new sound and I’ll work up some kind of a riff and a little track and then put some lyrics to it.
Sometimes you wake up at 2 o’clock in the morning with an inspirational thought or something
that’s just feeding your soul and you write it down and then you put music to it, and sometimes they
come together at the same time. Some songs take two or three months and some you write in 15
minutes. It’s a different process every time, and I love that and when I moved to Nashville, I had
written pretty much on my own at that point, and Nashville’s just a different game. I mean here you
get writing sessions, appointments and co-writes and that’s an entirely different animal where you

come in with a title and then everybody sits down and contributes their part of it. But for me, it’s
different with pretty much every song. There’s a different inspiration behind it.

BiTS: At some stage, Bill, you started doing record producing as well for people. How did that
happen?

BF: When I was with Premiere Radio Networks, I initially started writing parody songs for the
morning shows that were part of our network and so each week my partner and I had to write and
produce five parody songs. We had to do a country, an oldies, an AC, a rock. We had to do five a
week and back then you didn’t have the karaoke tracks the way you have today. We had to recreate
the music beds for all these songs and so I got really into mimicking and copying the sounds of each

of the parts of the songs through keyboards and my guitars and then writing the parody songs. While
I was with Premiere, I think if I’m not mistaken, we wrote five a week for four or five years. I
probably produced somewhere around 2500 parody songs, so you kind of get good at it after a while.
We actually had a song about Hillary Clinton called ‘I am Hillary’, a parody of I Am Woman by Helen
Reddy that got us on Inside Edition on that entertainment show. It was pretty cool.

BiTS: It sounds like a lot of hard work.

BF: My dad told me when I was growing up, he said you’re better off to do something that you can
do easily and be the best at, than something you might be interested in that you have to work your
butt off and only be second best and you’re constantly going to be working too hard. For me music
and radio, it’s just such a passion and something that I enjoy so much that the amount of time that I

put into it, being able to sit down and play with music all day, that was fun. Yes, it’s hard work
sometimes. It gets monotonous. Also working in radio you support other artists and your job is to get
to know them and help promote them and help get the word out about them and I was just
enthralled getting to know all these different artists and musicians and when I moved to Nashville
that was a big part of it. I was enthralled getting to know these artists and I started while I was in LA
because of my video background I got hired to do music editing for Power Rangers and V.R. Troopers

16