He saw something in me I couldn't see in myself

It was the summer of 2009. I was studying music in college, and I had worked up the courage to reach out to my cousin Alan for help with my career. I thought I knew exactly what I wanted. Guidance as a singer-songwriter, maybe some doors opened in the pop world. I had my own material, my own sound, my own vision of what my career was supposed to look like.

Alan Menken has eight Academy Awards. The Little Mermaid. Beauty and the Beast. Aladdin. Pocahontas. He was in the studio that summer finishing the Sister Act cast album. He couldn’t just give his time freely. Not even to family.

So when I reached out, he heard me out. And then, gently, he redirected everything.

He didn't see a pop artist. He saw a composer. Someone who could learn to write for film, other songwriters, or for publishers' catalogues. Someone who could write songs that other people would live inside. He saw it before I did. So, he offered me something different. A mentorship in writing for media, which became mentorship in writing beyond myself.

And his first email didn't feel like a correction. It felt like someone handing me a map to a place I didn't know I was trying to get to.

His opening assignment was deceptively simple. Write a song. A self-portrait, or a portrait of someone else. A snapshot of a moment in a life. But before I submitted anything, I had to answer four questions:

I remember reading that and feeling simultaneously excited and exposed. I had never once asked myself those questions before submitting a piece of music. I had always written from inside my own feeling and trusted that the feeling would carry. That was the only standard I had ever applied… whether it felt true to me.

He closed that first email with something that stayed with me:

A door opener. I've thought about that phrase a hundred times since. Because what I didn't understand yet was that the door he was opening wasn't just about songwriting technique. It was about learning to think beyond myself entirely. To ask who the song was for before I asked what I wanted to say.

I went away and wrote the assignment. I was eager, probably too eager. I submitted something quickly and waited. What came back over the following weeks was an education I could not have gotten anywhere else. Not in a classroom, not from a book, not from any mentor who hadn't actually done the work at the level Alan had.

But it all started with those four questions. They were the whole curriculum, really. Every piece of feedback he gave me that summer, every rewrite request, every redirect, every "I need you to do better," traced back to one of them.

I think about those questions constantly now, running a music agency in Los Angeles, working with artists, composers, and film scorers whose careers I help shape. The artists who grow fastest aren't always the most talented. They're the ones who learn to ask those questions before they create. Not after.

WHAT I CARRIED FORWARD

Before your next song, your next release, your next piece of creative work, stop and answer Alan's four questions. Who is this for? What style, and why? What emotion are you trying to create in the listener? And how do your creative choices serve that emotion, or work against it?

Most artists skip this entirely. They create from instinct and hope the audience follows. And there's nothing wrong with that… some of the most honest music ever made started that way.

But there's a difference between writing to process something for yourself and writing to move someone else. One is therapy. The other is craft. The writers who build lasting careers learn to do both… to write from a real place AND know exactly who they're writing it for before they hit record.

The door opener isn't the song. It's the questions you ask before you write it.

Next month: the message that changed everything. Alan told me plainly that my work was "fine on its own terms" and exactly why that was the most humbling thing I'd ever heard.

Sincerely,

Andrea Smith
Rising Artists Founder