Songwriting Innovation: Creativity That Drives Results With Cliff Goldmacher

In this episode, Cliff Goldmacher dives into the world of songwriting innovation, sharing how the principles of songwriting can spark creativity and fuel business success. Hosted by Tony Martignetti, this conversation explores how even those who don't see themselves as creative can unlock new potential by applying songwriting techniques to their work. Whether you're curious about creative confidence or looking to boost innovation in your team, this episode offers insights into the power of music in the business world. Tune in for an inspiring and fresh perspective on creativity.

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Songwriting Innovation: Creativity That Drives Results With Cliff Goldmacher

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Cliff Goldmacher. Cliff is a Grammy-recognized number 1 hit songwriter, 2-time TEDx speaker, and author who has been helping organizations innovate and build their creative confidence by teaching them to write songs. His work has been featured in Forbes. His book, The Reason for the Rhymes: Mastering the Seven Essential Skills of Innovation by Learning to Write Songs, encapsulates the principles of his programs. That's what we're going to talk about in this episode amongst many other things. I want to share a fun little fact. Cliff was voted the friendliest in high school. You'll notice that he has a very effervescent personality that will come across in our conversation.

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It is truly an honor and a pleasure to welcome you to the show, Cliff.

It is an honor to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

It's truly a pleasure. I've been really impressed by what I've seen of your work. I've talked to you a couple of times and have seen some of our colleagues use some of your work. Gena Cox is one of them. It's amazing what you're doing. I'm always intrigued when people bring in elements of artistry, art, and creative side into the world of business, which we need more of. We're going to talk about that and many other things. First of all, welcome. Second of all, I'm excited to get into what is the journey that got you to where you're doing this amazing work in the world. We're going to do that in a moment.

We use this model here on the show. It's called flashpoints. These flashpoints are the moments that have ignited your gifts into the world. What I want you to do is share some of those flashpoint moments that have created the path to where you are. You can start wherever you'd like. Share what you're called to share. Along the way, we will pause and see what kind of themes are showing up. There's no reason for this rhyme, but it's going to be what you want to share.

There are two critical flashpoints that I would describe. One is that I took classical piano as a kid. Like so many kids, I signed up for classical piano. After a couple of years with one particular teacher, at the end of one of our lessons, he said, “I have an assignment for you. Next week when we get together, I want you to have written a song.” I was probably fifteen at this point. That sounded like saying, “I want you to wiggle your ears. Do this thing that for most people is pretty much impossible.”

It was the first time that it even occurred to me that mortals could write songs like my musical heroes. It was the beginning of this incredibly long journey. I've been writing songs for 35 years and have written well over 1,000 of them. That was a flashpoint. That was the moment when I realized, “This is something that people do.” While it was still many years after that before I became a professional songwriter, that was the first moment where I thought, “This is something that someone like me can do.”

In terms of the work I'm doing, I fell into the work that I'm doing. It had everything to do with a seatmate on a flight. I don't talk to people on airplanes. I sit down and read my book. That's that. We are about halfway through the flight and I start chatting with the woman next to me. At some point, she says, “What do you do for a living?” I said, “I'm a professional songwriter.”

I still don't know exactly what prompted me to do this because I had done none of this before, but I said to her, “I've often wondered what it would be like to take the principles of songwriting and apply them in a business context.” I'm riffing here. There was no reason that I would've said this. I'd never done it. Her reply was, “I run an organization inside of Deloitte Consulting called The Greenhouse. This sounds like something we would be interested in.” That was the beginning of it. Talk about a flashpoint. That was the beginning of the work that I'm doing ten years later.

I'm blown away. First of all, there is this thing about seeing the impossible turn into the possible. It’s this idea of like, “Who can write songs? Where do these songs come from? That's not something I can do,” and then here you are, thousands of songs later. You're doing it. Sitting next to somebody in a very serendipitous moment is so interesting. This is the second time on this show that someone said, “I sat next to somebody and it changed my life forever.” If there's a note to the audience, talk to your seatmates because you never know it could change your life.

It's not exactly what I would call a business model. I can't book flights and try to meet people that way, but it worked out incredibly well. I am forever grateful.

It's really wild. Hearing that is remarkable. At first, it took some courage for you to even put those words out in the world, like, “What would it look like to do this?” We have to sometimes be unabashed and say, “What is the what if statement that I would put out into the world that I haven't considered? If the person or people around me would receive it and run with that, what would happen?” Some people don't think that way. It's a good connection to the way that your work is being received. It's about innovation, but it starts with, “What if we try this?”

In the words of the IDEO people, “How might we?”

Before we get too far along, tell me what happens next. Here you are. You talk to these people at Deloitte and they say, “Let's give this a go.” What happened after that?

The Power Of Creativity In Business

I put together a program where I effectively broke down the process of writing songs so that bright motivated people who don't think of themselves as creative could do this thing. All you need to be creative is the proper tools and a little explanation. We are all creative. I believe this in my heart. I put together the program. The whole program was based around exploring an idea that was important to whomever I was working with and turning that idea into a metaphor so that it humanizes it and adds emotion to it.

Once they're given the rules for, “Here's how verses work. Here's how choruses work,” they write the lyrics. On the spot, because I'm not expecting people to all of a sudden learn an instrument because that's a little much, I will put their lyrics to music based on what genre of song they think they've written. Is it country? Is it blues? Is it rock? Is it pop? We then all sing their new song. It's so much fun.

The program is not designed for an extended period of people being uncomfortable. It is that first minute where I say, “You are going to write and sing a song that everybody gets a little bit ill at ease.” The rest of the program is all about breaking it down and explaining how this is possible. One of the things that we discussed with Deloitte before I ever did one of these was, “What's our contingency plan? What happens if people can't do this?” I have done this program multiple hundreds of times. Every single time, they write a song. There is no what if necessary.

That's awesome. One of the things that you talked about for a moment here, and I'm going to double-click on it, is a sense that it takes that commitment to start writing the song. The thought of singing, that’s where the confidence starts to build up to that. It's almost like that's a no-brainer once you start to get into the process of, “Can we write this?” It's breaking through that first barrier and allows for bigger things to happen. If you take that to another level, once you believe that you can do something, you start wondering, “What else can I do beyond that?”

You hit it on the head. It's about momentum. When you sit down with a group of people cold and say, “You're going to write and sing a song,” there are all the alarm bells. Once you've written the verse and the chorus and all of a sudden, there's music involved, there's this sense of momentum. This happens piece by piece. It's not a jarring thing. It is a gradual building of momentum to where they want to sing their song. By the time we get there, it's almost a foregone conclusion. You're right.

Momentum is key: piece by piece, progress builds, and before you know it, you’re singing your own song!

I want to slow things down for you. I want to get back into your story. I want to talk about some of the earlier periods of your life where you had to build momentum or create some of the things that weren't as easy for you. I know you talked about the songwriting process, the beginning. What are some other challenges that you faced before sitting next to that person in the room?

Patience And The Long Journey To Success

If you want to talk about a career in music, how long do you have for the number of challenges that you face? If I've learned anything in the years that I've been a musician and a music producer, it's that you can't make the end goal the all-important thing. You cannot do that. As I like to tell beginning songwriters, I wrote songs for 15 years before a known artist recorded 1 of my songs and 30 years before I had a song on a Grammy-winning record.

Those are wonderful things to have on a resume, I'm not going to lie, but what happened for the first 15 years and then the next 15, that's your whole life that's going by. It's really about finding the intrinsic motivation to get up every day in spite of the lack of visible progress for a very long time. Those are skills that have held me in good stead in my entire life.

What you said there is such an important insight because there are so many people who struggle through the journey. They’re like, “Why can't I be a successful songwriter?” or the successful insert whatever profession you're in. They're more comparing people's end game versus where they're at. That's a challenge. It's a long process to get there. You have to enjoy the journey and find that motivation along the way to continue to show up and enjoy the process of becoming.

Without that, you're dead in the water. In a career in the arts, if your goal is the awards, that's a lonely, awful struggle. There is a good reason, karmically speaking, why these things take time. In learning what it is that moves you about your given craft, by the time you have become good at it and the awards start to happen, you're not moved one way or the other by the awards. You know what it is that makes you tick.

Introduction To The Episode

This is unrelated but important. Those shows like The Voice and American Idol do more damage to artists than help. A lot of these artists are very young and gifted but have done none of the work to know what it is about music that moves them, and they don't have a chance to develop that. It's really hard to sustain a career if you don't know what it is that moves you.

I love this. One of the things I want to play off of is that I had a conversation with somebody about passion. What people miss about passion is that there's suffering involved with passion. When you're following this sense of like, “I'm passionate about something,” there's also a suffering that goes along with the passion. There's an element of that that resonates with what you shared. You have to be okay with that element of suffering if you're passionate about something that is important to you.

Passion isn’t just joy—it’s suffering too. But if you love something, you embrace both the highs and lows.

By definition, I am not a patient person but I needed to learn to be patient. Once you learn to be patient or once you learn to focus on the here and now and not worry so much about the end game, you suffer less and you can get to work. There's a lot to be said for putting your head down and getting to work.

Let's fast forward. Here you are, working with Deloitte and putting things out in the world. What brought you to do some things like writing a book or thinking that it was maybe beyond the Deloitte doors, if you will?

The way I describe what happened with Deloitte was I was gifted this thing. Here's the thing about gifts. Unless you then capitalize on them, you can't continue. A couple of things happened at once. The Deloitte work started to come in. I found that I loved it. I genuinely loved it. I realized when I started to try and reach a broader audience, not everybody is as open-minded as my seatmate on my flight. I needed to find a way to articulate the work that I was doing, why it was important, and how it could be helpful so that I wasn't known as the dude who brought a guitar to your office. When you talk about incorporating the arts into business, for a lot of people, that's a stretch.

For me, writing a book was about codifying the work that I was doing in a way that could appeal more broadly to my target audience. I'd never written a book. I have written lots of songs. Once you've been doing it for a while, three hours is about what it takes to write a song when you're a professional songwriter who has been working for decades. You can't write a book in three hours. For me, writing a book was like sitting down and writing a song a day but with zero sense of completion. It was a different mindset, but I was used to getting to work every day and writing, so I had to learn how to translate some of those skills into a longer process. I really enjoyed it.

It's good to hear that you enjoyed it. There is an element that it has challenges but you get into the flow. You start to realize that this is something that's not going to be easy, but you start to enjoy the process of writing it. I talked to a lot of people on the show and they were like, “I hate writing but I like it when it's written.” There are some people who say, “I really enjoy the writing process.”

This is a carryover from some of the muscles I had built up learning to be patient in my songwriting career. When it came time to write a book, I knew it was going to take a while and I knew the end game couldn't be the goal. I settled into doing the work. I would be lying if I said there weren't a couple of dark nights of the soul in the process. In a book, it's very hard to change course once you're a long way in. I had to do that in order to finally refine my message. That was not a whole lot of fun, but overall, I enjoyed the process.

Talk for a moment about the key ideas from the book. There are a lot of things I can intuit about it. I haven't read it yet, to be honest. I'm going to pick up a copy. I would love to give the guests a taste of what they can expect when they read the book.

The book is based around codifying the work that I do with organizations. It's all about explaining how I take an idea that's important to an organization and help them turn it into a metaphor, what that means, and how powerful metaphors can be. I then use musical examples that everyone would know to articulate, “Here's how verses work. Here's how choruses work.”

There is a meta benefit, and this was part of my figuring out the arc of this book. It is that every skill that you develop while you are learning to write songs is a critical skill necessary for innovation. What I do is I take the skills that are important for innovation, things like lateral thinking, communication, empathy, risk-taking, and collaboration, map them to a songwriting skill, and explain how those work hand in hand so that ultimately, the more you understand about the songwriting process, the deeper your appreciation and ability will be when it comes to innovation.

I love that. It's such a great way to package it up too. There's theory and science in there, but it's also delivered in a way that allows people to start to connect the dots to the work and say, “Maybe this isn't so hard for us to integrate.” For those who are maybe the laggards or the people who are reluctant to embrace this concept, this is a way for them to get more comfortable with it.

That's it. For me, this book was all about articulating this in a way that, first of all, made people more comfortable, spoke in a language they were used to hearing, and did it in a way that showed that there is a broader business case for this work.

It's wonderful. One of the things that comes to mind is that there's been a lot of talk about giving as a prescription for people's mental health. There's an organization called Art Pharmacy that is in the process of trying to put this on the radar of a lot of organizations and a lot of municipalities. The work you're doing could be something that people could use in that capacity where it's not just about going to attend a concert, but it's about how we interact with the process of creating music.

That's huge. One of the terms that I have stumbled across as I continue to educate myself about the work that I'm doing is creative confidence. Creative confidence is so deceptively simple in the way that it sounds, but when you are creatively confident that colors your entire life. It is good for your mental health. It shows that you are capable of taking something that seemed impossible and doing it. How could that not translate into every aspect of your life? The thing that I love about my work is how exhilarating it is for people who don't think of themselves as creative. That exhilaration and that motivation carries over, I hope, into the work that they do and the lives that they lead.

Creative confidence colors your entire life. It’s about doing the impossible and realizing your potential.

That is a spark you see in someone's eyes when you see them finally say, “I'm doing this. I'm making this happen.” This is not to knock on accountants or lawyers who don't typically see themselves in the vein of being a creative, but seeing themselves tapping into something that is very different for them is what's so cool about this. You get the joy of that.

That's it. You reminded me of a very funny story. I did this for a group called Women in Tax. It may not be what you would immediately think of when you think of a group of songwriters. One of the things I do after I introduce myself and give people a little bit of my background is say, “Are there any questions?” Somebody in the back of the room raises her hand and says, “Have you ever worked with tax professionals before?” They were as creative, joyful, and focused on the work as any group I've ever worked with. It’s a reminder that it doesn't matter what your background is. As human beings, we are creative.

I love that. There’s a sense that we have to stop putting ourselves in boxes. In some ways, I did stereotype, but I was doing it for the sake of illustration. It's important for us to say, “Don't put yourself in a box.” That's important for us to embrace all the parts of who we are, which oftentimes we hold back. I'm going to come back to you again. What are some things you've learned about yourself along this process of expanding your capacity not just to be a songwriter but to be someone who could make an impact on a broader scale in this way?

I'm going to bring this back to something that I've heard you say because I found it so interesting. What I've learned is that even after a full career in the arts, I can come back around to what I thought I was going to be doing when I was in college. I had already taken the LSAT. I thought I was going to be an attorney. I thought I was going to be in the legal business world. That's where I thought I was headed. I've heard you say that you started in the arts and went to the business world but are reincorporating the arts into what you do. The surprise for me and the joy for me is this thing that I thought I walked away from in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I'm circling back around to and enjoying it. I'm enjoying working with businesses. I'm enjoying that part of the world that I was not connected to for decades.

It's such a wonderful thing when you realize that we don't have to hold back parts of who we are. We can be all the parts of who we are and bring it into the work, which is amazing. That's something we wish for everyone, but it's so hard to navigate that path, especially when we get comfortable in certain worlds.

You have to be willing to be a little uncomfortable for a minute. A really wise guy said to me years ago, “When your life is going well, everything that you do informs everything else. It's all connected. You're allowing each aspect of your life to touch every other aspect in a way that broadens your whole approach to life.”

The best moments in life come when we allow all parts of who we are to connect and influence each other.

Visually, I see the boundaries of who we are melting away. We see this melding and fluidity that happens in our lives. When we do that, cool things happen. There are people who are tuning in and are feeling that sense of rigidity in their lives or feeling like they're stuck in these different boxes. See what happens when the different boxes play around and start to melt away. Maybe there's some way you can be a songwriting tax accountant who can be out there doing something cool like that.

Anyone who is tuning in who is considering exploring the broader sense of their creative selves, I will tell you that even after 35 years of writing songs, when I sit down to write, I am still a little scared. When you're touching that part of yourself that is vulnerable and creative, it's scary. What I would say to people is, “Don't let that fear stop you. It is short-lived. The other side of that fear is exhilaration, joy, and something that you've never imagined that you could do.” As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says, that little bit of extra activation energy that you need to get past it is worth it.

I love that. It's so true. The most brilliant people in the world will tell you, “I still get scared standing up and talking in public or doing this or doing that.” That's what it is. It’s the activation energy you need to get over that moment of, “Am I really doing this?” You do it, and then all of a sudden, there you are. We've covered a lot of ground very quickly. Is there anything else around the work that you feel we need to talk about? Before we close the chapter on the work you're doing, is there any particular story or aspect that you think is important to touch on?

Cliff’s Experience With A Tough Audience

There's a story I tell in the book that's a fun one that might be a good one to close on. I was brought into an organization. It was a small leadership team. Right before I went on, the organizer said to me, “This is so you know. The head of this team was a prison warden for twenty years before he changed professions. Everyone on the team is scared of him. Good luck.”

I go on and start to break down the songwriting process. I am getting nothing from this guy. He was a total stone face. We make our way through the song and they have written their lyrics but still, nothing is happening here. I'm used to a little bit of laughter, but nothing. At that point, I usually say, “What genre are you imagining your song is?” He finally speaks up and says, “I'm thinking it's like an ‘80s heavy metal.” I start to turn their lyric into a Scorpions tune. The next thing I know, this guy is singing and he's into it. This guy who I really didn't think I was touching at all was all the way in. You never know.

That’s wonderful. It would've been fascinating if he started to say, “It's going to be a show tune,” out of the blue.

Who knows what prison wardens listen to when they're on the job?

That is so cool. I love that story. It also is so cool because when you see someone come alive like that and the people around them see them come alive, it opens the door for a lot of connections that wouldn't normally be there. The work you're doing is not just about innovating. It's about connecting. An important thing that we often are missing in the workplace is this connection piece.

The beauty of the work is that it is designed to be a great leveler. I'm the only person who's written a bunch of songs. Every once in a while, you find an outlier who's done a little of it. The idea is no matter who you are working with, they're all starting as beginners. That's a great way to generate that kind of connection.

I'll share a quick story of my own because it reminded me of this. There's a conductor of the Boston Youth Philharmonic. His name is Benjamin Zander. He wrote a book called The Art of Possibility. He came to facilitate a workshop for a company I was working at and had us all singing in German. Most of the people and the executives I was with, none of us spoke German, but we were singing German by the time that he was done. It was really wonderful. It was a great experience. I love the fact that it's possible if you follow along and keep the instructions going.

That’s pretty great.

It was neat. The last question is the one that we've all been waiting for, and I can't wait to hear from you on this. What are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you and why?

This is such a fun question because I'm an avid reader. I'll start with one because of the beauty of the writing and the economy of wording and description. The Great Gatsby, for me, is one of those books that the briefest of thumbnail sketches tells you universes about people. The Great Gatsby is one. On an entirely unrelated note, a friend years ago introduced me to the writing of Thich Nhat Hanh. He has a book called Your True Home, which is a little daily thought about how we are connected or something about ways that we can show kindness or compassion.

Every time I read Thich Nhat Hanh, my shoulders drop. It's such a great feeling. Those are two books. You were sweet enough to ask me also, “Is there a piece of music for you?” I should have been born in the ‘20s because anything that Cole Porter has ever written and Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin is pieces of music that transcends space and time for me.

I heard it in my head when you said that. What a wonderful thing to conclude here. I'm so thrilled that you mentioned The Great Gatsby because that's such a wonderful book. Thinking about all the texture it brings in and the imagery, it's a time capsule, if you will. It’s so wonderful. Thich Nhat Hanh has written meditations. It's one of those things that you could read and listen to because I also have it on Audible. It takes you away and gets you thinking about our existence and how we are. Thank you so much for sharing that. This has been such a wonderful conversation. There were so many great insights. I'm going to rectify my misgiving here and grab your book. Maybe I have it on the shelf but I haven't read it.

If you don't, I know a guy so let me know.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been truly wonderful. Thanks for going on the journey with us.

It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Before you go, I want to make sure that I can give the audience a place where they can find out more about you. What's the best place?

I'll make it super simple. I have a five-digit letter website, TR4TR.com. That is short for TheReason4TheRhymes.com.

I love it. That's awesome. I am so grateful for that. You make it nice and easy for us. Go pick up the book, which is available on Amazon and other places wherever you can find books. It’s wonderful to have you on the show. Thanks to the audience for coming on the journey. I know you're inspired and ready to take some risks or maybe write a song or two. If you want to do that, reach out to Cliff. He’ll help you. Thanks again.

Important Links

• Cliff Goldmacher

• The Reason for the Rhymes

• The Reason for the Rhymes: Mastering the Seven Essential Skills of Innovation by Learning to Write Songs

• The Great Gatsby

• Your True Home

• The Art of Possibility

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