Like many Stanford graduates, Connie Howard went to New York to build a career in international business. “I wanted to put my education to work and get some corporate experience,” the political science major recalls.
Less than five years later, though, she bolted the Big Apple for Nashville—to devote herself to songwriting.
Howard still has a day job, working in human resources for a big hotel chain. But her music is beginning to be heard in the nation’s songwriting capital. Last year, she won grand prize in the annual contest of the Nashville Songwriters Association International. Her entry, a soft ballad titled “Feel,” was selected from more than 1,500 works. Now, Jive Records artist Brittney Cleary—a 13-year-old who used to take piano lessons from Howard—has recorded the song for her debut album, set for release next year.
“Not only is Connie talented, but she’s got a tremendous work ethic,” says Cliff Goldmacher, ’90, a friend from Howard’s Stanford days, who records and engineers songs with her. “She came to Nashville and networked and just worked really hard to get attention for her songs.”
It was Goldmacher who helped her find her first gig back in the summer of 1991—as a cabaret-style performer in the south of France. Upon returning to campus from a trip to France, Goldmacher told Howard about a place called Le Café du Cours, nestled in Aix-en-Provence, that was looking for an American to play piano and sing in English. Howard, already toying with the idea of a postgraduation year in France, took the job that would later reroute her career.
Although she had studied music since childhood, her repertoire, it turned out, was a bit inadequate. “I was supposed to play four or five hours every night, and the first night, I realized that I only knew about an hour and a half of material,” she says. “So the first month there, I was learning songs off the radio and having my dad fax me music.” Once the evening routine found its rhythm, she spent her days developing her music- and lyric-writing abilities and studying jazz piano and French. By the end of her year overseas, she had written more than 20 songs.
Today, Howard writes “a lot of pop music and also modern country, like Faith Hill,” doing vocals on many of her own works. Independent songwriting, unlike most other businesses, has no clear ladder to success, she says. “Breaking into this industry is definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do—it’s all about relationships and who you know. I was so naïve. I thought I’d take the town by storm, but it took me almost three years to be able to get my songs to the right people,” she says.
“They say there are about 5,000 songwriters in this town and only about 100 actually make an okay living from it. There have been times when I’ve thought, ‘I don’t know if I really have the stomach for this.’ But every time I’ve thought that, something good has happened and made me realize I’m on the right path.”
—JOSHUA FRIED, ’01
