My wife, helpful and, uh, subtle as she is, bought me The Complete Idiot\'s Guide to Songwriting (2nd Edition) by Joel Hirschhorn . I've briefly skimmed over it, but have yet to start reading. In the meantime, I visited my local library and checked out all the music books that caught my eye. One was If They Ask You, You Can Write a Song. I started reading it and noticed a lot of things looked similar to something I'd seen before. I went back to the Idiot's Guide and there was my answer: authors of If They Ask are Joel Hirschhorn and Al Kasha. Like most things in my local library, it's a little dated (published 1986 -- even has sections devoted to disco).
Anyway, did a search of this forum and didn't notice any mention of Mr. Hirschhorn. Has anyone read any of his books on songwriting that could offer a brief review?
As a side note, as I was just now googling I noticed that Joel Hirshhorn passed recently (9/18/05).
