- Gordon Pogoda ’84
A few years after he left his engineering job and moved to Los Angeles to write songs, Gordon Pogoda hit the big time. Since then, his songs have been featured in more than 40 television shows, including CSI Miami, Sex and the City, ER, Hannah Montana, and Will and Grace, and in movies like the Oscar-winning Little Miss Sunshine, Josie and the Pussycats, and a Lindsay Lohan vehicle.
Pogoda’s music is heard around the world, too. In recent years, he
has had a number two song in Russia, as well as recordings that went
platinum in Australia, Greece, and Finland. His compositions have been
recorded for Pop Idol (the European version of television’s
American Idol) and for various Disney films, TV shows,
and DVDs. To hear Pogoda’s music check out his MySpace
page at: myspace.com/gordonpogodasongwriter;
email: gordon@gordonpogoda.com.
For a medley of Gordon's songs, compiled exclusively for UMass Amherst magazine click here. For other great interviews visit My Hit Online or Songlink.
When I was eight years old, I knew I wanted to play the piano, and for five years I kept begging my parents for piano lessons. The only problem was we didn’t have a piano. They were concerned about spending over $1,000 to buy one if I might quit after a few months. Then, when I was 13, we were at a family gathering where there was a piano and sheet music. I asked my cousin how the notes on the sheet music corresponded to the keys on the piano.
After three hours, I could play three songs. Two of them I still remember:
“You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon and “It Don’t Come Easy” by Ringo Starr.
Everyone told my parents “You’re nuts if you don’t get this kid a piano.”
I started writing songs a year and a half later. In my senior year
of high school, I announced to my parents that I wanted to be a professional
songwriter. They were very nervous about this, of course, because they
didn’t want me to struggle. They convinced me to go to college and
into chemical engineering. So for four years at UMass
Amherst and five
years afterward in an engineering job, I wasn’t pursuing my dream.
I still wrote songs on the side, but I felt like I was half into the
songwriting and half into the engineering and not doing very well at
either.
So I decided to move to L.A. and pursue my songwriting full-time. On
the plane, I thought, I don’t know a single person in L.A., and I’m
trying to pursue a career that’s all about everyone you know. I’m either
very brave or very crazy.
I had a plan, though. I knew there was a songwriters’
association in Los Angeles. I immediately started volunteering, which led to a paid
position dealing with songwriters who had gold records. I worked there
for eight years, while making contacts.
The first time I ever heard a song of mine on
the radio, I was in my
living room, and after jumping up and down, I looked at the piano where
that song had been created, and then 10 feet away at the radio now
playing that very song, and I thought, “What a short distance, and
what a long distance, that was.”
I write in different genres: pop, rock, R&B, urban, country, and
others. I often get inspiration by taking walks here in Canoga
Park,
a very wooded area with lakes, streams, and waterfalls.
My method? I usually go to the piano and start playing around with
melodies. Sometimes a certain sequence of notes will strike me as a
nice melody, and that will inspire me to write the rest. Then, lyrically,
I usually start with a title and build a story around that.
One of my favorite collaborators was the first person I met at UMass
Amherst. I met Chris Page the first day of freshman year, when I got
into the registration line. He was a fashion marketing major. We became
friends—still are to this day—and we wrote maybe 25 songs together,
even after college. We met in 1980 and wrote a song in 1991 that was
recorded and released in 2001. So almost 20 years after we met, a song
was recorded; the royalties would have covered a good portion of my
tuition. I wish I would have known that back then.
When I look at the whole journey, from when I was eight years old until
now, I find it ironic that I went to UMass Amherst to pursue chemical
engineering, and yet the first person I met there was a songwriter.
That’s an interesting design. Sometimes fate steps in your path, or
behind you in a registration line, but it’s not until years later that
you realize the importance. Despite the early barriers, there was something
in my core, probably in my DNA, that kept pulling me back to music,
and it was much stronger than all the outside forces pulling me away.
I don’t write songs about thermodynamics or the Bernoulli
equation,
but I feel my chemical engineering education helped me with solving
problems, like how to break into the music industry. If I have a thousand
obstacles thrown in my path, then engineering taught me how to find
ways to climb over those obstacles. There’s definitely a connection.
Whenever I thought about quitting, I’d say to myself, “Well, what if
I gave up and never knew the next day I would have written my breakthrough
hit?” So it’s actually scarier to quit than to go on.
