There is an old adage for creative people: “quality in equals quality out.” Or the converse: “garbage in, garbage out.” In other words, when we drop the bucket down into the dark depths of our creative wells, the beauty and worth of what we pull up, hand over hand, will be impacted by how we have stocked those wells. Watch a marathon of The Bachelor: Officer and a Gentleman, for instance, and we may get some insights into pettiness, but we’ll soon find ourselves malnourished for beautiful language. But, look out, Andy, that Bevin is crazy as a loon.

I attended the ASCAP “I Create Music Expo” this past weekend in LA. While some of the panels turned into nature-show style feeding frenzies where attendees swarmed high profile industry panelists and brandished press kits and CDs like weapons, the arc of the weekend for me involved the twining threads in the stories told by great songwriters and producers.

Hal David , who with Burt Bacharach wrote such classics as “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” and “What the World Needs Now” and “Close to You” (come on!), told a room of a thousand-plus that ...