Losing It is definitely the worst of the two songs, so let's talk about that first. I'm going to ignore the production quality and also the guitar mistakes, and just focus on the song itself and your delivery of it. Warning: technical musical analysis ahead.MelasZepheos said:
First big problem: You're not singing the root, but the 5th, which is fine in itself, however your voice dips down at the end of each verse vocal line in pentatonic intervals as if you're singing from the root. In other words, your singing is out of key. Not out of tune though - there's a difference. Could be a better song if you changed your vocal melody, that's the main problem with it. Either don't do those dips, or shift your voice up a fourth for the verses so you're in key, or try a different vocal melody altogether. The fact that you obviously haven't noticed this before you put it on YouTube worries me.
I'd stay well away from that standard Status-Quo-esque 1-per5 to 1-maj6 blues guitar intervallic movement too, just quietly. That's been done so many times in the last 150 years or so that people who make decisions on "who should I give money to to make an album" will tune out as soon as they hear it. Find something else, use that instead, or spice it up with some extra chord partials or something, there's a ton of different ways to make 1-5 to 1-6 more interesting, there's 1-5 1-6 1-b7 1-6 or 1-5-8 1-6-8 1-b7-9, or the 1-5 1-6 1-b7 1-6 with 1-5 b3 3 5 tacked on the end and they're just the boring ones everyone uses. Try and think of your own. On the positive side at least you're not moving things around in a I-IV-I-V-IV-I-V7 style 12-bar progression.
The other song is better, you're singing it much better, in the correct key for a start. However the other big problem with both songs is that there is no dynamics. If you've got an acoustic guitar in your hands, exploit its ability to play both very quietly and very loudly, to create some dynamic tension in your piece. You can speed up and slow down things too, pause for dramatic effect during key lyrical phrases, there's all sorts of things you can do. Watch some of the better singer/songwriters (i.e not Bob Dylan) and you'll notice that if they are on their own they don't just play a piece "flat", they'll let the piece "breathe" a little, even if the piece has a fixed rhythm. You don't have to play a piece at one fixed volume all the time, and you definitely shouldn't sing it all at exactly the same volume either. Listen to the following song - listen to how the songwriter sucks you in by altering volumes of both his guitar and voice to suit the story and to emphasize key phrases and points.
It's a deliberately emotionally manipulative song, which is why I chose it to illustrate this example. He's using every trick in the book to try and draw emotion out of the listener. Whether you agree with the political points he's making or not is completely irrelevant. Chances are that song made you feel mad, or sad, or angry, or vindicated, or like you want to give him a hug for sticking up for the downtrodden, or like you'd want to slap him across the head for making such a straw-man argument, but he at least made you feel something. That's the true art of the singer/songwriter - to convey emotion to an audience along with narrative and song content, using various techniques, whether it's a love song, or a political song, or a comedy song. If you can master that, you can then more confidently shop yourself to a label, because you may then have something that they want. Right now you sound like a busker who is trying to be as loud as possible all the time to try and drown out the shopping mall PA system. That's fine if that's what your aspirations are. If however you're interested in music industry attention you're going to have to change up your style and embrace subtlety and dynamics a little more.
(I hate David Rovics BTW so I hope you appreciate the pain I went through to discuss this dynamics issue just now.)
lol
