Diary of a Player (17 page)

After I graduated, I heard they installed surveillance cameras in the studio, making that sort of all-nighter impossible. That's too bad. I learned more before seven A.M. than most kids learned all day.

The first thing that I'm gonna do
Is spread my wings and fly.

—“When I Get Where I'm Going,” written by George Teren and Rivers Rutherford

I
hope I don't get hurt patting myself on the back while writing this chapter, but here's where I finally get to go from being some schoolkid who scores the occasional C-note playing guitar and singing a few songs to making the grade as an actual professional and nearly grown-up musician.

This is where I get where I'm going professionally—or at least on the right path.

I made a couple of smart decisions right about now, especially for a guy who'd recently earned that D in guitar. First of all, I didn't rush into any kind of bad deals right away, as people tend to do when they're starting out. Second, thanks to all of those connections I made during my time at Belmont, I suddenly began to feel some real interest from the Nashville music community. Since I had personally interned for a significant portion of that music community, I was pleasantly
surprised to find out that some of those people liked me okay. I'm a great believer in watching and waiting for your turn, and it's worked out well for me.

If you remember, I had decided not to tell anyone during my first year at Belmont that I even wrote songs or sang. Just be a player. In more ways than one. Well, really just the one. Still, I played backup guitar for people in the big Belmont Showcase Series and got to know the school. A great girl named Sally Smithwyck had me play lead in her band in several different showcases. So I made a name for myself as the go-to country guitarist in the school. And I was booked solid in that capacity.

In fact, when I was playing for Sally, she really let me shine. She found out I could play fast, so she wrote a fast song that showcased guitar. I really got to burn. It was after one of these really great nights that Frank Rogers came backstage. Even though Frank and I played together in the studio, we didn't take each other very seriously. After I tore that solo up, he said, “You know, I think we should try to record something together sometime.” The rest is history.

Finally the next year I was ready to try it myself. I went all-out and entered and won the Belmont Country Showcase.
This earned me a chance to appear in the Best of the Best Showcase, where Belmont presents the winners in various categories and even invites the A & R community to come and see the show.

So I decided to enter the Songwriters Showcase too, but to do so, I needed five good songs. At best, I had three—including one called “Another You” that would ultimately become my first outside cut. (Eventually, “Another You” would go on to become a top-five country record for David Kersh, a man from Humble, Texas, whom I must hereby thank for a number three single, a bass boat, and my first house.)

Back before all that seemed possible, I was still desperately trying to pull together five songs that could showcase what I could really do. The problem was, there weren't five songs that could show what I could do. Just those three or so. And I also realized I had too many ballads and not
any
real up-tempo songs. So I got together one night with my cowriter and future producer Frank Rogers and said to him, “We
really
need a crowd-pleaser here. Something that could lighten the mood and bring the house down.” So Frank and I sat down and wrote “I'm Gonna Miss Her”—also known as “The Fishin' Song.” I debuted it at the Belmont Songwriters Showcase,
and, well, it brought the house down. This little funny song was just about to change my whole life a couple different times in a couple different ways.

This little funny song was just about to change my whole life a couple different times in a couple different ways.

Next I performed at a big ASCAP showcase. My adopted family there really never let me go after I finished my internship and was bound and determined to see me achieve my true potential. The showcase went great, and just as I was about to graduate Belmont, EMI Music Publishing came calling. At the time, I convinced myself not to sign anything as a writer until I graduated. I figured I just needed to get through college, keep my promise to my mom, and then I would deal with the rest of my life.

Fortunately, right after I picked up my diploma from Belmont, Pat Finch from EMI formally offered me my first deal as a professional songwriter. Within a week or so of graduation, I became a professional songwriter making $22,500 a year.

I was twenty-one years old at the time and had learned during college that I could go to Kroger and eat a very balanced diet for sixteen dollars a week, covering both of the two major food groups—macaroni and cheese.

At this point, I worried a lot less about my eating and a lot more about my songwriting. In the back of my mind, I decided that I needed to have a couple of albums of songs written before I ever got a record deal. More than anything, I wanted to be prepared. So I started writing constantly, sometimes on my own and often with the new circle of talented friends that I had started to run with. I began getting together with some combination of Chris DuBois, Frank Rogers, and Kelley Lovelace almost every night. We would write until three or four in the morning, when one of us began to fall asleep in the chair. By the way, the particular chair in my condo that Chris DuBois would usually drift off in was my Papaw's old “Archie Bunker” chair. When I moved to Nashville, I moved it down here with me. And I've still got it. We've completed almost every song we've ever written together with either Chris or I sitting in that thing.

As I look back on it now, those days of all-night songwriting in my little band of brothers were some of the best and most productive of my life. I doubt I could do that sort of thing now, because running wide open in my thirties would probably kill me. Back then we were all young and painfully single, so we were free to get together any night we wanted. We would have loved to have had other plans. We tried like
hell to have other plans. But luckily, we usually weren't that lucky.

That shared lack of love in our lives led to a whole lot of songs. I was living outside of Nashville near Brentwood, renting a two-bedroom condo. And as bad as I wanted a more successful dating life, maybe God had other plans. It's hard to write your best songs when you feel no desperation.

S
peaking of desperation, I was pretty much a romantic basket case during my early years in Nashville. But let's go back in time . . .

As bad as I wanted a more successful dating life, maybe God had other plans. It's hard to write your best songs when you feel no desperation.

Back when I was still living in West Virginia in 1991 and still going to college at West Liberty, I started dating a girl I'd known in high school. Our first date was going to see a movie she wanted to see called
Father of the Bride
on December 28—I only remember the exact day because that also happens to be my mother's birthday. If you've been living under a rock, the movie starred Steve Martin as the father of
the bride, Diane Keaton as the mother of the bride, and a young actress named Kimberly Williams as, you guessed it, the bride. For my big first date, I took this girl not only to the movies but also to a romantic dinner at Pizza Hut—which in my defense was the second-nicest restaurant in the general vicinity of the Ohio Valley Mall.

As with any young couple, you tend to remember your first-date movies, and I definitely remembered this one. I also remember thinking that the star of the film seemed like the perfect girl. Somehow I felt like this movie had some huge significance in my life. So a year later, when
Father of the Bride
came out on video, we rented it and watched it again to celebrate what was now “our movie.” This was definitely what I would consider my first serious relationship. In the context of the guitar, which is what this book is about, this was to be my first real good reason for the thing to gently weep. Or rejoice for that matter. I wrote songs and played gigs with one thought in mind: impressing my girlfriend. I had a muse. I worked construction for her father, and I was around for all the holidays. I was most certainly smitten. It got serious enough that this girl actually transferred to the college I was going to.

Well, not too long after that, my friend Jim “Coach” Watson,
athletic director at West Liberty State, convinced me that Belmont was a much better place to go for what I wanted to do. He literally had to sit me down and say, “You belong somewhere else. I don't want you to be one of these guys who has potential and nothing to show for it. And quit thinking about the girl. If it's meant to be, you'll make it. This dream is too big to wait any longer.” So after painful deliberation, I enrolled at Belmont and moved to Nashville to follow my dream.