With credentials like that who needs to write, you just compose the questions, e-mail them, and back comes a wonderful Q&A. Love it! You will too. Read on.
You are a native of Texas. Can you draw any parallels between Texas and Tennessee (or may be Nashville)?
Texas is way
hotter and drier. Tennessee has farms & farmers, Texas has ranches &
ranchers, but all in all the people in both are very similar. I'm from Bandera,
TX. – which is in the Hill Country part of the state – so the terrain in Middle
TN. feels familiar.
Nashville is a place
all to itself with a crazy mixture of folks from Florida, Texas, California,
Oklahoma, South Carolina, etc., all trying to reach their dreams, in a town
with 3 major interstates, that's also filled with bankers, lawyer, hillbillies,
and college kids..... I thought I hated the traffic here until I spent two days
in Atlanta last week!!!!
As a Grammy award winning songwriter,
what advice would you give to someone aspiring to have success in the music
industry?
Be very sure
that music is what you want to do, because there are many, many easier ways to
make a living. If it's anything less than a calling on your life then make sure
that you are ready for a lot of hard roads, and patience is not only a virtue,
it is a requirement.... After that, I tell people wanting to be in music to
learn their craft by studying the masters and NOT by listening to current radio
all the time.
You need to
be career minded and not thinking about how fast you can get a cut or a
contract. When I first moved here a great writer/friend named Chapin Hartford
told me to “build your catalog” because once you get the first cut or two you
need to have more to follow. I didn't follow that advice closely enough and
have had gaps in my career where I didn't get any cuts and the funds got very
tight.... The other key is “quality not quantity.” I would rather spend six months on a song and have a song like “I Hope You Dance” than a whole shelf full of OK songs. I see a lot of younger writers posting on Facebook about writing “5 songs before lunch,” and I wonder just how good any of those songs could be....
The last 6
years of my career have been devoted to spending hours every day agonizing over
a few songs or ideas that have potential, and every night I spend hours on
YouTube “rabbit-trailing” over songs by Jimmy Webb, Carole King, Todd Rundgren,
Lefty Frizzell, Paul McCartney, David Gates, Paul Williams, Bacharach and
David, etc., etc., etc.
The longer that I do this and the more that I learn
about it, the more I realize how little I know about music, but it's such a
beautiful discovery every time I write something new or find a new melody or
idea.....
What is your next goal in life?
To be a
better example of what following Jesus means. To be a better husband and
father. To be a better writer.
If you could go back in your life,
what one thing would you change?
Fear. If I
could take fear out of the equation, it would have saved me so much agony and
loss due to trying to escape it with things of the world, only to find out, now
that I'm older, that most of what I was fearing was in my mind......
You have had multiple hits on the
radio. How do you feel when you hear one
of them on the radio today?
It will
always be a great feeling to hear something I've had a part in playing on the
air, but the best feeling is when you play it live and hear the air go out of
the room when the audience recognizes the song. And then to hear them tell how
it changed their lives and meant so much to them.....
As the father of both girls and boys,
so far what has been the biggest eye-opener for you about raising children?
That girls
are wired for drama even before the hormones arrive!!!! And that there is a
mandatory chemical change that makes teenagers smarter than everyone else!!! Ha-ha...
Honestly,
though, I think that having kids makes you really think about what comes after
this life and how I want to help them get to the right place.
What lesson or principle is the Holy
Spirit teaching you right now in your life?
The synopsis
of that would be longer than War and Peace!!! Almost every idea, notion, belief
that I've held for most of my life has been turned over, flipped upside down,
and flattened out. God just won't stay in his box, and it's taking a lot of
stretching and pruning for me to find that out!!!....
What brings you joy?
Of course,
my family is always a great source of joy..... Music seems to be one of the
great direct connections to heaven, and many times I find myself being
overwhelmed with emotions when I'm listening to certain things. All my life
I've had times where some music can just
shatter me and I even feel a sadness or a joy that's deeper than just the human
experience and not of this world!!!! (And, I believe that we are just hearing a
tiny echo of what it will sound like in heaven.)
I know your family just welcomed a
new puppy to the family at Christmas.
How do you feel about cats?
I don't like
cats, because I'm usually allergic to them. Plus, most cats are truly divas...
What is the last thing you scribbled
on a paper napkin?
In the old
days it would have been a song idea. Now it's probably an email address or
website...
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