A Diamond In The Rubble....

As a result of my recent divorce, I had the distinct pleasure of laying hands on everything I own. As I was going through it all and getting rid of what I could, I came across a cassette tape that is (dare I say) 22 years old.

The tape is a recording that a friend of mine from college (Raegan Echols) turned in as his Senior Project for a music production class. Using what crappy equipment I had and whatever free software I could download, I was able to convert the project to an MP3 file. If you would like, you may listen to it here.

Here's the story behind the song.

All through high school, I was going to be a musician. Nevermind that I never learned to read music, I was going to be a musician. I had played piano since I was about 6 or so. Anyway, I auditioned and was accepted into the music department at Belmont College (at the time, University now). There was just one small problem, I was going to begin my college career on academic probation. So, I dropped the music major idea pretty quickly. Belmont also had a strong Music Business program, so I changed over to that.

One of my first classes was "Music Theory For Music Business Majors" or something like that. The professor was John Arnn, what a hoot that guy was. Anyway, we had to write a song for one of our assignments. I could write pretty good chord progressions,but lyrics came pretty tough. I wrote the chord progression that you hear in the song and had a friend of mine (Mike Bond, anybody know what happened to that guy?) write some lyrics. I turned it in and got a B, assignment done, no problem.

A couple of years later, Raegan told me that he had to produce an original song for his senior project. I told him that I had written a song years before and thought he might like it. We went to a piano room, I played it for him, he liked it, except for the lyrics (sorry Mike).

Now Raegan had some connections in the music industry, his uncle was Jerry Reed and Raegan was his road manager during the summers. So Raegan gets some members of Jerry's band to come in and play some of the parts. I played the piano and string parts, other members of Jerry's band played the rest.

After we had recorded the rhythm tracks, he took a cassette tape of it and gave it to Shelby Kennedy who was also a student at Belmont at the time and a very good songwriter (he's now a bigwig at BMI I think).

Anyway, Shelby did a fantastic job of writing some lyrics to fit what we had already recorded (we didn't have to change a thing). I was amazed.

I never met the singer and don't know his name. I did watch the lead guitar guy record his part, it was amazing. He listened to the song once, told them to record, then he played the part that you hear. As soon as he finished, he packed up his guitar and left. It was amazing.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this blast from my past. If you know someone that wants to take it and make it a hit, I could sure use the cash ;-).