Diary of a Player

by Brad Paisley

  Next I interned for Atlantic Records. I interned in record promotion and worked with a woman named Debbie Bellin, who was an excellent promoter. It was all part of my plan to try to cover every aspect of the business. The way I saw it, I couldn’t believe they were going to let me walk into a record company like Atlantic Records every day (free of charge) and watch what a record company does. Why wouldn’t you do that if you want to be in the music business?

  I remember driving around these buildings on Music Row when I first arrived in Nashville and thinking, What’s going on in there? Is Alan Jackson inside there right now recording some hit song? Is Joe Galante planning the launch of the next big band? I have a feeling that today people walk into record company buildings asking, “Can I see Brad Paisley, please? Where do you keep him?”

  Finally, there was my most bizarre internship—with the very successful management company Fitzgerald Hartley. This was my only bad experience as an intern. It just wasn’t a good situation, and I didn’t feel needed and didn’t really learn anything. They had nothing for me to do, and I wasn’t invited to any events—I didn’t get any respect from the other interns who had been working there for years. I basically just moved paper from one folder to the next. I even quit two weeks early. I left that internship having learned only one thing—that these Fitzgerald Hartley people would never ever get to manage me.

  Fast-forward to now. Bill, Larry, and Mark at Fitzgerald Hartley have been managing me since 2003. Oh well. Never mind.

  * * *

  I couldn’t believe they were going to let me walk into a record company like Atlantic Records every day (free of charge) and watch what a record company does.

  * * *

  At Belmont, during those years, I was really known as a guitarist. I lived and breathed the instrument. I briefly worked at Corner Music in Nashville, stringing and selling guitars, and I played every session I could. I befriended some engineers and producers at school, like Frank Rogers, who would later produce me, and a great kid named Doug Sadler, who was into learning studio engineering as much as I was studio guitar. I was fascinated by the process of getting guitar on tape. That magical cauldron that took these temporary vibrations out of thin air and captured them forever on a disc. From the Beatles to Buck Owens, I wanted to do that very thing. Make some sounds that would live on, be unique, and be me.

  The great thing about school was the studio. Open to students between the hours of seven thirty A.M. and ten P.M. Well, in theory. If you’re creative, and if I’m anything I’m creative, you could get away with much more.

  Because Doug was a studio student adviser, he had the keys. So we would book the last session of the day, the evening. This meant that when a teacher came by at the end they would just see Doug and say, “Hey, lock up, will ya?”

  “Sure thing,” Doug would say, “about done.” We weren’t. We were just getting started.

  We would work all night. We’d record guitar, bass, piano tracks; then we’d listen down and usually try it again. Over and over, trying to beat what we had and find some magic. I would have my old AC30s in a booth, trying tone settings, and Frank would bring in an acoustic, and we’d mess with mics. By sunrise, when we could barely keep our eyes open any longer, we’d start packing up. We needed to be outta there before faculty came in.

  I remember one day the dean, Bob Malloy, came around the corner of the storage room at seven A.M. or so as we were putting the last of the speakers away. We stopped dead in our tracks, one guy on each side of these amp cabinets, halfway through the door of the storage room, thinking, Oh shit! We’re caught. But in a moment of brilliance, we started backing out with the cabinets like we were setting up for a session. Bob took one look and said, “You boys sure are off to an early start today. Good job! The early bird gets the worm, you know.”

  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.

  Guitar Tips from Brad

  LESSON # 6

  Don’t play just to impress someone. Unless that someone is really hot.

  7

  WHEN I GET WHERE I’M GOING

  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.

  Speaking 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.

  In the first few weeks, the phone calls between the girl back home and the songwriter chasing the dream became less and less frequent. I could tell something was wrong. I was very busy with the business of settling into a new school, but my gut was uneasy. It was one night about two weeks in that my phone rang. It was one of my best friends in West Virginia.

  Friend: Hey, are you and _____ still dating?

  Me: Yeah, why?

  Friend: You might want to make sure she knows that.

  And scene.

  As it turns out, my being gone was too much for her to take. She ended the relationship in the most final way possible. She started seeing one of my best friends almost immediately.

  I was crushed. And I was only twenty. That first real heartbreak is a little tough to deal with. I hadn’t really allowed for the fact that my new life in Nashville meant the death of our romance. I was thinking about career only. And in that sense, that’s what happens when you do that. You are left with career only. Of course, there were much softer ways for her to have ended it. Phone call, letter, long explanation, etc. Betrayal? Well, that’s certainly another way to go.

  So I spent my first few months in Nashville writing heart-ache songs.

  And the guitar would get me through once again. I remember one night when I was at my lowest. I felt alone and down. I was supposed to do a class project where I interviewed a music hero, and weeks prior I had reached out to John Jorgenson. He was living in L.A. at the time and said he’d call if he came to town to record or something but wasn’t sure when that would be. So here I am wallowing in self-pity and heartache, at home alone at ten P.M. on a Wednesday, and my phone rings. “Hey, Brad, this is John Jorgenson. I just flew into town to record and wondered if you wanted to do that interview. I know it’s late but I figure you’re a college kid. Wanna come down to the studio and get that interview done?” So there I was minutes later watching my hero record, in a major Nashville studio. I was over her for at least a few days after that.

  But in retrospect, being a heartbroken guy who was trying to become a country songwriter worked out just fine. That’s the thing about a broken heart—it can be prolific. So I wrote more than my share of songs that first little bit. I would set my ex-girlfriend’s picture on a desk and literally pretend she was there in person listening. Some songs were sweet and kind, some were more like a Sam Kinison F-bomb screaming routine. Either way, closure was years away.

  Two years, in fact. It’s December of 1995 and I’m sitting there in my bachelor pad watching TV when a preview comes on for Father of the Bride Part II. I remember thinking, You’ve got to be kidding me. How do you do a sequel to that? And why now? This came right at one of those times when I was back-sliding emotionally. I’d get over my ex for a while, go out on dates, be fine, and then slowly start to miss her. I’d gone from I hope she dies to I hope she calls. By now my friends Frank Rogers and Kelley Lovelace had heard just about enough moaning from me. They put it very plainly, as your true buddies will do: I had to get closure with this girl—or I had to get back together with her. One or the other. Then shut the #*!@ up.

  This is how I let my buddies talk me into perhaps the single most romantic, pathetic, and foolish plan in the history of bad romance. We decided that I wou
ld go to the same theater back home on the same day and time as our very first date and go to see Father of the Bride Part II. December 28, just like before. I would be home for Christmas anyway. Our theory was that if this relationship were as big a deal for my ex-girlfriend as it was for me, then she would think of this too. Fate would intervene and we would immediately get back together and live happily ever after. It would be like Sleepless in Seattle . . . or rather, in St. Clairsville, Ohio. And if she didn’t show up, then I would have closure once and for all, which I needed, and I could finally get on with the rest of my life.

  But I am, at heart, a romantic. So I bought into this idea—hook, line, and sinker. On December 28, 1995—while home in West Virginia for the holidays—I got all dressed up and said good-bye to my mom and dad. As I walked out the door, I announced that I was going to the movies.

  They asked, “By yourself?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I drove off to the St. Clairsville mall. I even wondered if I should have a long-stem rose ready. But I finally decided that flowers might be a little much. And twice as embarrassing if I was stood up. Stood up? You can’t be stood up unless you have a date to start with, dumbass. Anyway, I walked into the theater and bought my ticket for the seven thirty showing of Father of the Bride Part II.

  As you might imagine, I’m sitting there all by myself in the back and staring at every single person who walks into the theater. Because it was Christmastime and the movie was a big hit, the theater was absolutely packed with people—none of them my old girlfriend. When the previews ended and the movie was about to begin, it was starting to be clear—she was not showing up. Still, I’d already paid for a ticket, so I decided to stay and watch the movie. And even though I had my answer, I still found myself thinking, Hey, this is a good movie.