Yesterday * Today

Yesterday, I had a writing session with a guy named Jason Walker. I was a little worried because I had never heard any of his songwriting and was worried that we wouldn't hit it off. My fears were quickly relieved, however. Yesterday was a great, great day.

Jason is a mainstream artist who happens to be signed to Word publishing. He is seeing some pretty good success with getting some stuff into tv and film stuff, even though he's not signed to a label. We started off by listening to some music then moved into writing. Jason is a piano guy, and a great, great piano guy, so he had a couple of ideas that we screwed around with. The first one was an upbeat piano rocker. We worked on a lyric for a while and just didn't find anything we loved. We went to lunch and hung out for a while, then decided to go lay down tracks for both of the songs at my house.

We drove to my place where we layed down the basic tracks for both songs, then we hung out a little while and just talked. We ended up really starting to develop a friendship so that was really great.

Go check out his myspace/jasonwalkeronline. He's got some stuff up there and it's great. It looks like for my Spring tours that Jason will be going along as my keyboard player and will be opening up for me. So, if that works out, that's gonna be awesome.

That night, Phil, Kendra and the kids and Haley came over for dinner. My wife made an incredible dinner for us - seriously she outdid herself. We had a great time just hanging out and enjoying each other's company. It's funny how these people who I didn't even know a year ago have become like family.

After dinner, I went up to my studio and worked on the lyric for the first song with Jason. And I think I wrote one of the best, if not the best lyrics I've ever written. It was one of those that just happened really quickly and just felt great. I emailed it to several people involved with the project and several songwriting friends and the response was incredible...the song is called "I'm Clean" and it will definitely be on the record and is being discussed as the first single.

This morning I headed over to Brown's house to discuss more intense stuff with the record. We sat down and listened to the 13 songs and he threw a couple of other songs back onto the table for discussion. We talked through production ideas and how the record will flow with having 3 producers and how to make all that work. We talked about different production ideas, also, in the sense of how to take each of my songs and make the feel different from each other and for the album to take the listener on a journer for that 40 minutes they are listening. It was a great, great conversation.

One exciting note from the Brown meeting was that he told me that apparently word had gotten around town that I was working with him, and he'd received calls from a few songwriters wanting to write with me. Haha...it's so fun being able to write and be a musician for a living.

Then I went over and wrote with a guy named Ian Eskilin. I was toast from the last couple of days and I'm starting to come down with some kind of sickness...so we didn't end up writing a song, but we have a couple of killer ideas that we're gonna get together in the next couple of weeks to flesh out.

Finally, tonight, Sarah and I went with Phil and Kendra to a big fundraiser for Rocketown, which is a teen center here in Nashville that Michael W. Smith founded and helps support. It is a concert venue (Elliot Yamin played here when he came to town), a cafe and a skate park all combined. It's pretty freaking awesome. I think I'm gonna go start skating...I'll be the loser old dude trying to rekindly his love for skating.

Anyway, Ronnie Milsap played and he blew my socks off...he did a medley of several hit songs and it truly was remarkable. And Smitty debuted an instrumental piano piece he wrote. So, it was great night all in all.

Tomorrow I meet with Brown again in the morning and then head over to write with a guy named Clint Lagerberg. Clint and I met the other day when I was writing with Jason and hit it off really well...so that'll be great fun, I think. Then at 7pm I'll be taping an interview with Way FM's syndicated show "Total Axxess"...I'll find out when it's playing and let you guys know. Then after that I have a photo shoot. So tomorrow is a long day. But I'm thinking it's gonna be a great day.