Welcome To My Next Chapter
Here’s a little about me and how we got here to this moment as I move on from Roughstock and keep talking about music that inspires me.
For over 20 years I have been involved in the world of country music. But my life with the music genre goes much deeper. While songs like The Oak Ridge Boys’ “Elvira” and Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” were well known songs to me as well as the rise of Garth Brooks, it really was Collin Raye’s “Little Rock” song which made me a country music fan and had my 15 year old self become obsessed with country music and want to make working in and around country music a career, no matter how it’d happen. I’d dreamed of being a songwriter / album producer as a teenager and from that point, in 1994, and because of that, I read the liner notes and lyrics of every album I purchased. The dream became an encyclopedic knowledge of country music from that point-forward and a deep reverence for what became before it.
I would go on to make mixtape CDs and in my world, I became known for the country music obsession, which perhaps was rivaled only by a love of Baseball and while I interned for a sports radio station’s Baseball coverage, it was country music — and Nashville — that won my heart. While working overseas teaching English after college, I wrote a small blog called “The Lost Highway” and that was discovered by the owner of Roughstock.com and I eventually left Asia and moved to Nashville, fulfilling the dream and became a country music journalist.
Over the course of the past 15 years, I was immersed in and learned about all facets of the Nashville music world and gained dozens of great friends. It is truly a small town-like industry where we support each other and as an early casualty to the great search engine purge (look up Google and their destruction of media websites), I couldn’t totally focus on the music and industry I love. I hope I can do that now and that y’all will join me on this journey where I’ll continue to do what I did with Roughstock.
What will I do, you ask? Well, over time, I hope to feature albums, songs, artists that I love or that are interesting to me (and by proxy, hopefully interesting to you). I hope to take you on a journey to find new exciting artists (I’ve been a huge champion of developing and rising talent through the years and have seen many of them become Platinum and Multi-Platinum level artists), re-discovering past great songs, albums and artists, and, given this platform, maybe sharing some of the diamonds in the rough, or those who didn’t exactly get a huge spotlight in the years gone by. I also hope to give you more of my personality than ever before and that will probably come through more with a podcast, something I had been working on 8 years ago when Rouhstock first became more of a hobby than vocation.
As I wind down this opening post, I hope you know how much I appreciate all of you and that you’ll subscribe to read my musings and that you’ll share it far and wide to folks you think will appreciate what I have to say about country music (and sometimes country music adjacent/other music or music topics) and, maybe eventually more as we move forward. Thank you so much and I’ll see you soon.