Hi Gang:
I don’t currently have any songs that I’ve written racing up the country music charts (I wish I did!), but please don’t think my songwriting career has dried up and blown away. It hasn’t by a long shot.
As many of you know, I’ve been in the studio working on a new CD, and I wrote or co-wrote all five of the songs we have completed so far. And my friends in the business have really been dipping into my song catalog lately and cutting my songs…both old and new…for their own projects. At last count, nine new recordings have recently been made on songs of mine, and several more are in the works or “on hold.”
Willie Nelson just recorded “When Two Worlds Collide,” the old song Roger Miller and I wrote in the back of his car fifty-plus years ago. John Conlee has cut a powerful version of “A Lot Of Things Different,” which you might have seen him do on Country’s Family Reunion when they did the Bill Anderson 50th Anniversary show. Steve Wariner is putting the finishing touches on a new song called, “I Want To Be Like You,” the story of a man who wishes he could be more like his son. Three guesses where I got the idea for that one!
Clint Black recorded a song that he, Bob DiPiero, and I wrote last winter when we toured overseas. A new young female singer from Texas named Myra Rolen has a new cut on “Walk Out Backwards,” and Amber Digby, also a great Texas singer, has a new song out that she and I wrote together called “Saturday Night.” Talk about country….this one is COUNTRY!
And, believe it or not, three bluegrass artists have recently cut songs of mine. As much as I love bluegrass, you KNOW how thrilled I am about each one of these. Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver cut “One Small Miracle,” a song Steve Wariner and I wrote for Brian White many years ago. Doyle’s version puts the song in a whole new light, and I love it.
A fairly new bluegrass group, Joe Mullins & The Radio Ramblers took a song from my “Songwriter” CD called “Some Kind Of War,” and gave it a fresh new treatment. It’s not only on their current CD, but it is being released later this month as a single. And I just learned a few days ago that Del McCoury and the Del McCoury Band, great members of the Grand Ole Opry, have cut a new Anderson-Wariner song called “Amnesia.”
I told Steve that with all these new bluegrass cuts we should change our phone numbers to 1-800-BANJO!!
Some of these records are already on the market, and others will be released soon. I hope you’ll be checking iTunes and YouTube and all the other places where new music pops up these days, and that you’ll find some of them….or all of them….to your liking. I’m hoping to have my own project completed and available by around the first of June.
Now where did I put my guitar and my pencil?? Did I mention that I still write the old fashioned way?
