I have the final version of the new live CD One Night In Knoxville in my hands.  Tomorrow I’ll tackle the final tweaks on the album’s packaging and send the whole thing off to be manufactured. 

You, my friend, have been very patient, waiting for months now for this CD to be completed.  (Not you.  That guy.  Yea, you.  And my mom.  And, yea, that’s about it.) I at least owe you a preview of the album right?  So, for the next few days, I’ll be posting snippets and a few hopefully interesting tidbits on them to.

First up, “Should I Tell Them”.

I started writing this song while working at The Methodist Childrens Home in Waco, Texas.  I was in college and painfully aware of all my inadequacies.  Music school will do that to you.  I didn’t just lack the musical confidence to sing for 250 unentertainable juveniles, but I also couldn’t find just about every spiritual answer those kids at the home needed.  Truth was no one was expecting me to have those answers, but I wrote this while buckling under these false expectations.

When I moved to Nashville the next year to start chasing down any kind of job in the music business, I smacked once again into those old feelings of inadequacy.  I couldn’t write the kind of perpetually positive tied-in-a-bow spiritual nuggets coming from the professional writers I was becoming friends with at the publishing company where I archived reels of old songs all day.  Convinced something was wrong with me, I pulled out my guitar on a lunch break and worked again on Should I Tell Them.  Strangely, it was the first song my boss/publishing company VP Marty Wheeler liked of mine.

The song was quickly pitched (along with After The Music Fades, Two Cents and a never recorded song called Back Home to You) to Caedmon’s Call for possible inclusion on their Forty Acres record.  It didn’t make the cut.  I later found out it was never seriously considered but used instead, along with a few other writers’ songs, by their A&R guy to light a fire under the band – to get them writing more fervently, get them caught up and more in line with the marketing department’s deadlines for the album’s release. “Write some good songs fast or you’ll be recording these” kind of a thing. Their album turned out great without “Should I Tell Them”, and I got to record it myself three years later on my first CD. 

This live version of the song is from the second of the two shows recorded in Knoxville.  The crowd in the first show was too sedate, freaked out by all the microphones around the place and Brian’s sarcastic warnings not to mess up the recording or else.  This left awkward unnatural silences throughout the recording so most of that show is not included on the final CD.

When we started mixing this disc I was bummed we couldn’t use more of the first show on it.  We could have actually but it would have required so much editing that it felt dishonest to me and not at all live.  I was afraid of using so much of the second show because I was tired during that performance.  Very tired.  And in pain on the high notes, which makes them sound that much more urgent…I prefer “urgent” to “pitchy.” The entire CD has that same kind of “urgency” and now, after listening to it dozens of times, I actually like that about the final product.  It sounds like a show at the end of a long tour.  Raw.  Imperfect.  Human.  Just enough struggle to make you believe I meant every word of this song caught on silicon.  And I did.