The Story Behind Nashville Tears

So if I may be totally honest with you, when I had a baby in 2017, I was living in rural Arkansas, and hadn’t quite thought through how isolating that would be once the baby was born. Rob was away touring a lot of the time, and I started to adjust to the endless laundry and sleepless nights.

As the months wore on I couldn’t imagine writing a song again. I wondered if I would ever be able to write an album. I didn’t have any family there for support and very few friends. In a way I had snookered myself. Life had irreversibly changed. The way I used to write songs – I just couldn’t do that anymore. The daydreaming, the openness to new experiences, that ability to drift in and out of the physical world into a dream world, and ethereal world where songs live – I just couldn’t do it. I wondered if I would be judged for it, if people would be upset with me that I couldn’t do it.

Hardly anyone in the music world called me during that time. It was a lonely time. I felt far out at sea as though I had drifted too far away and didn’t know how to get back.

But one person kept calling me. His name was Fred Mollin. Now Fred was a funny Canadian producer I had met through Jimmy Webb and Stephen Bishop. He called me every week, he wanted to do something with me, an album project with me. I kept putting him off because I had this small baby and I was just totally lost and couldn’t figure out how to get back into music again.

But he was persistent. So one day I said “You know Fred, I did have this one idea for a project. The album would be called Nashville Tears, and it would be a collection of songs from the Nashville songwriting community that either got lost, or didn’t get the attention they deserved”. He said “I LOVE it. Let’s do it.”

So we put an ad in Music Row. The ad Read:

Is your song the saddest song in Nashville?
Is your song the song that got away?

We had hundreds, maybe thousands of submissions. I listened and listened but I wasn’t feeling that we were finding what we were looking for.

Then Fred sends me a song from his collection. A demo of Oklahoma Stray, by Hugh Prestwood. I had never heard of Hugh Prestwood – but his song blew me away. Then we listened to more of his demos and cuts. I couldn’t believe I had never heard of this great songwriter. I was thrilled – it was like finding gold. The quality of his writing surpassed every other writer we had heard out of Nashville. I knew in that moment we had to make an album of Hugh Prestwood songs and to curate a beautiful collection for you all to hear.

This album was an absolute joy to make. It got me out of the fog and back into the studio, and it saved me from giving up music altogether. It lite a fire in me again, got me excited about music again and in a place where I can write and am writing again.

I am very very proud of this album and I know that you’re going to love Hugh Prestwood as much as I do!