CMT Blog: Archive

I’ve always been interested in the person behind the song. Who wrote it? Why did they write it? When? The mere placement of the words and how precisely each one is executed through song has always fascinated me. My favorite artists have always been those whose music I can feel, the ones so convincing and powerful that I can feel their words deep within.

This week I attended my first Tin Pan South Songwriting Festival here in Nashville. Flourishing songwriters, as well as those aspiring to be, gather for five days and nights to hear songs sung by their creators. Luckily for me, I was able to see and experience one of my favorite artists of all time, Vince Gill, who shared the stage with fellow songwriters Al Anderson and Karyn Rochelle.

“This is a song I wrote but nobody would cut,” Gill said at one point, tuning his guitar. He told the story of how it was originally an up-tempo tune that he later decided to slow down. As he strummed his guitar, goose bumps ran down my arms and legs when I heard the opening line: “Everybody wants a little piece of my time….”

How often I have listened to “I Still Believe in You” and how often I have imagined him singing just to me. Not only did his delicate vocals strike a heartstring with each note, but I could feel the conviction in his voice. He was singing of a passionate love worth fighting for, a love everyone hopes to someday find. As I sat there trying to absorb the moment, I looked around at all the eyes peeled to the stage. Vince Gill was doing exactly what all great songwriters strive to do through song. He made believers out of all of us.