I had the distinct honor of being one of the musical guest at the “Take Back America” convention which was hosted by the good folks at Freedomworks on the Friday evening before the 8/28 “Restoring Honor” rally.

Daughters of The American Revolution Constitution Hall

The event was held at the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall which is located a block or so from The White House. .

In some miraculous way at some point during the past year, “Can You Hear Us Now?” was played within earshot of the President and CEO of Freedomworks,  Mr. Matt Kibbe and I was graciously invited to perform at this years convention as well as the 9/12 rally at the capital this year.

The people from Freedomworks were as nice as anyone could be but after arriving twenty minutes early for a 5:00 pm sound check (that never happened), I proceeded to stumble into the most inept sound crew on the planet. I ended up suffering through the entire performance without any monitor since the closest one was fifteen feet to my back and right and facing in the direction of my nine o’clock.

On top of that, what I was able to hear had a full second delay from the time I sang and played to the time it bounced of the wall on the other side of the hall and came back to me.

I hate to come across as a “Tin Hatter”  but the whole time I was thinking this production has been sabotaged by liberal political opponents.

Oh Yeah….as if that wasn’t enough….just when you think it couldn’t get anymore confusing.

Who shows up and horns in front of me?

Glenn Beck.

Just like millions of other Americans, 2009 has pretty much been the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I don’t belong to any political party but I am one of the silent majority that has had enough of the elitist politicians in Washington, DC who have somehow concluded that common sense is something that makes sense only to common people. And somehow regardless of what the commoner’s lying eyes and ears tell them, the elite few who live in and around the District of Columbia and on the east side of Manhattan somehow know what is best for us, the minions and our silly little country.

Unfortunately, we minions have been asleep at the wheel for way too long which has allowed the people who make our laws as well as the ones who control what we see and hear in the media to convince enough of us to surrender our common sense and on January 20th, 2009 we the people handed over the reigns of our freedom.

But it didn’t end there. Nine months later on September 9th, the ground shook inside the beltway as somewhere between one and two million people (maybe more) threw caution to the wind and converged on the steps of “we the people’s” house, the US Capital building. We were greatly discounted by all news media outlets, ridiculed and called outrageous names by the leaders of congress but it didn’t phase our convictions nor our momentum. We know what happened…We were there.

Myself, I ended up with an invitation to make the trip at the last minute by two true patriots who also happen to be brothers, Randy and Ken Frost. Neither of us knew for sure if there would be anyone there but us and maybe the bus load of people from Atlanta that we heard about on a local radio talk show but if that’s all that showed, so be it. It was a start.

After flying in the night before, getting a little bit of sleep and a breakfast that was so bad that it deserves it’s own song, we were a few of the first to arrive around 8:00 AM at Freedom plaza which is located on the White House end of Pennsylvania Ave. The organizers had a small stage with what at first seemed to be ample sound reinforcement gear, but it soon became apparent that this party was a lot larger than anyone expected it to be. And by 10:00 AM or so we heard over the PA that the Metro Police were insisting that we start the march early since the crowd was getting much larger than they had anticipated.

I was carrying two different video recorders as well as a uni-pod which is a telescopic pole that strongly resembles a walking cane when it has its protective ball attached on top but once you screw it off, it’s an effective way to steady your video camera with a very small footprint and fully extended it’s about seven feet tall. Somewhere along the march down Pennsylvania Avenue it occurred to me that if I screwed my camera to the end of the uni-pod and held it up as high as I could, I could get a better idea of just how many people were there. I did this several times not just during the march but also after the protest started where I was within fifty feet of the capital steps next to where the podium and stage were assembled. But it wasn’t till a couple of days after I got back home and started editing the video that I realized just what amazing footage I had actually acquired using the unipod.

At first, my intentions were to create a simple ten minute video with the “best of” from my eighty minutes of footage, upload it to YouTube and share it with my Facebook friends. However, once I started scouring iTunes for some sort of genuinely appropriate music to lay down behind it, well the songwriter gene that had been laying dormant for so many months started kicking in and pretty soon the project became the song and not the video.

About ten years ago when i first started seriously writing songs, just like so many that find their way to Nashville, I too toyed with the romantic idea of one day landing a publishing gig and writing for radio. But fortunately reality kicked in and I soon realized just how talented those staff writers really are. Although I have friends who do it every day, sometimes two or three times a day, I’m not one that can sit down and write a song about any topic and at any time. I seem to have to have a reason.

I feel fortunate that early on I learned these two things about songwriting. First of all, if I’m going to write, I need to write around my voice and genre because if any of my songs are going to get heard it will be because I recorded or performed them. Not because some publisher worked hard to pitch my tunes to the labels of all the famous acts of the moment. This first lesson saved me from myself. See, not only is Nashville the home of the best of the best songwriters in the world. It is also full of way worse songwriters than myself who are sure that one day they’ll get that one cut that’s going to open the magic gate for them. A lot of them can’t play an instrument nor sing yet they make up a ridiculous percentage of the city’s population. Fortunately for me I was over forty years old by the time I got the itch (I call it my mid-life crisis) so I had the wisdom to figure out real quick that as much as I love being able to hear my voice through a microphone, constantly repeating the chorus “would you like fries with that?” is not my idea of ‘making it’ in the music business.

The second thing I learned is that I have to write about things that I actually know about which is probably why I don’t write any more than I do. There’s not a big market for songs about racquetball, free style stand-up jet skis, grilling on Big Green Eggs or going bald. But one thing that I recently came to know a fair amount about is the emotions and excitement that every one of the contemporary patriots that showed up in DC felt that beautiful day in September. So after a couple of weeks of experimenting with different melodies, studying my own video as well as dozens of others on YouTube and the  websites of fellow patriots. I finally got around to the most important ingredient, I humbly asked God to help me stay out of the way. Then I sat down and started writing “Can You Hear Us Now?”.

On Friday, October 23rd I put the pen down and declared myself finished. The next day I stepped into my make shift sound stage, set up three camera angles and started rolling both audio and video as I recorded a guitar/vocal demo of the song using my Boss RC-50 on the vocal track so that I could layer a stack of live background vocals on the chorus.

Once finished I sent the audio track off to my friend Chuck Watson for mastering then spent most of the night and the next day editing the video. About 7:00 PM on Sunday after Chuck had sent me back the mastered audio, I merged the two together, uploaded it to YouTube and shared the link with my Facebook friends. Then for the first time in weeks, I finally got a good night sleep.

Over the next week I was overwhelmed with emails as well as Facebook and YouTube comments from people all over the country who were finding my YouTube video and evidently relating to it.

On November 9th, I took all the money I could scrounge and headed to Nashville to record the single with the boys at ‘Jays Place’ where I recorded ‘A Piece of My Soul’. I left my home in Dahlonega, GA about 5:00 AM, made it just in time to fit it in the days session. The next afternoon I laid down the vocals, mixed and mastered, then drove the five hours home, then slept for two days straight.

Since then I have submitted the mastered single to most of the Music Row/Billboard radio promoters and it has been accepted by several of Nashville’s best. I am now weighing my options and am shooting for a airplay campaign sometime in 2010.

But if nothing else comes from it, the song has already enriched my life immensely by the people I have had the privilege of meeting along the way. Each and every one has become one more line on my list of reasons as to why I am proud to be an American.