I guess I have two songs that I would say of 20 years of being in Nashville that I'm
most proud of.
The first one was John Michael Montgomery's song, Letters from Home.
It was a song that was deeply personal, I guess at the time that we wrote it, I didn't
realize until later how impactful the song would be.
I was in the airport, it was right after 9-11, and I saw this man and this girl together,
young boy and girl really.
But I could tell by looking at him he was a soldier, he wasn't wearing a uniform or anything,
and I knew that we were fixing to go to war in Iraq, didn't know exactly what was going
on, but I had a feeling because her eyes were swollen, red, and you could tell she'd
been crying all night and she was still in her pajamas at the airport.
It was early in the morning and I was picking up my dad, and something beside me just told
me to ask what the deal was, so I'd ask him if he was in the military and he said, yes
I am and we're shipping out and I don't know where I'm going, I don't know what's
happening and I could tell she was really upset and I thanked her, hugged her and thanked
her for her service to our country and him as well, and they left and I kept thinking
about that young boy and that young girl, and it stayed in my mind for the whole week
and I even told my dad, my dad said, you need to write a song about that.
So every Tuesday my buddy Tony and I got together to write and we sat down and I told him this
story and we started talking and like it always does, somehow or other you just through the
course of conversation, we wound up coming up with this idea, letters from home, about
a young boy and a girl and a family really telling a story of these letters that were
sent to these soldiers while they were over in war, and so we sat down and wrote that
song and it took about two hours to write that song.
Those songs take forever, I've spent as much as ten years trying to see a song come to
fruition but this song happened really, really quickly and we got done with it and really
didn't know what we had until it was recorded and then fast forward just a couple of years
later I was in, my wife and I had taken vacation, went over to Italy and we were there and this
will give you an idea of the impact and it taught me at that time how important what
we do as artists and songwriters.
We were in Italy and we were sitting in this little bar drinking wine and talking and this
guy said, oh, y'all from America, yeah, we are too, do you mind if we sit with you?
He said, no, so we sat down, we started talking and sharing some wine and he said, so what
do you do for a living?
I said, I'm a songwriter and he said, you written anything I know and I said, well unless
you listen to country music, probably not and he said, well I do, I love country music
and I said, well I just had a song out called Letters from Home and he said, you wrote that
song and I said, yeah, and he goes, no way and I said, yeah, I did and he looked at his
wife and he said, this man wrote Letters from Home and he was just acting astounded and
he said, that's me and my son's song.
I said it is, he goes, yeah, my son was a soldier in Iraq, he said he was killed last
year and he said, that was our song man and he started crying and his wife started crying
and my wife started crying and my sister was there, photographer, she was there taking pictures
for us, she started crying and I started drinking more wine and we sat there and talked for
quite a while and he said, will you do me a favor and I said, yes sir and he took this
bracelet off his wrist and said, would you wear this for my son and this is 2006, Matthew
P. Wallace, I've wore that, I haven't taken it off my wrist since that day and I've carried
his son and his service in my heart the whole time and I tell that story a lot when I play
that song and it's very impactful, it's one of those things where you realize no matter
how far away across an ocean you go, music is more powerful than us as songwriters.
The next song I would say that meant a lot to me.
