TommyHarden.com

Mark Prentice and I recording at Tommy's Dungeon studios

This is an email I received that I would love to share with you.

Dear Tommy,

I am a teacher in Edmond, OK that happens to be a drummer as well.  I would love to be a touring musician, session drummer, or just find a way to make a living sitting behind my set.  I know that you are a busy guy (6 kids and pets sounds hectic – I am married and just have one dog) but if you have any advice or thoughts I would love to hear them from someone with experience.  I don’t mean to sound forward but my wife and I have been praying for some opportunities to come along and when your name popped up on the following list, well we didn’t want to act weird, but it was definitely a cool blessing.  Thanks for listening to a little of my rambling and thank you even more for some of your time.

Peace to you
Jeff Smith

Thanks for the letter Jeff, I was actually thinking about blogging on this very subject, so your email was very timely.

I want to answer this letter as gingerly as possible.  When I moved to Nashville, you could tell me anything you wanted.  Tell me it was impossible, turn around, go home, it didn’t matter.  I had already made up my mind thatI had no choice, I was going to make it in Nashville or die trying.  No back up plan.  Nothing to “fall back on.”

Let’s rewind back to college days.  The first thing that one of my prof’s told me was, you should think about an education degree.  Because, “it’ll give you something to fall back on!”  My reply was, “I don’t plan on falling back.”  But I was lucky.  I had a musical mentor, one of my closest friends, the late Larry Dalton.  Larry was a piano genius, an arranger, composer, a Steinway artist.  He was someone that I looked up to as one who actually made a living in the music industry, making music. He was truly put in my life by God.

A pivotal moment in my life happened one day in Larry’s kitchen.  I’ll never forget it.  I told him I wanted to be a session player.  He looked at me and said, “Oh, you probably won’t be able to do that.  It’s too hard.  You’re competing against guys that have been in town 20 years longer than you have, and not only that, you have to show up and do something they can’t do.”

What?  This was like he slapped me in the face with a wet fish.

But, it did 2 things.  Number one, it made me rare back and say to myself, “by golly, I’ll show you who can’t be a session player.”  There are times that I wonder if he told me this on purpose, to see if he could cause me to quit.  The second thing that it did, is it put the fear of God into me about how much I would have to prepare to enter the music biz.

So I worked and worked, studied, practiced, learned, and worked some more.  I would be driving to the practice room some days and I would pass my friends playing frisbee or hanging out.  I didn’t care.

So, fast forward back to Nashville.

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