Lee Brice

The rugged feel of steel guitar and fiddle, the  images of growing up in a world of fields and  farms, of heartbreak and hard work … You can’t miss the fact that Lee Brice is country all the way.

It’s in his voice – think of it as honey trickling  through lines of melody etched in leather – and in the images it conjures, of “country girls and  redneck boys” anticipating the night to come in the sunset glow of a Dairy Queen (“Sumter County”), of growing up “on the edge of a cornfield” (“Picture of Me”).

And that makes one detail in his dream seem especially surprising.

“Ten years from now,” he says, smiling at the idea, “I’d love to hear my songs on the radio – on the rap stations, not just country.”

This sounds absurd, but only until you remember what makes Lee’s debut one of the strongest debuts in any genre over these past several  years. That’s when you realize that if anybody can make this happen, it’s this young man from backcountry South Carolina. His voice, his sound, even his wide-open grin are as country as they come – but his view of life is much broader than that.

Begin with his tastes in music. Ask him to name the artists who influenced him, and he’ll answer with Garth Brooks and Hank Junior, sure, but also Coldplay, John Mayer, Brian McKnight, Tom Petty, 3 Doors Down, Whitney Houston, Edwin McCain, Ray Charles … a list you might assemble by grabbing randomly at bins as you wander through the Tower closing sale.

But Brice insists that something ties all these artists together: “They’re all great,
which appeals to me because I want to make every song I do as great as I can
too. I’m not comparing myself to them in any way, but I want the same thing that I
love in what they do: They all make music that you can believe in.”

Brice takes a big step toward his dream with album. This is music that takes you
to special places, from the farms that he worked as a kid through the dirt roads
where he and his buddies would spin their wheels and race for the smiles of their
girlfriends. He has that knack for making memories come alive that he sensed in
the songs of his heroes.

The thing is, it took him a while to figure out who those heroes were. While most
people his age across America were tuning in to MTV, Brice was growing up
on gospel, as sung by his mother and her side of the family. His Aunt Henrietta
played the piano, and through the singing she did with her sisters Lee built his
own music on the rock of the church.

“I was completely sheltered, even from country music,” he remembers, “so my
first influences were those gospel singers. Man, those tenors could wail! I started
to sing by imitating them.”

By age seven he was teaching himself the basics of piano on Aunt Henrietta’s
old upright. Shortly after that he began writing songs; aside from church quartets
and his father’s Alabama and Oak Ridge Boys albums, he had only his own
imagination to mine for inspiration. By the time he’d entered high school, though,
he’d assembled enough originals to perform them at the talent pageant – which
he won, by the way, three years in a row.

Around that same time Lee finally became aware of other styles of music,
through friends who had trouble believing he’d never heard groups like
Aerosmith. “Now, I’d heard of Aerosmith,” he insists, just to set the record
straight. “But that’s when I got exposed for the first time to them, to John Mayer
and Dave Matthews and all that stuff. My first huge influence, though, was Garth.
That had a definite effect on my writing, especially in making my lyrics more
mature and my hooks stronger, although even when I was ten years old I was
very emotional songs, songs that told stories.”

There were two loves in Lee’s life at that time: music and football. His father, a
star player in high school, had passed on an offer to play for Clemson in order
to marry and open shop as an electrician. Lee, not having yet met the lady of his
life, picked up where Daddy left off by enrolling at Clemson and making it onto
the team, long-snapping for punts and then moving to center …

But fate changed the game plan. After playing the first game of his senior year,
Lee woke up one morning unable to straighten his right arm. “I’d been snapping
the wrong way, 500 times a day,” he explains. “They had me in surgery the next
day, took out all this cartilage, and that was the end of that.”

He could have stayed and finished his civil engineering degree; instead, Lee
resolved to chase his other dream. He’d kept playing music during spare time at
Clemson and had even spent spring break in Nashville, checking out the town
and its possibilities. During that visit he met and performed some of his tunes for
Doug Johnson, which prompted the well-established songwriter/producer to offer
advice that, by his own admission, Lee’s family might not have appreciated.

“He told me, ‘Lee, I see that you love music with every bone in your body, so
unless you love civil engineering as much as you love music, you need to be
here. And if you do come to Nashville, I’ll stand by you from the moment you get
here.”

Brice laughs at the memory of that conversation and at his decision to leave
Clemson that summer and take his chances in Music City. With Johnson as his
mentor, he sharpened his writing, played out at songwriter circles, and hooked up
with some of the top talent in town on co-writing sessions. His partners included
Bob DiPiero, Craig Wiseman, Walt Wilkins, Marv Green, and more than a dozen
other heavy hitters.

When Johnson took on A&R duties at Curb, one of his first acts was to bring
Brice onboard for a writing deal with Curb Music Publishing. For a year the young
writer blossomed, creating songs that would be covered by a diverse group of
artists, including Cowboy Crush, Keith Gattis, and, on his upcoming CD, Jason
Aldean. “I was writing two and three times a day,” he remembers. “I’d go to one
session at 9:30 in the morning and write until two. Then I’d go from three to six,
and again from seven to ten. I just wanted to write, write, write. I did 150 songs
that year, and some of them were pretty good.”

How have things changed since then? Brice grins as he answers, “I might have
written 60 songs this year – but they’re 60 songs that really matter.”

They especially matter when it’s Brice delivering them. Powered by musicians
hand-picked for the session, with Johnson bringing the same sensitivity and
feel for the material that distinguished his productions for Clay Walker, John
Michael Montgomery, and Hank Jr., Lee’s album alternately flows like a stream
of memory or pounds like the tide along the Carolina shore. The songs represent
the cream of Brice’s catalog, whittled down from more than 300 compositions.
Taken together, they forecast years of success ahead for an artist who has the
key bases, writing and performing, more than covered.

“I love what I’m hearing on the radio today,” Brice insists. “People aren’t trying
to be perfect or slick anymore. It reminds me of records back in the day, when
everything sounded like it was played live. I’d love it if someday people could
look back on what I’m doing now too and say, ‘When Lee Brice, something
changed in a positive way.’”

Why look back? That day has already come … right now.