What fueled your passion for music?

The Beatles? A guitar? A concert?

Paul speaks on his turning point, winning a guitar on the radio.

I'm from Jackson, Mississippi, kind of right outside of it. I was living there the first 17 years of my life, and then I moved up here, so I've actually lived here longer than there now... it shows my age.

“Nice, these guys have to be good at math, though.  Yeah, so and what uh, what brought you up to Nashville?” 

Actually, it is my dad. So I, this will turn into a long story, but I always loved music, but, and most of you probably like this where you grew up loving music, but at some point, something was the trigger that said, “oh wow this is I want to do this.” And for me, I won a guitar off the radio when I was 15, and they were actually, this will also show my age, they were having a contest to show how fast the yellow pages were. So you call in to the radio station they would say, “look, we want you to look up Forty-one Fifteen, and if you can do it under 30 seconds, you win the prize.” And the day that I called in it was a guitar. 

And so that's what it was like. You know in the Simpsons when it's like “the Simp-sons?” It was like the guitar came down, so from then on, it was everything else in my life just kind of went away. And I think my dad, as dads do, just saw how passionate I was about this one thing and said, “well, how can I help my son? You know because I don't know anything about music.” And so there's one piece of advice was, he's like, “If you stay here, you're gonna be in a bar band or teach.” You know, so you need to go somewhere where people are making a living doing music, and Nashville was the closest place. That was that. 

“That's crazy, so tell the people, because I know of course  what your dad does and why you have lots of things with your name on them.  That's incredibly insightful for your dad.” 

Yeah, my dad, my family has had an automobile business since the 1950s. And basically, my grandfather came back from World War II, and they were teaching little six-week courses. “So what are you interested in?” “I'm interested in accounting.” “Okay, you go over here, and you get a certificate and then you can get a job.” And they're just trying to get GIs employed after the war. So he took an accounting course and he started a set of books for this... dealership is really not the right word… I mean it was like the size of this room, and they had like 10 cars out on the lot. It was a used, you know thing or whatever, Pontiacs.  

That guy was retiring and kind of sold the business for next to nothing to my grandfather, and my dad works there, my uncle worked there, my sister works there, her husband works there... it was very much a family business. It's a small little mom-and-pop operation, but you know, I was named “the third” after my grandfather. So my grandmother used to say, like when we'd be at the dealership at my grandfather's desk, she would say, “well, that'll be your chair one day” you know. So I just grew up thinking, “this is what I was gonna do,” and when I found the guitar, everything changed.  

And so my dad and I were driving down the road one day, and I think I was 16 at this point, and it was like the existential crisis of my entire life, “how do I tell my parents that I don't want to be in the family business,” and it got to that point, and I was like, I couldn't take it, you know I don't even know, I don't remember what we were doing, but it was like I had to tell him then. I couldn't wait any longer, and I was like ,”dad…” he's like “yeah?” and I said “what if I don't want to be in the car business?” And he pulled the car over to the side of the road, put it in park, and he looked at me. He goes, “Son, I know, I've known since you were born that you weren't going to be in the car business.” And I was just, you know, there's like this really sweet moment, and then about five seconds later he goes, “Plus you'd be terrible at it.”   I was like why can't we just have this moment for just a second?