Musician

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I started out yodeling in the family show. My parents got divorced when I was eight and my dad and I became a duet, and so we started traveling around, singing in barrooms, hotels, weddings, bank openings. You name it, we sang it. I was pretty much the backup. I sang harmony, but he really trained me. We practiced a lot. We practiced, you know, anywhere from one to five hours a day and then, you know, I’d go to school and sing in barrooms at night. I moved out when I was 15. I never really did start writing songs yet. I had written poetry my whole life and sung my whole life. When I was 15, I needed money to go to a private school, and so I sort of did my first concert by myself and without my dad. And I didn’t have any material. You know, I kept doing cover songs. And it wasn’t until I was in school in Michigan where I went to a performing arts high school when I was 16 that I actually started writing songs. I started writing songs because I wanted to hitchhike through Mexico for spring break, like most parents hope their children do. That first song I ever wrote when I was hitchhiking through Mexico ended up becoming my first single, which was really a surreal experience. The song I wrote when I was 16 ended up getting on the radio. It was called “Who Will Save Your Soul.” And for some reason, all of a sudden, it started to take off. We’d been trying to get on the radio for eight months. Usually, a record’s dead by then. A record label will give up on you after eight months, but I cost them about $12 so they just kind of kept pushing it at radio and they really did believe in me. They thought I was different and they kind of stuck up for me and “Who Will Save Your Soul” became kind of a little hit that did pretty good. I actually had gone back in the studio to make my second record because nine or ten months had passed and it was just time to do a second record, and they put “You Were Meant For Me” on the radio and it exploded. It did really, really well. And I went, you know, in the first nine months of my career, I sold maybe 800 records; and then, by the 11th month, I had sold hundreds of thousands and then, all of a sudden, I was selling every month – it got silly and I was selling 300,000 records a month – and it went on to sell 11 million records.

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