(upbeat music)
- How has music saved you, in your own life?
- Well in a literal sense, I mean, it saved me because
I was getting an eviction notice from my apartment
and I got my first royalty check.
(laughter)
Pretty much within the same week, so literally saved me
that way, but I always say in a broader sense,
in a general sense, everything good that's happened to me,
in my life, has come from music.
Particularly in my case, country music.
Everything good that's happened to me.
I met my wife through it, which was the first turning point
in my life into a real understanding of what love is
and what a future could be, and finding out who you are,
in a lot of ways, and discovering the bad sides of yourself
and the good sides of yourself.
And it's such therapy, especially if you grew up in sort of
a dysfunctional environment, to have that as a tool
that you can go to and release yourself is something that
I'm always grateful for.
I try to be grateful, I'm not always grateful.
I try to be grateful that it can go away at any moment.
You can wake up one morning, and like you said,
your magic's gone.
(upbeat music)
For me, I think of myself loosely as a singer first,
and a songwriter second, I don't consider myself like this
prolific songwriter.
I've always written and I've written
a couple of songs for movies.
When this one came along I was in the middle of a tour,
my second year of touring with my wife, we were doing
our Soul2Soul tour and we were,
been touring together and we were in, gosh,
in the middle of it, trying to finish it out.
And at the same time, I was flying in and going to the
studio and sleeping on the couch for three days at a time,
getting my next solo project started and working on it.
So I didn't think I had any time to do it.
Brian Lowex, who works at CA called me
and he told me about the film and asked
if I'd be interested in writing
a song for it.
My first answer was, I just don't have time.
I don't think I have the brain power right now,
with everything I'm doing, have time to do it.
And secondly, I don't know anything about mountain climbing.
(laughter)
I mean, I'm afraid of heights,
I don't understand why you'd do that to start with.
I don't know that I can relate
to this subject matter at all.
So I said, look, I have a couple of days,
send it to me, it'd be nice to just
watch a cool movie anyway, so send it.
And watch it.
I started watching it and was immediately hooked on it,
on Alex and his focus, and his journey,
and the bigger picture, I think, of how you can
pursue something in life, and succeed at something
with intent and purpose.
So I was enthralled by what he was doing and how you
could believe that much in yourself to put yourself in a
position where you can not make a mistake.
So that's what really got me.
I started writing notes and thinking about it and I thought
well, this is pretty interesting so I'll call a friend
of mine, Lori McKenna, who, in my opinion is one of the
great songwriters, to write music out of Nashville.
She lives in Boston.
I sent it to her, I told her I'll overnight you this and if
you like the movie, you know,
maybe we can work on something.
So I overnighted it to her, and she fell in love with it and
she sent me her notes that she made.
Ironically, our notes were almost identical, with the words
that we were using and some of the phrases we were using.
So within a week of emailing back and forth, we wrote it.
I told 'em, that, look, we'll write something but I don't
really have a lot of time to keep going back and forth
and trying to perfect a song or trying to change things.
I can give you a shot at it, that's all I can give ya.
I don't want you to feel like you're married to me.
If you like it, you like it and if you don't, you don't.
We're big kids, we can move on.
- Mmm hmm.
- They liked the song that we wrote.
After about a week of emailing and texting back and forth,
they liked the song.
- Tell me about the first song you ever wrote.
- It was when Princess Diana and Prince Charles got married.
As a kid, there was something about her, I mean,
I just fell in love with her like everybody else.
Probably every boy did at that time, fell in love with her.
So I sat down and wrote a song about their wedding
and about Princess Diana and about how beautiful she was.
And I don't remember how it goes, I just remember something
about, "You look so much like a queen", something like that,
it was terrible.
(laughter)
But that was the first song I remember actually sitting down
and writing and getting enjoyment out of writing a song.
And understanding that you could actually put words to paper
and a tune and a melody and come up with something that you
think is good.
Whether it was or not is a whole different story.
And we've all been down that road.
But it was about Princess Diana.
That was the first thing I remember writing.
(upbeat music)
I think art, you create something people can project onto.
In a lot of ways.
Where you find a way to project your life and what's going
on in your life and in the world into that piece of art.
SO I think that that's part of our job.
And there's a lot of people, a lot of artists who can listen
to a song and "Oh I get how they feel, I can hear that
they're telling me how they feel."
But the really key, I think, in the real power in what
really works is when somebody hears something
and you tell them how they feel.
Because they couldn't put it into words.
You put it into words how they feel, and maybe
they didn't even know they felt that way
until they heard you sing it.
(upbeat music)