Bob,

I have enjoyed your blog, I just joined a week ago and ironically, Wayne Kirkpatrick and Little Big Town are good friends of mine. I am forwarding your kind words about the group to them. If you want to feel the influence of the producer on the group check this out..Go to itunes and look up ‘The Maple Room" Wayne’s solo album…
Then you can be in the loop further than your pals!

Matt Huesmann
Franklin, Tn

So, after e-mailing Mr. Huesmann, telling him that thirty second samples don’t do it for me, asking him what tracks to start with, trolling for a free CD, I fire up iTunes and track down this album.  And start PLAYING said thirty second snippets.

Yup, load the iTunes Store.  Put "Maple Room" in the search window.  Start playing the snippets that come up.  From the top.  With "It’s Me Again".  Hang in there, till 16 seconds, when all of a sudden the track changes.  IT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND!  This guy seems to have at his fingertips what Clive Davis sifts through a thousand demos for.

So then I go to the NEXT sample.  And the NEXT.  I go through SEVEN, and I never hit a loser.

Meanwhile, I’m reading the comment.  The five star review from this guy Sir Geoffrey says: "I bought this album when it came out and I think I played it non-stop for almost 2 months…"  THAT’S the kind of record I’m looking for.  But I’ve never even HEARD OF this record!

And iTunes has got it categorized as Christian & Gospel, which kind of scares me.  I’m against religious zealotry.  But I like Jars Of Clay…

And so much of Christian/Gospel music is like too much Latin music.  What rockers were doing just a few years back.  But this doesn’t sound hackneyed, "The Maple Room" sounds FRESH!

So I fire up my P2P program.  But you can’t find any shit, since this album stiffed back in 2000!

So I go to Google, and search on "Wayne Kirkpatrick", without the quotes, I figure he’s obscure enough.  And I cannot find a homepage.  This dude doesn’t even have a WEBSITE??

Oh, I find a story, at: Wayne Kirkpatrick, but I don’t want hype, I want to hear MUSIC!

So I fire up AltaVista and search for MP3s.  To no avail.

And then I do google with quotation marks.  And search on "maple room".  But I’m not getting anything substantial.  So I go back to my original search, because I remember a Wikipedia entry.  I mean this guy is big enough to qualify for the Wikipedia, but he’s got no HOMEPAGE??

And reading the Wikipedia entry (Wayne Kirkpatrick), I find out Wayne Kirkpatrick has much more history than I’m aware of.  He worked with Bonnie Raitt?

And get this.  He wrote a hit for Garth Brooks!  And he was a writer on…CHRIS GAINES??

And then I hit the final entry:

Later in 2000, he teamed up with Kennedy and several other songwriters (Phil Madeira and Billy Sprague) to record ‘Coming From Somewhere Else’, which was a CD of their own music that had previously been recorded by other artists, including "Change Your World".

So I go BACK to iTunes.  And I search on "Coming From Somewhere".  And at first all I can see is "Battlestar Galactica", but then, more investigation reveals…  The album written about in the Wikipedia!

And I click to hear "Change The World"…and I’m enraptured.

We used to read the credits.  And explore from there.

But then it was no longer worth it.  We didn’t recognize the names, and when we researched…we didn’t like what we found.  Oh, all these years later to follow the links, so easily done on the Net, and to actually have GOOD STUFF REVEALED!