The Thunder Rolls

My good friend and soul brother Billy Mason is a world class professional drummer and one of the greatest guys I've ever known in my life.

Billy and his family were close neighbors of ours during our earliest days in Nashville and we became good friends eventually creating a lifelong bond of mutual respect and appreciations in the sharing of our personal struggles, professional aspirations and our ongoing spiritual journey as Christians navigating entertainment industry minefields.

We often shared wonderful family times together with our children having BBQ's and picnic meals together, playing baseball and helping to pick one another up when we felt down or discouraged with the uphill nature of earning some measure of security in the very insecure world of professional music. Our children were all about the same ages and they all got along very well and in the shared hardships of those early years, we supported one another in our situations as family to each other. We're family to this day.

You may not recognize Billy's name, but indeed the world knows my good friend Billy "Thunder" Mason today as Tim McGraw's drummer.

Billy's band, The DanceHall Doctors, have toured with Tim McGraw for over 14 years. The band has recorded with Tim on several of Tim's best selling CD's including many # 1 chart topping hits. Billy Mason has "rolled" live and in the studio now for more than 30 years.

On my recent visit to Nashville, I had the opportunity to spend some great quality time with Billy and his family and we got to catch up on things as it has been a few years since we last saw each other. It was wonderful sharing our personal stories and recounting the memories of our lives and our children's lives. In fact, it was so great that Billy asked of me a special personal request as his friend. He asked me to help him write a book about his life and career in the music business.

I'm honored and grateful to be asked to help write the story of a world reknowned drummer who I knew long before he was famous.

But I'm truly more honored to be able to help my good friend write his very personal and deeply moving story which the world will come to value for it's substance and home truths about family and about a very tough & demanding big league industry that spares no mercy for the pure of heart. Our writing project will bring Billy and I together in a shared enterprise that will include writing some new songs and having Billy play drums on a future CD project of mine.

We're looking forward to sharing in these new creative experiences.

So stay in touch with the mystery as often as you can.

You'll want know all about it when the "Thunder" rolls.