Two Wheel Artists

08/16/2025

Lunch

08/16/2025

07/25/2025

Chapter: A Cassette, a Buick, and a Beginning

It was 1981, my 25th birthday, and I didn’t know it yet, but my life was about to change. That day, Kim Carson showed up at KEOR in Atoka, Oklahoma to take over the midday shift. She was “taking it country”—and just like that, I was out of a job.

But before I left, Kim handed me a birthday gift: a Mickey Gilley cassette with You Don’t Know Me and Jukebox Argument on it. I didn’t realize it then, but that little plastic tape would flip a switch in me. I’d heard plenty of country music by then—lived it, even—but something about those songs lit a fire in my chest. They turned my ear, and my heart, toward Nashville.

I took that cassette to my next job at KKAJ in Ardmore, spinning more country records and sharpening my focus on songwriting. I’d listen to that tape in my old Buick Skylark a hundred times, just letting those melodies and words soak into my bones. It was like a classroom on wheels.

That job led to others—radio stations here and there, all of which helped me develop a deep respect for the craft. Of course, when I finally made it to Nashville, all that radio experience made me perfectly qualified… to wait tables. I went from broadcast stations to server stations overnight.

Still, that tape stayed with me, at least in spirit. For the last forty years, I’ve been trying to write a song as good as You Don’t Know Me. I haven’t quite done it yet—but I’m still here, still writing, and I think I’ll give it another shot tonight.

Thanks, Kim. And thank you, Mickey.

04/04/2025

Song of the South

Bob McDill

08/28/2024

It’s a stout one today. Wrote a song, went to the gym, lunch and now a sugar bomb. I hope I don’t pass out.

08/08/2024

16.5

07/03/2024

Writing with my favorite people!