Corey Smith

Yeah.

I played there with Corey Smith.

Yeah.

And it was so cool.

She was like, Mitch, do you have a guitar? And Mitch is this kind of guy that's just, he just, he don't put up with a whole bunch of bullshit, but he was like, yeah, I got a guitar.

And he said, when he tells the story, he's like, here comes another drunk college kid that's about to play me a terrible Corey Smith cover, so he brings that guitar down there, and I played a song that I had written sometime in college, just when I was kind of, you know, doodling around, having fun with it, and he didn't really say anything that night, but the next day, he came back to work, and he said, hey, what are you doing with this, like, songwriting and music thing, and I was like, I'm not doing anything with it, I just kind of do it for fun, and I'm on go to physical therapy school and be an adult, whatnot.

And he was like, well, I kind of like dabbled in the music scene before.

Let me book you a show.

And I genuinely believe it was just God sending that fellow Mitch down that's now my manager and been with me for years.

I truly think that that was just what was supposed to happen.

And I would have never taken that jump if I would have never been at that party that night and played what he thought was going to be the terrible Corey Smith song and ended up getting things going.

Now, if

Um, and a- and I know that, that may seem like a, a cliche answer, but Skynyrd was one of the first bands.

I, I came up, uh, when I was 15 or 16, I was touring around the Southeast with a guy named Corey Smith.

And v- a- between him and Lynyrd Skynyrd, I always tell people those are my two greatest influences as songwriters, 'cause they showed me it was okay to write about home and write about things that were close to the chest in a way that I understood.

And being from the South and, and, you know, the Southeast, like, Lynyrd Skynyrd coming up, man, when I found that cassette tape, and my mom and dad had this basket of tapes, right? And you know, there was a lot of church stuff in there.