Tony Mantor's : Almost Live..... Nashville - John Tesh: From Entertainment Tonight to Beating Cancer, Faith, Music, and the Purpose That Never Ends

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

Show NotesJohn Tesh has lived a life unlike almost anyone else. Millions knew him as the co-host of Entertainment Tonight. Basketball fans know his legendary "Roundball Rock" theme that became synonymous with the NBA. Music lovers have filled concert halls around the world to hear his compositions.But behind the success is an incredible story of resilience.In this heartfelt conversation, John shares how a garage full of cassette tapes launched his music career, the unlikely return of his iconic NBA theme more than 35 years later, and how a devastating cancer diagnosis changed the way he views life, family, faith, and purpose.He also discusses:The return of "Roundball Rock"His new cycling remixes and upcoming Christmas albumThe story behind Entertainment TonightLessons learned from interviewing some of the world's biggest starsHis battle with terminal prostate cancerHow faith and prayer changed everythingWhy purpose is the key to living a meaningful lifeWhy he has no plans to retireThis is an inspiring conversation about perseverance, reinvention, gratitude, and making every day count.Guest: John TeshHost: Tony MantorIf you enjoyed this episode, please follow Almost Live Nashville, leave a review, and share this episode with someone who needs encouragement today.

Hi, I'm Tony Mantor. Thanks for joining us today. Welcome to Almost Live Nashville, where music, entertainment, and great conversations come together. If you haven't already, tap follow. This way you stay up to date, never missing the great conversation and guests coming your way. Some people build a career, others build a legacy. Today's guest has done both. John Tesh welcomed millions into their homes as co-host of entertainment tonight. His music became the soundtrack to some some of the biggest moments in sports history, including the unforgettable roundball rock theme that has thrilled basketball fans for more than three decades. His concerts have filled world-famous venues. His nationally syndicated radio show has informed and inspired audiences across America, and its passion for music continues to shape generations. But behind the spotlight is a story that very few people know, a story of setbacks and reinvention of faith in the face of uncertainty, of being told he had only months to live, and refusing to let that diagnosis define the rest of his life. Instead, he chose purpose over fear, hope over despair, and continues to inspire millions through his music,

his message, and his unwavering belief that every life has meaning. Today we'll talk about the moments that changed everything. From writing iconic music in a small studio, to the return of his legendary NBA theme, to his remarkable fight against Skies. cancer and the lessons he learned about resilience, family, faith, and living with purpose. This is more than a conversation with a composer, broadcaster, and entertainer. This is a conversation with a man whose life reminds us that our greatest work often begins when we think our story is coming to an end. It's a great honor to have John Tesh with us today. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me.

Oh, yeah. We'll start off with your current business that you've got going. It's the cycling remixes. What made you decide this was the right time to revisit these pieces in a completely different way? In October of 2025, NBC made the decision that they wanted to bring back this old basketball theme that I had written 35 years ago. And I was actually in a mode where I felt like, all right, I've done enough music for a while. I just wanted to tour. Sure. And so we have a daily radio show that we do. And so I was out doing like maybe 18, 20 shows a year.

Sometimes big band stuff, sometimes sports music. music synced up to video, things like that. Sure. And it was actually my son Gibb who said, he said, I'm grandpa, his kids. And so he's like, hey, pop up. Why don't you get back in the studio and do this stuff that you started with?

And that was basically in 19. I mean, I grew up on Long Island playing music like everybody else in town. Yeah. And I ended up being assigned to the Tour de France bike race when I was working for CBS Sports as an announcer, not as a composure, but as an announcer. And David Michaels, who is the brother of the legendary Al

Michael's the announcer, was assigned to be the producer of the Tour de France bike race. Okay. His idea was not to cover it the way they do in Europe, which is live. Right. Do it in what he called MTV style. Again, this is 1982, 1983. Yeah.

And so he said, you're a musician, aren't you? I said, yeah. He goes, well, why don't you bring some of your stuff over to Paris? And I had like, you know, this was, I still have some of these instruments, actually, but I had a Prophet 5. I had an Oberheim. Nice. I had a PPG wave, if you've ever heard of that thing.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. And the key to the whole thing was the emulator too, which has that big giant floppy disk and you put it into the, you put it into the drive and it says it clicks and says this will take a while. And then I had a Lindrum, right, and a MacS.E. Right. And so he would cut the footage of the day's races. You know, Tour de France is 24 races with a different finish line every day. Yes. With one rest day. First of all, I had never seen anything like this before. I had only played sports in college, you know, small sports like soccer and stuff. Right. This was like I couldn't. believe it. You know, what a great opportunity. And so I just started writing music, you know, with a lot of the 80s sounds for the picture. Yeah. And I had to write like an hour and a half of music a week for four weeks. And so it was a lot of it was sort of bits and pieces, you know. Yeah. So that stuff, those themes, I released later on a cassette called Music from a Tour de France because we had a lot of people asking, you know, what was that music? And I couldn't get a record deal. And so I sold it out of my garage. Sure. I had a tape duplicator, right? And I sold tapes out of my, my garage in bicycling

magazines and I sold for 1295 a tape and I sold like 8,000 of these things. Wow. And that was really the beginning of my music career, I guess, you know. And so when everything just came full circle around again, and during that period of time, I had also written this basketball theme and some other themes for sports, you know, gives head to me. He said, why don't you, why don't you get back in a studio and just do this? And so I released this sports record in 2025, which is just basically, it's not easy listening music, as my wife would say. Okay. And then. And then, Then knowing that the Tour de France was coming around, I thought, you know, why don't we just do different mixes of this? So I worked with a guy named John Baker and also Tim Heights, who were both back

and forth from Nashville all the time and had to extend these like three-minute songs into like 12-minute pieces with just, you know, down beats and all kinds of stuff, samples and all of that. Right. Just knowing that this audience is familiar with a lot of these themes. That's why that happened. Looking back, you've evolved many different times, which version over the years, surprises you the most. I think that I have any career at all in music. Just because I grew up by band geek, I was, I'm 6'6 now. I weighed 2.30. And junior high, I was this height, and I weighed 155. So I wanted to play football in high school because it was the only way to get girls. And they wouldn't insure me. I wasn't insurable because I was too light. So I ended up in the band. So I

played baritone horn, trumpet baritone horn, and vowel trombone in the marching band on Long Island. And then also, I took lessons, piano lessons since I was six years old. My mom was a retired surgical nurse, and she was just very much into making her kids study stuff. But both my sisters and I were musicians. And it was a time, right, I was born in 52. So it was a time when everybody was in a garage band. We were in a band called a Blood Sweat and Tears cover band. Billy Joel was in the hassles at the same time.

So we were a rivalry, although it wasn't much of a rivalry. If you've ever heard Billy Joel's band. If he didn't want the gig, we got it. So we were like, not even Pepsi. we were like RC Cola. Everybody was playing the same places. You know, Atlantic Beach Club, Catskills and all of that.

Right. 25 or 64 had just come out. And the first Sweat and Tears album without Cooper. Yeah. So we did all that stuff. We would also do, you know, big band stuff and things like that. So that's what I always wanted to do with my life.

But my father was a, he was the vice president of Haynes underwear. Okay. Okay. And so he thought that I would starve to death if I was a musician. Yeah. So he enrolled me

at North Carolina State University in textile chemistry. And I lasted, I lasted about four and a half semesters. And then I took a, I took a course to try and raise my GPA and it was radio and television 101. And that's really when that part of my career started.

But through it all, I was always in the practice rooms at NCC and all of that. Yeah. Yeah. But I, and your chief instrument is piano or guitar or both? Piano. Yeah, piano.

Yeah. And so when I was, was in New York working for sports and also working for CBS News. I studied with a guy named Harold Danko, who was a jazz teacher. And he had studied with with Chick, apparently, Chick Korea. And so I learned a little bit. I was mostly a reader. I grew up, you know, playing whatever, Rock Mononov's Prelude in C Sharp Minor. Yeah, me too, me too. Got halfway through Rhapsody and Blue. You know, I'm not doing this anymore. Yeah, yeah, the, uh, uh, uh, Rok Monodonov's thing is great because you get to be

beat on the piano, right? Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah. And then when I got to, you know, I said, oh, here I am in the television and radio business. And I'm writing news themes for people. Yeah. And then when I got the job at CBS Sports, I'm in the truck with everybody, right?

And so they're like, hey, we need some music for this. And so I would just create music and then give it to them for free because then we're going to pay me as a musician. And then we would take the BMI royalties and stuff like that. So when I got to entertainment tonight in 1986, I'm still not sure why. I took the job, but it really worked out. Yeah, I did. Because 23 million people in night were seeing that show at the time, right?

In 1986. And I just thought, well, this is the way to get a record deal. So I sent demos of all the Tour de France music to everybody, including, you know, Clive and Quincy, all those guys, you know, Donnie Einer. And you've got to have all the turndown letters. And I think, and I don't blame him for this, I think that they were like, they didn't want the guy who was reading the celebrity birthdays on the same label as Billy Joel. Yeah.

You know? Yeah. So I was watching PBS one Sunday night, and I saw you two under a blood red sky. I saw the moody blues, and they were both at Red Rock. Wow, yeah. And then I saw my old friend, became a friend, Yanni at the Acropolis. And I watched these PBS pledge drives. And I said, well, this is, nobody knew who these guys were.

They didn't know who the three tenors were. Why don't I try and do this? Right. And so I called them up and told them what my idea was to play with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. And they said, well, how much touring are you doing right now? I said, well, none. How many records have you sold? I said, I don't know, 8,000 out of my backyard.

And they were like, well, if you make the special, we'll take a look at it, right? But we're not going to invest in it. And what happened was, I mean, it's a long story, but what happened was four songs in, it started raining, you know, and the orchestra left. But the audience wouldn't leave because it was Red Rock, because they put on their slickers and their umbrellas. Right. And they were stomping their feet because they knew it was at stake for me.

We'd given away 7,000 tickets. But they knew it was a special, you know? So they stuck it out. Yeah. Finally, the moon came out, you know, rain stopped, and we, the orchestra came back and we finished it. And I sent a rough mix, rough edit to a woman named Linda Taggart at Maryland Public Television, about three or four weeks later.

With that rough mix and that rough edit, she played it at midnight in Maryland. And she calls me up. I put my phone number on there. She calls me up. And she says, you know, this thing, you've got something here. This thing, it just out pledged the three tenors. Wow. She said the most popular segment was when we were being rained on.

So, yeah. So anyway, that was the biggest surprise. It's a long way of answering your question. No, that's no problem. Actually, it's a long way to answer all your questions. But that's really what happened was if it hadn't been for that. And the only reason we could afford that was my wife, Connie Selleck, and we took TV money and invested in that. And at the moment it started raining, we were like, well, that's gone.

That was kind of one of those things that a failure turned out to be a great thing for you. What other things have kind of been there where you look at them and you realize, oh, this might not have worked, but then in the end, it worked out okay. Yeah, I would say that after Red Rocks, Connie and I had our daughter, who was eight weeks old at Red Rocks. And then in order to have PBS play your special ad nauseum, you have to offer them tickets to live shows. So I had to announce a 50 city tour. Oh, wow. Okay. I know, right?

Yeah. To give away the tickets and they gross them up, you know, all that stuff. Oh, yeah. And so my Italian wife looks at me and she goes, okay, this, okay, fine. But when you get back, you're going to have a one and a half year old. And so what are we going to do? Right. So I kept touring and I did two other albums, Avalon and one world, which are both big PBS specials, same type of stuff.

Right. It became clear that I was going to have to spend more time at home. Sure. So I thought, wanted to go back to like one of the first things I did, get back into radio. Yeah. My first radio job was in Raleigh, North Carolina. I was Rick Dees, a news guy at 20 years old. Yeah.

I looked at the landscape. I said, what can I do that's different on the radio? It wasn't going to be, you know, fluffy Danny and the Weasel in the morning or Howard Stern. It wasn't going to be love songs at night. Right. Didn't really have DJed chops. And so I thought, why don't we do something?

Because the Internet was in its nascency. Right. People really weren't sure what was real and what was not. Sure. One night we were going to sleep, my wife and I was going to say bedding down for the evening. That sounds terrible. And so it was like pros, but I'm betting down the evening. I looked at her side of the bed.

Oh, she looked at my side of the bed and it was all these wires and stuff. I mean, like everything, you know. Right, right. She said, this is our sleep. She called our sleep chamber. This is our sleep chamber. What are you doing with all this crap in here? So I had to cross complaint. So I looked at her side of the bed and it was all these magazines. Yeah. Oprah magazine, health magazines, you know, all this stuff with sticky notes, yellow sticky notes in there. I said, what's this? And she said, these are all the articles that I want to get to, but I haven't had time yet. Sure. They were all like self-improvement, health things. And the veritable light bulb went off.

Right. And I said, why don't we do a show for this woman where we take, she was 33 at the time? We'd take, you know, 5,000 word pieces, right? Yeah. Turn them into like a minute 30 and surround them with music. We'll call it intelligence for your life. And so I started calling radio stations like an idiot. So they got this thing.

It's called intelligence for your life. I was like, is that some sort of a conference? I said, no, it's a radio show, you know? It was like three hours on a weekend. Mm-hmm. And I gave it away for free to like, I don't know, maybe 30 stations like that. Right. Chugging away.

I'm writing myself. you know, doing this stuff and not making any money. And so all of a sudden, getting calls from radio stations saying, hey, what is this? You know, can we have this too? Right. Then we hired like Westwood One and through the whole thing like that and started a weekend show and then it became a daily show. And that was 25 years ago.

Yeah. It still continues to this day. Yeah. So that was something where if I hadn't put in the reps, I would say. Right. It was idiocy because if I had known more about the radio business, I would realize that it wasn't possible to do a self-sindicated show. Yeah.

So now you've interviewed thousands of people. What did those interviews and the difficult questions that you had to ask sometimes teach you not only about humanity, but about yourself? Yeah. I've never been asked a question like this. It's such a great leading question for me because I did some interviews from entertainment tonight, right? Mostly they were there with the music interviews, you know. Everybody from, you know, Clapton.

Gosh, everybody. I can't even think of it. You know, it's classical musicians. I interviewed Celine Rollins on the Brooklyn Bridge, you know, because it's where he used to practice. Yeah. But I did a show for a year on NBC called One-on-One. Okay.

Those were like three-hour interviews. We would play them for like a half hour on NBC daytime. Those were the ones that had the experience that you just talked about. Yeah. Where I had a list of questions that NBC wanted. And I was in a real, I had been through a divorce. I had just met my wife Connie in 1991. Okay.

We were dating and she was a famous actress. The music thing was just really happening and I wasn't sure what to do with my life. So I would ask people with questions that I wanted answers to in my own life, just like what you said. Sure. You know? Sure. So people like John Voigt, for example, had amazing answers. He still lives by me right here.

Had amazing answers for that. Even people like Telly Savalas. Yeah. If you have to explain to people at a certain age, Telly Savas was, you know, was Cojack and Betty Davis. You know, it's just, I mean, on and on and on. Yeah. You'd go through all the stuff that the producer wanted. And then it would be like, I mean, you just ask personal questions about, you know, how did you know,

that your husband was the one or your wife was the one, you know, things like that. I ended up with a wealth of knowledge. Right, right. Experiential knowledge. You just mentioned a plethora of people that are just so well known. Out of all the people that you've interviewed and been around, what's that one pinch me moment that you go, whoa, I can't believe this. Yeah, it was Clairton.

Okay. It was interviewing Clapton. And it was an Entertainment Tonight interview, right? Okay. They just really wanted me to hammer him about losing his son, you know? was just so uncomfortable for me. And the same thing happened with a Tim Allen interview where they wanted me to interview him

about being busted for cocaine dealing, right? Right. I remember that, yeah. Yeah. And so I found a way to come in softly. Right. And then I asked a bunch of questions. Entertainment Tonight, to this day, probably has never aired the answers to it.

Yeah. Chord progressions and pentatonic scales. You know? It was like talking to the Diction. Dregs or something. It was, yeah, so it was tough because I loved E.T. And they were so great promoting my career. But no, what was it like kissing your co-star?

Right. That's really what they wanted. When fans stop you today and talk to you, what's one story that you might hear over and over again that still just catches you off guard? Yeah, it's changed. You know, it is nowadays, in 2015, I was given 18 months to live with a rare form of prostate cancer. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. The journey had, in fact, we just got back from M.D. Anderson, the cancer center there,

who has been treating me for a decade. And the doctor who's known as the Jedi master for prostate cancer, Dr. Christopher Logothetus, you know, he pulls up all the scans and everything, just the 100,000-mile checkup. And he says, well, you're now an extreme outlier. And I said, well, just give me to that in layman's terms. What does that mean? We can't figure out why you're still alive. I said, don't ever say that again. Yeah, yeah. But the point I'm making is that there are two things are happening. One is that I'll get a lot of emails from people because I was so honest about it, my wife and I both, about, you know, this is what I'm going through.

What were the prayers that you used and what treatments did you use? Should I get radiation? Right. So I get a lot of that very, very personal stuff because nowadays, you know, back in the, back in the 80s, you couldn't communicate with people like that. Right, right. But now it's great. It's become a bit of a ministry for me.

and my wife. Yeah. The other thing that's happened is that when I would walk into a, back in 86 to 96, I would walk into an airport and somebody would just, they'd be walking by and they'd go, da-da-da-da-da-da, you know, that kind of thing for the entertainment tonight theme. But it's now, it is the basketball theme. When that thing came back, and when I wrote that in 1989, it was just, I had written an NFL theme, I'd written a golf theme.

It was just another theme, and it wouldn't have had any of the effect that it's had if it wasn't 35 years hence, right? And during the whole of Michael Jordan thing, you know. You brought up the prostate cancer. I have to touch one little thing on this. Sure. How does life seem different to you now that you've lived through this when at the time they didn't give you that much time? Because the older we get, the more defined we get on our legacy and on our mortality. How did that affect you during and then how does it affect you now that you've actually gotten through all this. Yeah, I was a bad person when I first got,

became a bad person when I first got diagnosed. I was, I became a cancer patient. And so it was, the doctor said, get your affairs in order, so that's what I did. And we can make sure the insurance is right, whatever. And it was Connie really, Italian girl from the Bronx who sort of rose up and just said, this is not us.

I'm like, what are you talking about? Right. She just said, we're going to find, we were both reading books about prostate cancer and about latest treatments. We were, you know, I was, you know, there were people who knew who I was. And so I was able to actually call up hospitals and find doctors and interview them. Yeah.

None of it was any good news. Sure. So when I started taking treatment and chemo and something called androgen deprivation therapy, they give you shots in your stomach, which basically suck all of the, all of the testosterone out of your body. Yeah. Because prostate cancer loves testosterone feeds on that. And prostate cancer also loves to go to your, to your bones.

Okay. So that's why you want to get on it. it right away. This was a rare form of that cancer. It didn't make any PSA, you know, which is the marker for prostate cancer. My GP found it with a manual exam. He just found there's something wrong with, you know, I feel some lumps or something. Right. And I feel some lumps ended up being, you know, these giant tumors that had took my kidney and one of them and it spread across my body. What happened with me is I was in a lot of pain. When you're a quote unquote terminal patient, you can get anything you want, you know. So I was taking oxies. And then at night I was chasing him with whiskey.

Wow. I know. And when I tell a story on stage, I'm like, I don't, I don't recommend that. And I'm like, oh, yes, I do. No, I don't. Yeah, yeah. I just became a horrible husband. And in this studio, I remember my wife, we were toe to toe arguing about something.

And she just said, if you're not going to fight, then I'm not, you're done. Right. You know, and she was serious. Yeah. And so I sobered up and we kept fighting. Yeah. And then when I found out how many people were praying for me. Yeah.

And I would get these Facebook posts. And all the rest of other stuff. And that's the thing about, you know, that's actually a, you know, a challenge when you're first diagnosed is have a lot of friends, you know, in this situation where they don't want it to be public. Yeah. Yeah. Don't even want any other friends to know.

Right, right. But if you've got friends who are going to pray for you, and that's really what was happening. And so to answer your question. My daughter's pregnant. So she calls me every 15 minutes. No problem. She's okay. That's good.

Yes, good. To answer your question, once I got to answer your question, once I got to ask you. got past the pity party, which is what my wife called it. Yeah, yeah. Then I did think legacy. The legacy that I thought of was more music, you know? Yeah. Just more music.

Because you know as a musician that you'll release a song and you have no idea what's going to happen with it. Yeah, yeah. And then all of a sudden you get a message for somebody. I have a song called Bastille, a very simple song. It's just an A minor and C minor. I almost didn't put it on a record. Yeah.

I get this stuff. I still get it today where it's like, oh, I got married to the song. Someone said, I buried a friend to the song. And I've got a couple of people say, I vacuumed to the song. You know, so. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

So it is one of those things where it's just, I feel like producing more music and doing that. Good. Can I add to a legacy, yeah. Now, out of all the times you've been interviewed, what's one question you always hoped that someone would ask you, but they never did? Why don't you retire? Nobody asks me that question. Although, although, whatever you go to the hospital for a checkup, whatever they go, Are you still working?

They ask you two questions. Yeah. Are you still working? And when was the last time you had a fall? That's what they start. Why are you asking me this? I was 74 years old. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, I think, actually, I think the question is, are when are you going to quit? Yeah. You know, which is the same question. And I don't know. I think maybe it's the baby boomer thing. Yeah. I just don't, I just, I feel like if I didn't have a purpose, I would probably shrink,

you know, shrink and die. Yeah. Do you feel the same way? I do, I do. You know, people constantly ask me, so when you're going to retire? It's like, never. Yeah. You know, why retire when doing things that you enjoy? Yeah. And when you look at somebody like Tony Bennett, for example, right? Yeah, yeah. But his career was just re-energized, you know, by his son. Right. I'm still waiting for that moment for me. But it's, yeah, I really, I just, I think purpose is a big deal.

It is. You know, my friend Rick Warren wrote Purpose Driven Life and that's a great book. It's just, about you were you were born with a purpose god but god birthed you with a with a purpose and you got to figure out what that is and just and just live it exactly my thing is i really want to encourage people to find the mission the purpose that they were that they were made for and then live that out yeah well it sounds like you've done well that way and i'm just glad that things are still progressing and going good for you yeah i mean not a you know not every organ works the way it's supposed to but i just i just mean my kidney i don't mean the i don't mean the private parts Right, right. But I mean, it's like you're still sitting here with having this conversation about your life, about your future projects, about what you want to do. That's a good thing.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. And I think that, I mean, I'm talking to a musician here. I think that you lose track of time when you're working on music. You do. You just do. Whether it's whether you're practicing or whatever. And now, you know, my wife and I are very involved in helping to put music programs into schools and certainly our grandkids' schools. I have all three of my grandkids are great pianists. I did not teach them. Music in the house is just a huge thing. I love it. And I love watching like an eight-year-old learn a piano piece and not be worried about what we think about it, you know. Right. And just their innocence and how they approach it.

Yeah, you know, there's a book called, we've quoted it on our radio show before. It's called The Rule of 10 Years Old. Yeah. I can't remember who wrote it, but it's basically a book that informs you on how to find your purpose if you're lost. Right.

And it is, look back at your life when you were when you were 10 years old. Yeah. What were you doing then? Right. When you were on your stingray, green stingray bike with the, with the playing cards attached to the spokes and you had your eyes closed with your hands off the handlebar. What was that person doing to make, to make him come alive?

Right. And if you look at my life, parents, you know, my father was a World War II veteran. They just sort of stuffed me in the basement, you know, and they would out and gotten party and and stuff. And I had in a basement, I had actually, you know, Lynn Manuel's life is a lot like this, too, latchkey life. Yeah. where there was a real-to-reel tape recorder that my dad had.

It was actually a wire recorded. If you've ever even heard of that. Oh, yeah, yeah. And, you know, a microphone and an amplifier, an upright piano. Yeah. And I was just creating really bad stuff, you know. But look at that. And I also, I bought one of these from Heath Kit.

Do you remember Heath Kit? I remember them. Not many people remember that. So it's basically a kit, right, for people who don't know. Right. And you send away, and then you can build your own radio station. Yeah. And so, or whatever it is, wherever you want.

Right. I built a radio station and I was broadcasting into my parents' car in the driver. Right. Yes. So if you look at that, that's pretty much what I was going to be doing, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, it's been good. So what would you like to leave people with just to let them know what's on the horizon here

that they can look forward to from John Tesh? Yeah, I mean, I'm actually just about finished with a Christmas record. And I've done several of them, but I've never done one like. this this is this is if if round ball rock became eight Christmas songs no it's it's and the only title that would work on this is epic Christmas okay and what I did was I started out sketching sketching out tunes I have my friend Tim Hines do the MIDI stuff for the MIDI arrangements for it right and then charted it out took it into a studio with all live musician yeah we had I laid down my dental part in the

studio and then we had Tim, Tim Landers on bass guitar, who's been my music director forever. Ray Brinker on drums, who's now out with Herb Albert. Andrew Sinowick, who plays on all the big movies here on guitar. And then Jim Cook, who's as good a B3 organist as you'll ever find. And then Tony Guerrero, who's a great flugelhorn player and arranger, he did all the orchestra stuff. So it's basically 80-Synthi stuff, right? Right.

With a live band with strings and brass. Nice. And it's powerful. Nice. It's for unwrapping presence at a high speed. Okay. All right. That's good.

Well, this has been great. I really appreciate you taking the time to join us today. It's been good therapy for me. I appreciate it. Are you in Nashville now? I am. I am. Oh, that's great.

That's great. You know, I used to work at Channel 4 there. Did you know that? Yes. Yes. Yeah. I was on the air with a guy named Dan Miller. I remember Dan.

Pat Sejack was the weather guy. I learned how to be a journalist in Nashville, was that that was a really, really strong station. Well, this has been a real honor to talk to you. Well, it's been great. Thank you. It's been my pleasure. Thanks again. A sincere thank you to our guests for sharing their journey with us today. And thanks for spending part of your day with us. We hope today's conversation gave you something to take with you. If you haven't already, remember, tap follow so you never miss the great conversations and guests still ahead. You can always reach us at media at plateau music.com.

Thanks for being part of what we're building here on Almost Live Nashville. We'll see you next time.