James T. Slater

James T. Slater grew up in the Panama Canal Zone and has spent twenty three years writing songs in Nashville.

Slater sat down with the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast at the Fernandina Beach Songwriters Festival, and the conversation opened on Atlanta. Brad grew up there and remembered All I Want From Santa Is a Girl From Atlanta from 96 Rock. Slater wrote it the night before his college band drove up from Miami in a ratty van, cut it the next day in a cheap studio for twenty five dollars an hour, and two weeks later was riding in a limousine with Atlanta Falcons cheerleaders.

His advice to songwriters is to take the gig. He drove to a seventy five dollar night in Redondo Beach, played a funky piano in a crazy bar while half the room listened, and somebody there told him he would do well in a piano bar in Zurich. Two months later the call came. He wrote a song called Meet Me in Zurich, a Belgian band saw him play, and seven years in Europe followed, writing their hits and playing arenas there and in South Africa. Nashville taught him the other half of the job. He had written In My Daughter's Eyes alone within two months of arriving and thought the town was easy, then sat on High Cost of Living for years until he wrote it with Jamey Johnson, who he had met on a fishing boat in Key West.

Within a week of arriving in Nashville, Garth Brooks heard In My Daughter's Eyes and loved it. Brooks has three daughters and Slater was sure of the cut. Then Brooks stepped away from music to raise his kids, and Slater's heart was broken inside a month. Three weeks later a publisher played the song for Martina McBride, who also has three daughters, and she recorded it. He calls that the shape of the business, riding high in April and shot down in May, and says the town takes people ten years because you may have to write one or two or three hundred songs and then find the right artist at the right moment while still paying rent. A song Tim McGraw recently cut had been knocking around Nashville for two years.

His father was a sailor, a psychiatrist and a mandolin player, and for a couple of years after losing him Slater tried to write him a song. He eventually sat down and cut it as a piano vocal, Guy Named Captain. It reached Kenny Chesney through his producer, and Chesney called from an unlisted number to say he had played it on a boat in the islands with a group of boat captains and that all of them teared up. He recorded it. Slater was fifteen and wanted to quit piano for baseball and football, and it was his mother who kept him on it.