Mike Byer

Mike Byer runs the Nashville nonprofit that pairs professional songwriters with veterans and turns their stories into songs.

Byer came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast after he and Brad Banyas found common ground between Operation Song and what Salty's Live Music was building. The first thing that landed was the studio name. Banyas explained that he learned at 53 that he was adopted, and told his four kids he was changing the family name to McBastard, which is how the room they were sitting in got christened. Byer said he liked it, because he is adopted himself.

Operation Song pairs professional songwriters with veterans, their family members and first responders, and it is free to them and always will be. A veteran fills out intake paperwork and a songwriter agreement, gets paired, and the two of them usually finish inside a week. The veteran signs as a co-writer and keeps half the copyright, and Operation Song Music Publishing, registered with ASCAP, administers the veteran's side. Since 2012 they have written more than 2,500 songs. Byer includes family members because the wife who ran everything for a year and the Gold Star mother served too. Three full time staff and one part timer put on 35 to 40 events a year, some of them 500 people or more. Scott Stapp of Creed has written and performed with them, and Ward Davis has backed the organization almost from the beginning.

Byer was going through a medical retirement from the Army when he first walked into an Operation Song retreat on Music Row in 2013. Across his kids' childhood he had been gone about seven years. He had just come back from his son's graduation from basic training, where he pinned on the infantry cord, and that parade field turned out to be the last time he ever wore his uniform. He says he was in a really bad spot. At the retreat he sat down with Travis Meadows and Mark Beeson and gave them the elevator version of his service. Meadows wrote down every word for about forty minutes, never strummed a chord or hummed a note, then picked up a left handed guitar and sang the whole thing back to him. Byer broke down.

The song was about his retirement landing as his son enlisted, and about the boy seeing the things his father did not want him to see. Wherever Byer plays it now, somebody comes up afterward to say that is me and my dad's song. When founder Bob Regan said he was worn out and thinking about retiring, Byer told him they were not letting it go away, and took it over in late 2018. His son has been in the Army eleven years now and tells him he is getting soft.