Stephanie Bentley

Stephanie Bentley wrote Breathe and Concrete Angel, and with three kids now in college she is back to writing and performing.

Bentley sat down with Salty's Live Music at the Fernandina Beach Songwriters Festival, her first year at it and the festival's fourth. SALTYmf was there sponsoring the event to put its Band Groupies service in front of independent artists and venues, and wanted songwriters in the room rather than only performers. Tammy and Jeff King put the festival on, a lot of the proceeds go to the seniors of Nassau County, and Bentley says saying yes was a no brainer.

She moved to Nashville in 1991 to take it by storm, the way everybody who moves there does. She landed a deal with Sony Epic Records, cut one album, and got released. She kept writing. Her method sits at the opposite end from the song camp assignment, where writers get handed an artist and told to channel them. She does that work too, and wrote Can't Shake You at a camp Matt Serletic ran for Gloriana, with the group's lead singer Tom Gossin and with James, who she is playing with again tonight. Her own success has come from writing from the heart and ignoring the box people try to put a writer in. If it moves her, she reckons it moves somebody else, because the whole world relates to music.

The label let her go after one album, and she was raising three kids pretty much by herself and needed the money the work brought in. Holds arrive constantly in that business, one song on hold for this artist and another for that one, and a writer learns to stop thinking about them. Breathe, which she wrote with Holly Lamar, sat on hold for Tim McGraw for a year and a half and Bentley had let it go. Then she and Lamar were writing one day and Lamar took a phone call and started jumping up and down. Faith Hill had cut it, as the first single and the title track. She has also served years on the SAG-AFTRA board, fighting for songwriters' rights while streaming rearranged what a song is worth.

The festival has been a season of reconnecting for her. She ran into James in the hotel lobby at check in and had not seen him in forever. She told Tammy the last time they saw each other was about thirty something years ago at Tammy's house, where Bentley was singing a demo for her or Jeff. Her own kids did not go into music, which was deliberate, because she kept them away from most of it and let them find their own thing. They all sing anyway. The song she planned to play that night was one she wrote with her 21 year old son, the first song he has ever written.