Born Country by Randy Owen

Author:Randy Owen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

It’s her first night on the town since she was

just eighteen, a lady down on

Love and out of hope and dreams.

The ties that once bound her now are broke away,

and she’s like a baby, just

Learning how to play.

I ran back to my motel room and wrote that song as fast as I could. I thought if I could just get it to Johnny Rodriquez, a huge star at the time, I would have a No. 1 country hit and be on my way as a songwriter. I even switched the lyrics of the last verse to tell this sad story from the man’s point of view, with a guilty plea that “I gave in to lust, and she just couldn’t live with a man she couldn’t trust.”

It didn’t work out with Johnny Rodriquez, I’m happy to report, and we recorded it for the first time soon after for the Wildcountry album Deuces Wild in 1977. Later we rerecorded it as Alabama, and I’ve always felt that I finally got to do it exactly the way I wanted—the exact right guitar-solo intro, the exact right string arrangement by Kristin Wilkinson, the exact right Alabama harmony, the exact right feeling I felt the first time I met that young lady. It wasn’t overdubbed, overdone, or overanything.

My favorite Alabama album, if you were dying to know, is Just Us, which came out in the middle of the 1980s Alabama prairie fire, in 1987. This was a period when I was personally consumed with the possibility that we were making hit records one after another but in danger of losing our soul in the process. This one album helped me get over that worry. “Face to Face,” off of that album, I wrote up in Dale Morris’s office. I had this tune bouncing around in my head, a very romantic tune about two young lovers. I had the feeling, but I didn’t quite have the line I needed to convey the depth of that feeling. I walked around with this problem for weeks, until I was up on the third floor of our house one night, and it came to me—the simple phrase “face to face.” The fact is, the most important thing when making love to someone is that you are fulfilled with that person and want to look at him or her, face to face. If it’s not there when you are face to face, then it’s probably a one-night stand. It’s not going to last long. As the song says, “We happen face to face.”

Another song on that album that was a high mark for me is “Falling Again,” co-written by me, Greg Fowler, and Teddy. I thought it was a hit from the moment we recorded it; Teddy was not so sure. It ended up becoming the BMI Song of the Year, a very prestigious award based on how many times a song is actually played on radio within a given time frame. It is the only song I ever wrote that was given that award, and it is still a source of considerable pride.

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