Injury leads to love of music
Submitted by jcht2010 on
By Jessica Coleman
Staff Writer
Vanderbilt native and Industrial High School Graduate John Hicks broke his ankle when he was 19 and to curb the boredom, he picked up a guitar.
He didn’t know it at the time, but that injury was the catalyst that would begin a lifelong love affair with music. He’d always been a bit of a wordsmith, and now he had added an important piece of the puzzle. He bought a cheap guitar and the self-taught artist hasn’t put it down much since.
“I’d always liked writing,” he said, “I just had to learn how to play an instrument.”
In July, after years of working and hoping, Hicks finally saw his dream of releasing an album come to fruition.
5 after 4, an emotion-saturated country record produced by Arms Strength Records, is packed with songs that peg the perfect balance between being deeply personal to Hicks himself, but widely relatable to listeners.
The record contains 11 songs, each telling its own story with the added touch of Hicks’ sandpaper voice. Vanderbilt, an angsty ballad about ambition in a tiny town, and Behind the Velvet Rope, a sort of lyrical exposé referencing addiction in show business, show off Hicks’ talent for storytelling.
His favorite song on the album, Gift and a Curse, has been laying around waiting to be heard for over a decade. It is perhaps the most personal song on the record.
“I wrote that one when I was 23, I guess,” said Hicks, “I’m 35 now. There’s a lot of self-reflection in that song. My dad shot himself, and I kind of pulled from that pain.”
35-year-old Hicks said his somewhat dichotomous upbringing, which included singing in church and frequenting the bar his father owned, inspired many of the tracks.
He said his writing process takes a little time, usually starting with the melody, and growing from there.
“It’s a long process for me,” he said, “ I hear about some people writing 10 songs in a month. I write, like, three, but they’re meaningful.”
From the outside, it appears to many that Hicks’ record came out of nowhere, but he said that is most definitely not the case.
“A lot of people tell me it happened overnight, but it didn’t. I’ve been at this a long time, playing acoustic shows, writing. You’ve got to live through things to have something to write about.”
Hicks has been running sound for Clay Crockett and the Shotgun Riders for 15 years, and works at Amkon Air Filter of Victoria, as well as writing music. His album can be found on iTunes, and at cdbaby.com, and is gaining in popularity, as his friends and family act as a sort of social media publicist group, sharing and tagging, until everyone on their friends lists knows the name John Hicks.
If Hicks and his ever-growing loyal following have anything to say about it, Jackson County will see Vanderbilt become the next Luckenbach.
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