Album Notes

Ask Sandy Lawrence where she hails from and she hesitates. “Well, my family’s all from San Angelo, Texas so my roots are there. But I never lived there. My dad was in the Air Force, so I was born in Ardmore, Oklahoma, lived in Scotland and northern California, went to high school in central Florida during all the “moon shot” years, went to college in Bakersfield and Long Beach, moved back to south Florida and then eventually to Tennessee, where I actually have lived for over 20 years.”
Sandy credits this “gypsy” life for her ability to adapt readily to life’s inevitable changes, and for her ability to be an astute observer of the way people interact. “Moving every so many years meant I was always an outsider, trying to understand pecking orders and cliques. It was tough on an overly sensitive kid like me,” she laughs, “but I learned to be a pretty good judge of what motivates people, good or bad. It’s all fodder for songwriting.”
She says she grew up listening to her dad play Bob Wills, Hank Thompson, Tennessee Ernie Ford and Roger Miller, as well as Broadway show tunes like “My Fair Lady.” But she knew her calling when she saw Joni Mitchell on television when she was 15 years old. Having played piano and sung in choirs since she was 7, picking up the guitar was a natural. The Beatles, the Eagles, James Taylor, Carole King and eventually Emmylou Harris all led her in the direction of her destiny. “ I saw Rodney Crowell open for Emmylou my senior year of college. I was a snobby English major who thought my future was as an academic poet. I had about decided that songwriting was not a worthy pursuit. I saw Rodney and everything came together. Joni Mitchell taught me you could write intelligent lyrics. Rodney taught me it could be done in country music.”
Sandy started playing bluegrass music soon after college. “I loved the harmonies and the pure simplicity.” She played the circuit for several years in a band called Sourwood in south Florida. Marriage and a child led her to believe again that songwriting was in her past. “But then one day I was reading an article about Kris Kristofferson and it said he went to Nashville when he was 29. I was 29.”
Sandy and her family packed up and moved to Nashville. She played the Bluebird, worked with publishers and was a Kerrville songwriting finalist in 1988. Success was moderate, but over time she felt that what she had to offer, Nashville didn’t want. “I pretty much gave up. The marriage failed, I got a job working on a horse ranch and eventually got where I didn’t even pick up a guitar.”
But life changed again. With a new marriage to horse trainer Jack Lawrence and with the encouragement of close friends and her now grown son, Josh, Sandy decided to make a cd of some of her best songs. Grammy nominated songwriter Mary Ann Kennedy produced it, Vince Gill, Craig Carothers and Pam Rose and Mary Ann sang harmonies, with some of the top acoustic Nashville session players backing them all up. Suddenly people are sitting up to take notice.