DARREN LONG: STEEPED IN TRADITION

By PHIL SWEETLAND
Country Music and Radio Contributor, The New York Times

Ernest Tubb, "The Texas Troubadour," must be ranked with other immortals like Minnie Pearl and Mother Maybelle Carter among the most beloved figures in the history of country music. Tubb had the word "THANKS" printed on the back of his guitar, and one of the ways he repaid his millions of fans was to found the Ernest Tubb Record Shop in 1947.

California native Darren Long, one of the newest additions to Steven Sharp's amazingly gifted songwriter roster at Sharp Objects, has worked at the famed record shop for six years. Few places in the world could provide a better training ground for a successful tunesmith.

"I already had a love of country music even before I moved to Nashville," Long said in a telephone interview. "I love Jack Greene, Willie Nelson, Jim Reeves, Chet Atkins, those guys. Once here, I got more entrenched in the really old stuff, like Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, and bluegrass."

Long grew up in Stockton, in California's San Joaquin Valley. His mother had a wonderfully diverse record collection, including the Beatles, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Bobby Darin, Dylan, and Herb Alpert&The Tijuana Brass. "My mom was pretty hip," he says. "She bought `Sgt. Pepper' when it first came out, and listened to underground radio stations from San Francisco."

Like Alpert, who co-founded A&M Records with Jerry Moss, Long began as a trumpeter. He played in school bands and sang in the glee club. At age 10, he experienced culture shock when his family left small-town Stockton and moved to San Francisco, just as Haight-Ashbury was exploding as a cultural and musical mecca.

"It was pretty wacky, coming from Stockton, which was a lot like the movie `American Graffiti' to going to an inner-city school where the kids were bused in," Long says. "Just being in a big city at first kind of scared me."

He went to some free concerts at Golden Gate Park, but didn't "get" the music of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix until later. Instead he got deeper into the albums of the Beatles, and began teaching himself guitar. He joined a rock band called Roundhouse, which by the early 1980s was regularly working in San Francisco's Irish pubs and rock clubs.

Roundhouse recorded a two-sided single, one of which Long wrote, and he quickly discovered another musical passion.

"My favorite thing was going into the studio," he says. "I loved that process. It's sort of a Beatles thing. The studio is such a creative environment. To this day, that's stuck with me. I was in the studio last night."

Darren's remarkable ability with a lyric began when he read Johnny Cash's first autobiography in 1975. "It made a big impression on me," he says. "Johnny was talking about becoming a Christian and writing about his life. I started writing poems from that book."

Indeed, with a family which had originally come from Kansas and Missouri, it's not surprising that Long had always loved Gospel music. Saxophonist's Boots Randolph's remarkable "Sunday Sax" album helped show him that country and Gospel could meld beautifully. When he became a Christian in 1995, he wrote and co-produced "The Lord Is Good," a CD of praise-and-worship music.

Darren and wife Vickie moved to Nashville in 1997. He had to adjust to Music Row's standard practice of co-writing, since in California he'd nearly always written songs by himself. "It was a little mind-numbing," Long says. "I remember for the first few weeks sitting there with my guitar and a notebook saying, `What do I do?' "

It wasn't until Long met a fellow Californian named Greg Padgett that he began to come into his own in Nashville. Padgett and Long had grown up miles apart, but never met until both were in the Tennessee Songwriters Association. "We started writing songs, and it just kind of clicked," Long says. "Greg had his own recording studio and we started doing demos."

With terrific new songs like the Texas swing-flavored "Don't Try This At Home," Long began attracting Music Row's attention. He was named Most Promising Male Songwriter of the Tennessee Songwriters Association for 1999, and signed with a publisher who later faded away.

"I got the award and got songs published and it seemed like I was on the verge," he says of those days. "But lots of publishers were letting people go. It was not a good time to try to get a new deal. It was frustrating. Things were just tough."

Indeed, by the summer of 2004 Darren was so frustrated he was considering returning to California for good. But then Padgett, who has also just been signed to Sharp Objects, came for a visit.

"Greg stayed with us, and I heard him talk about Steve and Randy Sharp. I knew of them from California, and I didn't know Steven was living in Nashville now," Long says. "Greg told me the scope of what Steven was doing, and I was pretty blown away. We went over and met Steven, and I felt like I had known him forever. Maybe it's the California connection."

Sharp says of his newest writer: "Darren Long is incredible! He has that rare quality of painting his life on a musical canvas. Every painting is unique, and different from the last. He is careful to depict the perfect example in his music. Darren has so much `soul' and insight to our hearts."

The combination of Sharp's remarkable ability to identify and promote hits and Long's skill at crafting them should be a match made in Nashville heaven. Darren is not only writing some of the best music of his career, but is also doing a singer/songwriter project with songs that pay tribute to his early heroes the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Burt Bacharach, and Bing Crosby.

Meanwhile, Darren already has two cuts on John Foster's "The Lost Nashville Chronicles" album, and one on {the} upcoming solo CD by BR5-49's Gary Bennett.

Darren has worked Long and hard to get to this point, and with Sharp in his corner he will at last get Music Row and country radio to stand up and take notice.

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