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Top country music songwriter brings unique show to hometown Behind the hits with BOB DiPIERO
Top country music songwriter brings unique show to hometown
Behind the hits with BOB DiPIERO
By GUY D’ASTOLFO
Bob DiPiero might be one of the greatest songwriters in country music today, but he’s still a performer at heart.
The Liberty native has been a Nashville fixture for decades. He has penned 15 songs that hit the top of the charts, and hundreds more hits for the biggest names in the business.
He’s also won just about every honor that the country music industry can bestow on a songwriter.
But as DiPiero puts it, “In my mind, I’m still that 18-year-old kid getting ready to play the Tomorrow Club,” referring to the once-famous but long-gone rock venue in downtown Youngstown.
On Friday, DiPiero will be back in downtown Youngstown to give one of his acclaimed American Made songwriter’s series performances at Ford Family Recital Hall.
Accompanying DiPiero will be fellow Nashville songwriting champs Gary Burr and Tim Nichols, each of whom also has penned at least a dozen No. 1 country songs.
DiPiero is well-known among Nashville’s biggest stars, but flies under the radar of the general public.
The songwriter showcases give him a chance to get back on stage and have direct contact with an audience.
In the format, he and his cohorts take turns talking about the songs they wrote, revealing insights into the creative process, and then play the tunes on acoustic guitar.
“We tell any strange and wonderful story behind the music,” said DiPiero, in a phone interview from his Nashville home.
“It’s a one-of-a-kind show, with no rehearsal.”
He said the intimate, semi-circular Ford Recital Hall, with its 600 seats, is the perfect place for the show.
As someone who works chiefly as a songwriter, the shows have a special benefit for DiPiero.
“It’s therapy,” he said. “I think of performing as a selfish thing because I enjoy it so much. It’s part of the creative process, whether it’s the old songs or new ones. I get a chance to get feedback from a living, breathing audience.”
The songwriter showcases tend to attract the most serious fans of country and Americana music. But that’s not all they attract.
“What I have found is these fans at the showcases are superfans, but they bring friends who have no idea what they are going to experience, and a hundred percent of the time, those are the ones who make their way to the stage afterward and say ‘I don’t really listen to country music, but I love those songs’,” said DiPiero.
A transformation occurs when those casual fans realize they are learning the history behind a song they love.
“Our songs are translated by the artists of the day, and that’s what they’ve heard, but you see the connection being made [by the audience] and they get drawn in.”
So the songwriter showcase shows are a chance for DiPiero to bask directly in the glory, rather than once-removed.
“I once saw a television writer who wrote a number of famous ‘Seinfeld’ episodes,” he said. “She was being interviewed about the same thing — how she feels when she sees Jerry Seinfeld delivering her ideas.
“I get my ego filled doing these songwriter shows,” he said. “But my biggest fans are the artists who record my songs. They become fans of my writing, and as long as I have that fanbase, I’m OK.”
Although he has been living in Nashville for 35 years or so, DiPiero still returns to the Mahoning Valley on occasion to visit family. He played a songwriters showcase at Ford recital hall a few years.
The 1969 graduate of Liberty High School and later, Youngstown State University, still fondly remembers his early days as a musician in the Mahoning Valley, when he played in a band.
“We started out as a rock band and morphed into a horn band,” he said. “It was the Earth, Wind and Fire era, and we were a lounge band, playing the hits. I was fortunate to grow up in a time when there was a lot of live music in Youngstown. But I had my eye on moving to Nashville, so my main focus was getting enough cash together to move.”
Success came quickly to DiPiero after moving to Music City. He would soon pen his first hit, 1980’s “I Can See Forever In Your Eyes” (Reba McEntire).
Three years later, he scored his first No. 1 with “American Made” (Oak Ridge Boys).
Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, DiPiero wrote more hits, including McEntire’s “Little Rock,” Restless Heart’s “That Rock Won’t Roll,” Shenandoah’s “The Church on Cumberland Road” and John Anderson’s “Money In the Bank.”
In 1995, DiPiero earned the Country Music Association’s Triple Play Award for writing three No. 1 hits in a 12-month span: “Wink” (Neal McCoy), “Take Me As I Am” (Faith Hill) and “Till You Love Me” (Reba McEnrire). He repeated the feat the next year with “Blue Clear Sky” (George Strait), “Daddy’s Money” (Ricochet) and “Worlds Apart” (Vince Gill).
Over the past decade, DiPiero has continued writing hits. Among them are “Cowboys Like Us” (Strait), “If You Ever Stop Loving Me” (Montgomery Gentry, No. 1), “You Can’t Take the Honky Tonk Out of the Girl” (Brooks & Dunn) and “Southern Voice” (Tim McGraw, No. 1).
He has been inducted into the Nashville Walk of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. More than 1,200 of his songs have been recorded by other artists.
DiPiero’s most-recent honor came Feb. 15. He was the subject of a Poets and Prophets: Legendary Country Songwriters, at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Ford Theater in Nashville.
The quarterly series honors industry greats, a fact that DiPiero humbly acknowledged.
“I’m following in the footsteps of people who have been honored on that show, include Kris Kristofferson and Vince Gill, plus others who might not be known to the general public,” he said. “Being part of that bloodline is a very big honor for me, and I enjoyed every minute. To even say my name in the same sentence as [Kristofferson and Gill] is still mindboggling to me.”