Music

In the late spring of 1989, I was serving as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Las Vegas, Nevada. My companion (Elder Eric Orr) and I had just returned to the trailer home we lived in on Boulder Highway after teaching a first discussion. I was sitting on the porch of that trailer thinking about the things we had just taught. The words and melody to a song called “Lamb To the Slaughter” seemed to pour out into my journal. I had written quite a few songs before my mission but this was a different kind of experience for me. It was testimony formed into music, and at least for me, I knew it was special. That song was the first song I wrote that was later on the Nashville Tribute Band’s first album Joseph: A Nashville Tribute to the Prophet, which was released in June of 2005.

I wrote a portion of a song called “Candles” while serving as a missionary and also a portion of a song called “He Walked A Mile In My Shoes” while serving in Nevada. All were special to me, but I had no plans to do anything with them, they were just musical journal pieces of my testimony.

I returned home to Oklahoma from my mission, went back to BYU and met a girl named Sonja. We married in 1991, both graduated in 1994 and moved straight to Nashville where I would jump in and carved out a living in the music business. Sonja was a Registered Nurse and her income certainly helped us through the starving years until I had some hits.  After a couple of years in the business, I met and became friends with Dan Truman, who was a member of the Church and also a member of the Grammy Award winning country group Diamond Rio.

Around 2004, Dan and I were sitting together one day both sharing gratitude for the successes that we had enjoyed in a very hard business. We started discussing ways that we could use our talents to give back to the religion that we loved so much. We had several discussions about this over the next few months. One day I began to gather the song pieces I had written while serving my mission some fifteen years before. I sat in the unfinished basement of my house, where I always seemed to do my best work, and I began to write.

I finished “Candles” and “He Walked A Mile In My Shoes”. I wrote a song about Porter Rockwell called “Modern-Day Samson”. I wrote a song about Emma Hale Smith called “Emma” that was one of the most special and unique experiences of my life. I called Dan and set up a time to meet with him at his house. I played him the songs. I cried. He cried. We just sat there moved to tears wondering what we should do about how we felt. Church history country music? What does that even mean? Who would possibly care about this? Probably no one we thought, but we decided we needed to make an album with songs like these, even if we were the only ones who liked it. So we set our minds to it and started working.

I wrote the rest of the songs that ended up being in the project and Dan masterfully wrote the final song on the album, an instrumental called “Farewell Nauvoo”, that remains one of my favorite instrumental pieces that I have ever known. We had eleven songs that we loved. They told a story, and we loved how the songs told it. They were gritty and they were unapologetically human, and we loved what the experience of creating them had done to our hearts.

In a somewhat miraculous way, these songs happened to get into Deseret Book President Sheri Dew’s hands in 2004 just as she went on a Church history tour with her nieces and nephews. She called me on the phone when she returned from her trip and she said, “Jason, I listened to every song several times with my family along this trip. This isn’t the kind of music that we usually release over here on Deseret Book, but these songs have the Spirit in them and I want to release this album as soon as you can get it done.”

Dan and I were thrilled. Sheri was a Kansas girl, born and raised, and she seemed to love the simple, human approach to these songs about the Restoration. Sheri believed and she got the staff at Deseret Book to believe. In 2005, the album released and  Joseph: A Nashville Tribute to the Prophet very quickly became one of Deseret Books best-selling albums of all time. It was awarded Album of the Year at the 2006 Listener’s Choice Awards by the LDS Booksellers Association and we were awarded New Artist of the Year.

At the 2006 Pearl Awards, the album won an award for Themed or Concept Album of the Year. The Nashville Tribute Band won an award for Recording Artist of the Year. The song “Emma” won the award for Song Of the Year. The song “Say Uncle” won the award for Contemporary Recorded Song of the Year. “Jason Deere” won the award for Songwriter of the Year and Dan Truman got an award for Inspiration Recorded Song of the Year.

Dan and I didn’t know what to say. We were astonished. We loved this music so much and it was getting attention and people were liking it. Our lives started to change very quickly. People started to ask us to perform the songs. I had opened a music publishing company at the time and had a bunch of young songwriters around the office like Matt Lopez, Brad Hull and Tim Gates. They started performing the concerts about the Restoration with me and Dan.

Dan and I had previously been the “Nashville Tribute Band” as two songwriters who made music paying tribute to something we really loved, but as we did more and more shows with some musicians who loved this music as much as we did, we one day realized we really were a band.

For almost a decade we had somewhat of a rotating cast of truly great people and great musicians who toured the world with us. But somewhere around 2010 we settled into the six guys that we still tour with today. I can’t tell you how much I love these guys in this band. I love their wives and their children for their love of the things that we sing about and how they support their husbands as we are gone for so many weeks and months each year. There are challenges to loving men who travel. I think they see what it does to the hearts of these men to sing, play and testify night after night of truth restored and the people who made that Restoration possible.

For many years, the six individual members of the Nashville Tribute Band (NTB) all lived in Nashville, Tennessee within miles of each other. In the past five years four of the six members of the band have moved to various places in the state of Utah from Bryce down south to Providence up north. Geography has made things a bit more challenging but it hasn’t slowed the band down much. Dan Truman and I are the founding members of the band and we rarely see each other anymore with me living in Nashville and Dan now residing in Cache Valley, Utah, but we talk almost daily by phone.

One of the most fascinating things about this group of talented guys is that we all do things outside of being in the Nashville Tribute Band. We love the diversity this fact brings to our experience as musicians. Dan Truman has been in the Grammy award-winning band Diamond Rio for thirty-five years. Brad Hull and Tim Gates for many years were two thirds of a successful country trio called Due West who made several albums on several different record labels in Nashville, all the while making records with and touring with the NTB. Dan’s two sons, Ben and Chad, have both been members of the NTB for well over a decade, all the while touring with other acts and as a duo called Truman Brothers.

We absolutely consider both Aaron Kopp, our live sound engineer, and Silvio Richetto, who has mixed all of our albums, to be members of this organization called NTB. Aaron works in the sound department at Brigham Young University and Silvio continues to work as a Grammy award-winning mix engineer from his home in Araxa, Brazil. We all have families. We are all running fast and keeping ambitious schedules, but we are never too busy for joining our hearts together as NTB every chance we get.

As the Nashville Tribute Band, we collectively have missed performing live with the regularity that we have enjoyed in previous years. The pandemic has made us take a break from heavy traveling for over a year, but it has also created other opportunities that we are very excited about and grateful for.

We recently worked on a brand-new website with the amazing Tiffany Bloomquist www.tiffanybloomquist.com who helped us provide our online friends with the website we’ve always wanted. So much music and information all in one easy-to-access place. We are thrilled. Please visit us often at www.nashvilletributeband.com.

We released a lot of new music last year. Early in the year our eighth album Praise: A Nashville Tribute to the Hymns released, comprised of unique NTB versions of favorite hymns, and a few new hymns. In May we released a song that I wrote about my father for Father’s Day called “Old Man”. Of course I love it, but we were excited to see so many other people relate to their own fathers with the song.

YouTubers Emily Belle Freeman and David Butler of the popular Come Follow Me study Don’t Miss This invited us to travel with them to all of the church history sites in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and Wyoming during 2020 where they were filmed teaching their lessons at many locations for the 2021 Come Follow Me Doctrine and Covenants curriculum and we played music on camera about Jesus and the Restoration of the gospel along the journey.

It was a truly amazing experience that you can follow throughout 2021 as you study the Doctrine and Covenants with Don’t Miss This. We made an accompanying EP of new music called “Don’t Miss This in the Doctrine and Covenants 2021”. Twenty-one of our songs also make up the Spotify Playlist “Don’t Miss This in the Doctrine and Covenants”, the official soundtrack of Emily and David’s 2021 study of Come Follow Me.

In April of 2021 we filmed a live show for an online concert series that Deseret Book is bringing to your homes called “The SESSIONS”. https://www.deseretbookpresents.com/artists. Our online concert releases on July 2^nd, with special guest Emily Belle Freeman. We love her and loved filming this with her. Get your tickets and enjoy the show with your family.

Missing our many friends out on the road, I wrote a song one night called WISH YOU LOVE. The rest of the band loved the message and we recorded it and recently released it. It is especially for those of you whose faces we have seen singing along with us over the years at our concerts. You can get it wherever you download or stream music.

After 9 albums and several singles over the past seventeen years, we are forever exploring and developing the next project with the amazing staff at Deseret Book. We expect an announcement for a new Nashville Tribute Band project in the very near future. It has been an incredible journey since our first project in 2005. We have paid tribute to the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ, to that great part of American history called the Pioneer Trek, to the unique culture of sending missionaries into the world and all of the miraculous blessings that accompany that privilege.

We have paid tribute to our Redeemer in an album that we believe may be our best work ever, and we hope that is true as the life of Jesus is the center of that project. We have paid tribute to Christmas, to the Old Testament and to beloved gospel hymns. We love to make music that aligns with the bullseye of our culture as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and we love to join Christians everywhere in loving, praising and honoring Jesus Christ, our Savior and our Redeemer.

We say it often, that our time with the Nashville Tribute Band seems to save our lives every time we get together and sing our hearts out to an audience of believers. We need it. We love it. We look forward to the next performance every time we walk off of a stage. I love these good and talented men and it is a privilege every day that I get to make and play music with them. This is how we open our hearts to the world and join our voices with the prophetic invitation to “Come Unto Jesus”. This is how we shout our testimonies from the rooftops. It does our souls good and we will do it for as long as people will listen and find inspiration and a smile from the music that we make.

I love these gentlemen, every one of them, and I want you to quickly update you on each member of the band.

Jason Deere

Sonja and I have raised our three children, Josie, Madeline and J Davis, in Franklin, Tennessee. We have lived for more than twenty-seven years in Tennessee. I continue to write songs and produce music for the Nashville market, but I have also recently accepted a faculty position as an “Artist In Residence” at Southern Virginia University. I will be developing curriculum for and helping to expand the Commercial Music concentration there and I couldn’t be more excited to work with this amazing institution and the young creative students there teaching them what I have learned. It’s going to be busy, but I’m ready for the challenge.

Dan Truman

Dan continues an unparalleled, three-decade career with country supergroup Diamond Rio, who has enjoyed a long list of hit singles, platinum albums, Grammy awards, a lifetime Grand Ole Opry membership and after thirty-five years they still do over eighty shows a year to enthusiastic audiences. As a pianist and producer, Dan has scored background music for dozens of TV shows and has recently created a successful YouTube channel, “Dan Truman Instrumental Piano Music”, specializing in original piano music, what he calls “chill-hop Jazz”, innovative movie themes and song classics. Dan and his wife Gina are also active in teaching health through essential oils to audiences through the U.S. and Brazil.

Brad Hull

Brad and his wife Brooke are raising their three children, Reese, Thatcher and Remi, in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Brad has a successful real estate business in the very busy middle Tennessee housing market. He is also serving as the Bishop of his local congregation. He is privately working on a solo album of songs that he has written that the rest of our band can’t wait to hear. He’s being pretty secretive about it, but we are all certain that it will be smart and very good.

Tim Gates

Tim and his family moved in 2019 from Nashville to Bryce, Utah to perform his hit show “A Song Like Me” for nightly audiences at Bryce Canyon National Park. Tim and his wife Berta have five kids, Lainy, Bradi, Alex, Jaden and Bellamy, and a bunch of farm animals somewhere out in the desert mountains. All that we know for sure is that it is as hard to keep a signal on a call with Tim as it is to get Tim to answer his phone way out there. Tim is also in the process of recording a solo album that will be covers of classic country hits that musically shaped him from his youth. I have worked on a couple of the songs so far with Tim and I’ve got to say, this is going to be a good album.

Ben and Chad Truman

Ben and his wife Sami are raising their three boys, Harrison, Leo and Miles, in Vineyard, Utah. Ben’s brother Chad Truman and his wife Catherine also live near Provo. Ben stays busy as a financial consultant for a few clients and Chad continues to do recording sessions and perform with various comedy and musical groups in the Utah area. Together the two, as Truman Brothers, recently released an EP with Deseret Book called Quiet Revolution with critical acclaim.

Aaron Kopp

Aaron and his wife Meghan are raising their children, Mikelle, Christian and Brynae, in Lehi, Utah. Aaron stays forever busy working at Brigham Young University. In essence, if someone steps up to a microphone on that campus, Aaron is in charge of making sure that their voices are heard, or not heard…depending on the situation. We consider Aaron to be the best in the business and it is a privilege every time that we see him in the audience in front of us at the sound board. Seconds before every Nashville Tribute Band show begins, just before the lights go bright and someone counts off the opening song, we hear Aaron’s calm and reassuring voice in our earpieces saying, “OK boys, it’s time for another show. You’re going to be amazing. Have a great show! Let’s do this. 30 seconds.” This voice gives us every confidence to do the job and love every second of it.

Silvio Richetto

Silvio lives in Araxa, Brazil. He is a three time Grammy award-winning mix engineer who has intimately worked on every piece of music that the Nashville Tribute Band has ever made. He works with mega-successful recording artists on a regular basis, but always makes time to be the very important part of the Nashville Tribute Band that he has come to be. We love him and consider him forever a brother.

We look forward to seeing you all soon.

Jason Deere and the Nashville Tribute Band