Some people were born to be on stage. Some people were made to have their name in lights. Some people were born incredibly attractive. Some people can't help but be rock stars. Some people read. Andy is not any of those people.
Ok - I am sick of pretending like I hired someone else to write about me. I am way too cheap and disorganized for that. I am writing about myself so I will no longer talk about myself in the third person.
I was born in Austin, TX and grew up on a little farm Northeast of town. I started playing piano when I was around 3 years old. When I was 9, my best friend's dad bought me a guitar because he said that little boys who play piano will "grow up to be gay" - but real men play guitar. For some reason that didn't convince me. However, when I was in Junior High - I decided to quit music and devote myself towards training to play in the NBA. This involved walking around in those weird looking strength shoes that supposedly make you jump higher. In the process, I had very strong legs but was still a "piano player" at heart and was too wussy to actually lift weights so my arms were as buff as the ones you put in Mr. Potato Head. Anyways - somewhere in my high school basketball career I had a realization. 6'1" was as tall as I was going to get. No matter how high I could jump, my hand was too small to palm the ball and dunk it with authority. I wasn't as good as I thought I was.
Right around that same time I happened to be at a Garth Brooks concert (back then I only listened to country music) and he called my little brother up from the audience and gave him his guitar. Pretty random. To make a long story short - I ended up learning how to play on that guitar and it changed my life. I finally took those strength shoes off and spent all my free time playing guitar. Somewhere along the line, I realized that I didn't just have to cover every country song known to man - I could write my own songs. So I started with a horrible song called "Me, Myself and I". Probably the most depressing song you could ever hear. Typical teenage angst. Many songs later, I actually had some stuff that I kind of enjoyed.
I went to College at Belmont University in Nashville to be close to the country music scene. This was the town where all of the real songwriters lived - and I wanted to be one. So did 3500 other students at Belmont. Big surprise. Four years later somehow I graduated, got married, finished my first CD "Old Hat" and started my career in music. That career was writing songs for Word Publishing and playing guitar for my wife, Jill Phillips. So for the last seven or so years I have been traveling the country playing guitar for Jill and writing for a couple of publishing companies. At the last one I was mainly writing country music.
Singing and recording my own stuff was always last on my priority list. Last summer we took some time off the road to have our second child. I finally had the time to record the CD I had been threatening to make for 6 years. I am not much of an engineer, but I recorded the whole thing by myself in my house - using one mic with one setting on the one preamp. My initial goal was just to use all acoustic instruments. It ended up just being my amazing vocals and acoustic guitars along with a few friends coming in to sing a background part or two.
If I were still writing this in third person, now would be the time for me to talk about how amazing Andy's latest recording "Room to Breathe" is. I would throw in some incredible reviews from well known publications. Unfortunately, I am not writing this in third person. Also unfortunately, nobody at any well known publications even have a copy of my CD. Before I finished it I had already hit the road with a guy named Andrew Peterson and then was back on the road with my wife again as well. So needless to say - there was no big marketing push. All I had was my awesome website, www.andygullahorn.com .
The bottom line is that I don't have any big dreams of becoming a superstar artist. I quite like playing guitar for other folks and letting them handle the stress. I would be much more comfortable with those superstar artists recording my songs so I don't ever have to put on makeup for a photo shoot. I just have a few songs that I like to share with folks and some people actually like listening to them unless both of them are lying to me. So that is why I am here. I hope you like it. If you do - tell a friend. If you don't - lie to a friend.