Touching Souls and Changing Lives featuring Creative Powerhouse Barry Dean

Take Aways

• creativity is an act of courage
• beware of being a shadow artist, someone who encourages other people to be creative, but who doesn’t pursue their own creative potential
• it’s never too late to step into your passion
• collaboration in music and in life is about listening and finding shared truths
• personal experiences, especially those related to family, are often the catalyst for some of our most compelling creative endeavors. 

Resources

• Follow Barry on instagram @thebarrydean
• Learn more about his music at creativenationmusic.com
• Check out Luci and learn more about smart wheelchair technology
• And watch God’s Will, which Rolling Stone listed as one of the saddest country music songs of all time. And here’s Moving Oleta. Get ready to cry.

Transcript

Barry (00:00.11)

I’m Barry Dean, I’m a songwriter and the founder of Luci, and this is No Time to Be Timid.

Tricia (00:21.934)

Hey there, I’m Tricia Rose Burt, and in this podcast, we talk to artists who show us how to find the courage to take risks, step out of our comfort zones, and use our creativity to make our work and change our world. Pay close attention, because this is no time to be timid.

Welcome to the show. So back in Episode One, I told you that I was gonna feature several folks from Nashville on the show this season, a result of my living there on and off for four years, and a place that always fills my creative well. So far, we’ve had Kimberly Williams-Paisley, Megan Barry, and Vince Gill. And today we’re gonna talk to Nashvillian Barry Dean. I didn’t know Barry before I interviewed him, but for the past two years, our mutual pal, Deanna Hemby, who’s the mother of one of his co-writers, the Grammy Award winning Natalie Hemby, kept saying to me, Tricia, you need to have Barry on your show. Now, Deanna is one of those people where you do whatever she tells you to do. Plus, I know she has my back and I can trust her instincts. And when it comes to having Barry as a guest, she was right on the money.

Barry’s basically a creative genius and his story of breaking into the music industry in his 30s is one of the best I’ve ever heard. When you look at who he’s written with and the songs he’s written, it kind of blows the top of your head off. Reba McEntire was the first person to record one of his songs. Martina McBride was next. Toby Keith, Alison Krauss, Jason Aldean – the list keeps going. He’s written and co-written multiple number one singles, including Day Drinking and Pontoon for Little Big Town.

(clip of Pontoon)

He’s been nominated for a Grammy for Best Country Song on Tim McGraw’s Diamond Rings and Old Barstools. And here’s a clip of Barry singing that song.

(clip of Diamond Rings and Old Barstools)

Barry also wrote Ingrid Michaelson’s top 40 hit, Girls Chase Boys

(clip of Girls Chase Boys)

All this you might expect from a songwriter who appears on a show about creative courage. But what really made me want to speak with Barry is he’s also the CEO of Luci, a company dedicated to creating mobility solutions for people in wheelchairs, like his daughter, Catherine. Along with his brother, Jered, and a team of experts, Barry took on the rigid, status quo clinging powers-that-be in the mobility industry and created smart wheelchair technology – that never existed before – that allows Catherine and others like her to move safely and freely through this world. What they’ve accomplished is unbelievable.

Some insights from our conversation include creativity is an act of courage; beware of being a shadow artist, someone who encourages other people to be creative, but who doesn’t pursue their own creative potential; it’s never too late to step into your passion; collaboration in music and in life is about listening and finding shared truths; and personal experiences, especially those related to family, are often the catalyst for some of our most compelling creative endeavors. 

Between his music and Luci, Barry has touched the lives of countless people. Get ready for an amazing conversation.

Tricia (04:35.106)

Hey Barry, welcome to the show.

Barry

Hi, thanks for having me on here. This is great.

Tricia

You’re kind of a double threat because just one of your, like one of the things you do would be enough to fill a whole segment. So it’s like, I’ve got between your songwriting and between Luci, it’s going to be an interesting endeavor to try to fill it all into one episode. But I am really curious how they feed one another. But I want to start out because I’m reading a little bit about you and it’s not like you came out of the womb as a songwriter, you did some other stuff, right? So talk to me a little bit about how entered into the songwriting world, because it wasn’t until your 30s, right?

Barry

That’s right. I’m kind of a random case. But I, you know, when I was very young, I got smitten with music and I wanted to do that. And I actually did move to LA when I was around 18, maybe 19. And I lived out there for a little while pursuing, you know, being a rock star and all of those things. And as I look

Tricia (05:37.814)

On the microphone? Were you gonna be singing as the rock star or were you gonna be a songwriter?

Barry

I thought I had been, yeah, I thought I was probably set up for that and it was delusional, but you know, it happens. And I went out and things went very well. By the way, my story is not like I went out and it was horrible. doors opened. I was able to move quickly. But I would say this looking now as an older guy, looking back at that guy at 18 and all, I realize, I kind of believe success is harder to manage than failure. Because failure is so clarifying. You know who your friends are. You know exactly where you are. You know what you don’t have. And I mean, it’s just so clarifying. I don’t like it. What’s the old Philipp Yancey book, where he talks about pain is the gift no one wants? And so it’s like that. But then success brings pressure. It kind of elevates the wire or the high dive. It just keeps moving. And if you don’t have…If you haven’t, like I had not sorted out my,  some elements of my theology and some elements of my self-worth and some of those things, that can be harder to manage honestly than failure in some ways. So I was terrified of failure, but I was really having good experiences. And so the long and short on that Thanksgiving day in the late eighties, a young 18, 19 year old boy, ran out of brave.

I had a counselor who said, creativity is just an act of courage. That’s what it is. And if I’ll see it that way, and if I had been able to tell that kid at Barney’s Beanery that day, on Thanksgiving Day, I was eating chili and apple pie, and I thought, I think I’ll go home. And I quit. And I put it in a box, and I kind of hid it away, and I became what Julia Cameron would call a shadow artist.

Tricia  (07:34.55)

Yes.

Barry

Our natures and you’re this way too. You know, we’re all curious is what we really are. We’re hyper vigilant. We’re very curious. And so I went into business and was working in that way.

Tricia

I’m gonna stop right there. What did your success look like when you said, I’m not doing this anymore?

Barry

Well, it was the opening of doors, having meetings that the risk kept moving forward. And I’ll be real honest, there was a theological part to it, which, you know, a lot of people would go, that’s crazy. But, you know, I grew up in a wonderful family. I have a wonderful family. And now at this age, I have great roots, you know, for my structure of faith. But I grew up in a worldview at that time, which was there’s a secular world and then there’s a Christian world and I was out here pursuing the evil rock and roll, the secular path, the wide way to destruction. And so it created a distance from the people and support networks that I knew. And so I see now, as anything good is really moving you away from anything you know. And I think that guy just could not handle.I didn’t like the guy for a long time and now I look at him with compassion and go, I see. You were just, you felt that the better I do, the further away from home I can become.

Barry (08:57.238)

I get it.  I mean, years ago, I was very unhappy. was in business and I was really unhappy. And I went to a career counselor and she did all this testing on me. And she said, well, first of all, you know, need to work on your own, not for anybody else. You need a tremendous amount of freedom and you need to be in the arts. And I was like, I don’t know who you’re talking about. And I can’t do that. And I went and took a job as director of corporate communications for a financial services firm.

Because I’m like, don’t know who that is. That person scares me. And I’m going to go back and do what I know, even if it’s making me miserable, because I know that world better. I can’t, this is too much. I can’t do it. And then eventually God was like, look, I’m serious. You need to go in this direction. So, you know, we follow. But I understand that these two worlds are, I can’t. I can’t make sense of these two worlds. It feels like too big of a risk and letting go of things I don’t want to let go of.

Barry

That’s so true. Yeah. There’s a book I read somewhere in there after that ,I think Morley wrote it. He says failure is succeeding at something that doesn’t matter anyway. And sometimes I’ll say success and later, and you were getting to that with your question, what was success? You know, I mean, a lot of times we kind of go, I’m headed towards success. What is it for you? I hadn’t really thought about that. I just was, I just, I’ve been taught to run at this and, so I think there’s an element of that, that’s a pretty, it’s a part of that, you know, and then anything you do. I’ve read, you know, your story and was really moved by it because I understand. I so understand. I know a lot of people are because you’ve become a hub for people like myself who go, how do I process this? How do I integrate this? How do I live this life and, be fully, you know, a part of my choices, right? I mean, cause really people say, well, I want to be successful. Really what you want to feel like is that all of this is fulfilling and it matters. And I’m doing the right things for me.

Tricia

That it’s meaningful.

It is.  For me, it’s a joy. I felt like I found my tribe in a lot of ways with songwriting.

Tricia (11:06.584)

So talk about that. I I also love that line, I ran out of brave, because, whoo, I think a lot of us ran out of brave, which is why I started a podcast. You know, just to help us. I need as much infusion of bravery from other people as anybody else does. So that’s why I’m talking to people who I can emulate and they can inspire me. So talk about how you ended up making your way into songwriting.

Barry

It’s so much credit goes to my wife, actually. So I went through the long, I called it the long journey through the desert. So about 10 years of that. And I still was curious and I was still a shadow artist. So I’m hiring a commercial graphics people and animators and videographers. And I’m in this little place. I’m helping build the company as part of that team. And we did a lot of fun, wonderful things. We helped a lot of teachers and students. We kind of were the.

the front runners on what they call STEM now for middle school and high school and grade school.

Tricia

And were you in advertising production? What were you doing?

Barry

Well, we were creating curriculum and selling the materials for the teacher. So we do video creation and all those kinds of things. But we also, you know, we, started there and, we ended up forming a joint venture with Lego and helping them relaunch their education division. And, and so in this little town of 18 or 20,000 people, it’s really 18, but we try to pretend it’s 20. We’re trying to kind of pose a little bit, but it’s a wonderful place.

Tricia (12:31.306)

Which state are you in?

Kansas, it’s a little town Kansas called Pittsburgh, Kansas, at Pitt State Gorillas. That’s the college there and it’s real near Joplin, Missouri. Really very close. That’s where we went for fancy stuff. And it was a wonderful place. Still is a wonderful place. And so, you know, I was friends with the local bands, but it was not like I was playing in a band or showing people my new songs. I’m literally hiding behind the creativity and encouraging others. Not in a mean way, but I’m just trying to help them. I want them to get out. I want them to get to do what they want. And it was, you know, I did that for quite a while. So then I meet Jennifer, my wife, and we get married. And so she marries a guy, business guy in this small town. I have a really good job in a small town, which is one of the big goals in a small town. So what happens is there’s some opportunities to do other things. There’s a question of,do  I want to continue? I’m asking those questions.

What do I want out of this? What is this worth? What am I worth to this situation? Is this where I belong? And she’s not afraid of those questions like I am. And I have this counselor who is, he’s the guy who said creativity is just an act of courage and he is working me through these things. And at some point, Jennifer says to me – I talked to a company that was kind of interested in me going somewhere and doing similar things – and she said, well, if that’s your passion, we can go there. And I laughed. And I do even now when someone laughs in a co-write, for instance, I consider it kind of a sacred moment because the world has, what you believe has burst out. Right? And so like if a songwriter goes, like an artist will say, well, we could say this and they, they’re defending or something has come out of it. So I always take those things as kind of sacred moments.

Barry  (14:28.778)

And anyway, she did that. She’s who taught me that. And, she just looked at me she goes, why do you laugh? And I said, almost verbatim, I have a great job in a small town. We’re not going to use passion as a decision maker. This is, I’m in my thirties and she goes, yes, but, but what did you want to do? What would you like to do? What did you want to do when you were young? And I said, it doesn’t matter. None of that matters. That’s what I said. I embarrassed to tell you that because of how powerful your podcasts are.

Tricia

It’s wonderful. 

Barry

She stayed on me for a while. She’s gracious in the way she does it. She’s very elegant about that, but she would not let it go. And then after a few weeks, I said, look, I wanted to be a songwriter and a producer working in the studios. I really love that part. She says, well, do you, do you write songs now? And I said, I do. When I mow the lawn and in the mornings, when I’m journaling, I will write songs sometimes.

And she knew I would still go play piano at my parents’ house. My mom can tolerate that. AndI loved music and I was always taking people to see songwriters or bands that no one had heard of and stuff like that. So she saw the tells of the shadow artists, but she had no idea. So then she was like, well, why don’t we do that? And I said, absolutely not. I’m too old. It’s too late. So I understand the person who goes, yeah, but you don’t understand. I’ve got this job and I’ve got these things.

And, she came back and said, would you take me on a cruise for our anniversary? I said, yes, which is pretty much my role. And, it’s to constantly go, yes, I think that’s great. So we went on, and she goes, it’s this one and the Nashville Songwriters Association, which is probably a surprise that there is such a thing, but there is, and they’re really great. They did a cruise. These professional writers would tell you all about it in the morning, what their job was like, how they created songs, how the business worked.

And then you’d go sunburn yourself to death or whatever in the afternoon, like normal cruises. So we went on that trip.

Tricia (16:32.098)

Where were you cruising? Like were you on a river or were you on a… Where were you?

Barry

It was out of Cape Canaveral, out of Orlando, Cape Canaveral. And it was, it was, you know, it was a very short, not high end cruise. But it was, it was amazing to be in this group and to be honest, I sat in the back of the room and I took notes and I didn’t say anything. Everyone else brought guitars and they’re playing songs and they’re doing stuff.

And I was a keyboard player at that time, you know, so I was not a guitar player. Now I did before I made a run at Nashville. Then I started taking these marathon lessons and so they, I didn’t tell anyone I was a keyboard player. I pretended I was the guitar player. It’s kind of weird, but so I was really cloaked is what I would say. I was behind a lot of layers. Like a parfait. And, so anyway, we go on the trip and the last day, two of the writers, Hugh Prestwood who lived in New York and was a phenomenal Grammy-winning writer, and then a guy, Craig Wiseman, they came over and they just said, you know, you’re probably the only person on this whole boat who hasn’t tried to give us or play us a song. And we can’t tell whether you’re good or bad. My sense was one of them voted he’s a genius and one voted he’s horrible. And I respond with I’m probably in the middle, which is what I thought. And they made it clear that my opinion was not what they were seeking. So they told me to play them a song. And I actually didn’t play a song. I gave them a little CD I had burned. And they played that. And when it got done, one of them, Craig said, don’t quit your day job, but you should start coming to Nashville. Hugh became a real helper of me, a real champion of mine, and opened the door for me to get my first deal.

Barry  (18:25.474)

So, but we started making the journey and then to be clear to anyone listening, then two years of work went into it. I was gone the first year, maybe 30 days I was in Nashville instead of Kansas and I kept, still have my day job. And then the next year I was here 60 days, but I had, I signed a publishing deal and, and I still kept my job in Kansas and my family there for the first year and several months of that deal, that’s how little I trusted the process..

Tricia

And then what made you say, I can move them out?

Barry

Jen did. So we have a daughter with special needs. She was born 18 weeks early named Catherine and, she – true story. She had a seizure. We didn’t know that. We just knew we were losing her. She was rushed into ICU and, and it’s a kind of a dramatic story, but, there was a moment where her doctor, a wonderful doctor, but a local guy I knew forever. He takes me out of the room in ICU and he says, Do you have any ideas of things we could do? And the idea that I was supposed to be the smartest guy in the room is a bad plan. If we were ever planning, you and I –  you talk about, you know, getting people, you know, it’s one of the rules of collaborations, right? Write people who are better than you. I mean, this was that moment. And so, we were able, I had an idea because I knew the nurse, he had gone out, we’d gone on a double date 10 years before, maybe 15, when we were young in high school and we didn’t know each other. We just knew the girls knew each other. And he was now the nurse in ICU. And I said, Oh, is there any thoughts on something we could do? And then I said, is there, why is her foot moving like that? And he goes, it could be a seizure. And I said, what do you  if it’s a seizure? And he said, diastat, you know, we would give that, I said, let’s do that. I’m calling the Shots. And that works.

But we, the life flight took her to St. Louis to Children’s. I drove up following that, got there in the wee hours of the morning and we sat down and Jennifer said, because I was going, we should stop this songwriter thing, it’s too risky. And Jennifer said, we need to be in a city with a children’s hospital. She needs better therapeutic alternatives. We need more education alternatives for our kids. It’s time. We’re moving to Nashville.

And, she really was the courage, cause most people tell that story of like, you know, my spouse wouldn’t support me. So I went anyway. This is not that story that – we are a strange, we are a great team. Mostly she’s a great team. So she’s really the brave one.

Tricia

She may be leading you, but you’re also taking the steps. You can’t do this – she can’t be dragging you along.

Barry

Yeah, it’s a team.

Tricia

It’s a team! But this is what’s so interesting. You started going back and forth to Nashville and when did you have Catherine? Right when you started going back and forth to Nashville?

Barry

Pretty early on, the challenge – you always say, you know, when you step towards it, normally a challenge will come. And then that did happen and it was a lot. I mean, she’s, she’s changed our lives in a lot of ways.

Tricia

Yeah. And she’s then helped you change a lot of other people’s lives. So it’s just this very interesting overlap that happened. And so I really want to talk to you about that because again, when I was telling you before we went on that I was researching you and I was going back and forth between crying my eyes out and then dancing in my kitchen. And then I cry my eyes out. Then dance in my kitchen.. Okay. Where are we now? 

Barry

That’s funny.

Tricia

I started with, you know, your first cut with, is it, pronounce name for me? Moving Oleta. Which one? 

Barry

That’s right. Oleta. Oleta is my grandmother.

Tricia

And which was particularly poignant because I just lost my mother who had, she knew who I was in her last three years, she really, like, as we say, she was sassy as ever and couldn’t remember lunch. Which was true. Totally true. But she remembered her children, which was such a blessing. I just lost her two months ago. And so listening to that song was like, you know.

Beautiful, though, but you’re working that personal experience into your creativity is what we do. But when you’re doing songwriting and you also wrote that beautiful song, God’s Will, which was shaped by in part by Catherine’s.

Barry

Directly. 

Tricia

I loved how apparently Rolling Stone said it’s one of the saddest country music songs ever written.

Barry

It was a great honor. Country music, I love honky tonk songs, but we also do great sad story songs. So was actually…

Tricia

 No kidding.

Barry

I cherish that. cherish that. It’s one of my, honestly, means so much to me.

Tricia (23:30.37)

I was like, this is great! But the storytelling in both of those songs is so beautiful. How do you incorporate these very personal experiences? How long does it take for you to integrate them into your work? Is it an immediate thing? Is it something that you wait a while? Just how does that work for you, the combining of those things?

Barry

A lot of times it does take time for me. There are occasions when, Don Schlitz is a great writer, he wrote The Gambler, he’s been a great teacher to me. He told me that his mentor told him, God gives you eight songs a year and the other 40 you have to write by yourself. And I think about that all the time. So you gotta notice when there’s a little spark and you do chase it. I take those moments as a really, I think, I look back and think I didn’t cherish them as much as I should have. So I do. This is how I process the world is through writing songs. That’s and writing in general is how I process the world. And music is a part of that. Whether I did it for a living or not, finding that as a way of processing the world became really important to me. Sometimes like a lot of people say, do you have a love song you wrote for Jen? And I have a few of those of the 1500 plus songs or whatever I’ve written. There’s a couple I can go, that is all 100 % me shooting directly that way. But I can show you my children and my wife and my grandparents and these experiences, sadness. They become sections of songs, you know, so, and for me, that’s how it mostly happens. 

Now I will say with Moving Oleta, I did not believe I was writing anything for anyone else. My dad, had helped my grandfather take my grandmother to the nursing home in Maysville, Oklahoma. And I was talking to him on the phone, because it was really hard on him and all of them. And he said, I have to say, I think this is the hardest thing your grandfather’s ever done. And so I just wrote in my little title book or my line book, moving Oleta is the hardest thing he’s done. And then I didn’t touch it.

Barry  (25:52.622)

because it was so sad to me because I love them both so much and all three of them actually. Then I was playing one night in the studio and playing by just by myself and I was thinking about them and I wrote a little chunk of that. So a couple of verses and this little moment and then, you know, I was crying. I just turned it off. Obviously I thought it’s not commercial and it’s not built right. And I just turned it off. And so a friend of mine, as I signed my publishing deal at BMG, you send in everything you’ve ever written. It’s called the Schedule A and they go through it and go, I want this one. I don’t want that one, whatever. And this guy calls me he goes, there’s a song and my friend Byron, is an engineer and helped me, a wonderful guy. He made the CD for me and he just saw all these work tapes and threw them all on the CD and it was in there. And the publisher in Nashville called and said, what is this song at the end about the old woman and the old guy? it’s Moving Oleta? And I said, I’m, I’m sorry. You, that wasn’t supposed to be on there. That’s just for me. And he said, buddy, that’s the one I love. And I was like, well, it’s not commercial. It’s not built right. It’s not structured. It’s not, it’s not, it’s, that’s very personal. 

And so for months I would come back and forth to Nashville and he would say, I need you to finish that song for me. I need you to finish. And I didn’t want to touch it. So then I did the thing where I sat and looked at it for a couple of days in Kansas. I wrote it by myself. So you’d have no one to bounce it off of. And, nothing felt true. I don’t know how else to say it. I felt like I could make up things, but, and, so I just left it alone and then, you know, how it works. I woke up one morning really, really early crying and I knew what it was and I just wrote the rest of it still didn’t believe it was commercial still thought he was crazy but I did send him the thing and and then the next thing I knew Reba, they played it for Reba. She had come to the office to hear up-tempo fun songs from the hit writers I was not I was I was so unimportant to that publishing company

that they would do an ad with all the writers names and mine didn’t make the list. They just cut, I don’t know, too many names. So they just took my name. I was not even, I’m not sure they knew I was there, right? I didn’t live in town and it’s true story. And they did two years in a row. So I just want to be clear. I was very low on the totem pole, but this guy, he, they came and they listened to some up tempos and they got to the guy, Chris Oglesby is his name. And, he’s one of those guys that I told him that first Christmas, there’s a whole lot of voices in my head telling me I can’t. And the one that says I can sounds like you. And that’s him. And you’re looking for people who just breathe air into your sails, you know, just and inspire you, you know, and not all about praising you, just inspiring you.. So he said, I know this isn’t uptempo. I know you’ve never heard of this guy, I honestly don’t care. I think you’re looking for a great song and he played it and Reba cut it and changed my life. 

And Martina was right on the heels of that because I wrote with Tom Douglas. I’m still living in Kansas and Tom is a great writer. Tom wrote, you would love Tom. He has a great documentary out called Love Tom on songwriting. It’s really cool. I think you’d enjoy it. 

Tricia

Yeah, yeah, no, I’d like that.

Barry  (29:38.668)

He’s a great writer. And so he agreed to write with me. It was one of my first co-writes with a big, you know, big time writer. And I sat all morning throwing everything I thought a country song was. I was being clever. I was flipping the title. You know what I mean? It’s like that kind of stuff. And then he said, let’s go to lunch, which is the same as saying you have failed. And, so we went to lunch. It was horrible. It was brutal. And, then he, we came back and he said, instead of sending me home, he said, why don’t we go back in and talk a little more? Is there anything else? 

And at the bottom of my list of ideas, it was Christmas Eve night. We were at the NICU in St. Louis with a brand new baby. I think she was maybe three pounds at that point. somebody said to us as we were walking into the NICU, well-intentioned and kind, said, “Well, we don’t know why this is happening, but it must be God’s will.” And I, and their intentions were very good, but it, happened to hit a theme that had caused me some trouble before. And, as we were walking in, I said to Jen, look, it’s God’s, it’s God’s Isaac. It’s God’s and I started pointing out all the other NICU kids in there. I call them the casserole dishes, but they’re warmers and ventilators and all that.. She said careful, you know, what’s that all about? You know, and so I would journal it and I could only hold her for a certain amount of minutes and then we had to put her back in. So I would journal and I just journaled, you know, all about that and my feelings on that, what I was really struggling with, why that bothered me, what I was wrestling with, I’m going to have a child with challenges that we’re going to need to address. And Jen had arranged for me to meet a little girl named Deborah on Halloween night. It just happened. She had similar issues to Catherine, but she was several years older, quite a few years older. And she showed up dressed – her Dad had made her walker into a costume, which was a bag of leaves. And I had always been a little bit afraid, not sure what to do, you know, with, with, kids with profound challenges, with real profound challenges. And so I had confessed that to Jen, I was like, you know, I, I’m going to be fine. You can count on me, but I just want you to know I may be a little awkward. but well, I met this girl fell in love immediately and she wasn’t a talker, but she was verbal. She just wasn’t using words and we became a very good friends. And I had then a beautiful picture for me to carry of my daughter. All that’s in my journal. So I say to Tom, well, I’ve been fiddling with this idea of a song about God’s will, but you make it a young kid with a lot of issues like Catherine. And I wrote some stuff about it in my journal and he said, tell me more about it. So I started talking to him about it. He started playing and I always say, this is when Tom Douglas taught me how we really write songs, right? We think it’s here’s this cool thing I thought of. Here’s this bumper sticker I took out. You know, it really wasn’t for Tom and for me, it was finding something we both felt deeply, whether it was fun or sad. I didn’t learn about fun till later. I just learned about sad at first. But pretty quickly, I just pulled out my journal out of my bag and I just tore the pages out and spread them all over. And we wrote that song and then, and then Martina cut it. And that was really the song – it got on the radio and she did it on the CMAs. And I think it won a Grammy for video or something, but that was the song that opened the door. All of a sudden we could move to Nashville and, and make a run at it. And it was still scary, but.

but it helped. So, sorry for the long story.

Tricia

No!It is a fabulous story and it’s fabulous because what you’re including in it is the, let’s go to lunch, which was, you have failed. I mean, you know, those moments when you think I have failed at this when actually you’re just, you know, just get that stuff out of the way so this other stuff can come through and having someone who guides you through that process. I mean, how fortunate that you were writing with him, just kept pushing you to talk to me, talk to me, talk to me. And we always talk about in storytelling, the more specific it becomes, the more universal it is. And so you telling that very specific experience for you is what made that story work and be so universal to so many other people. It’s really beautiful.

Tricia (34:35.918)

We’ll get back to the second half of our conversation in a moment, but right now I want to tell you about our sponsor, Interabang Books, a Dallas-based independent bookstore which was named one of the country’s top five bookstores by Publishers Weekly. They have a fabulous curated online collection and it’s just as easy to shop with them as it is with Amazon. Who doesn’t want to support an independent bookstore? Please show them some love and check them out at interabangbooks.com.

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Tricia (35:29.134)

You did move to happy because those were the ones that were making me dance around my kitchen while I was listening to you. You moved to happy and you’re writing with some amazing people. When you said that you found your tribe, talk a little bit about the importance of having your tribe. Cause you’re writing with Natalie Hemby, course, cause Deanna, her mama was so, she really wanted to make sure that…

Barry

She’s the best

Tricia

 Deanna’s the best. Deanna is the best. 

Barry

That’s such an honor.

Tricia

And you know, I’ve had the opportunity to visit with Natalie too and she’s amazing.

I got to see her perform. I was at the Kennedy Center when Amy Grant got her the Kennedy Center honor and Natalie was performing and it was a great experience to see them all together. But I know that you write with Natalie, you write with Luke Laird, you write with one more person whose name I’ve forgotten right now.

Tricia

Lori McKenna a lot. Lori McKenna. She’s like my Natalie and lawyer kind of like my sisters. Honestly,  they’re just a great gift to me.

Barry

Well, it’s an amazing team that you’re working with. So talk about that importance of, you said the word, tribe. Talk about that.

Barry

Yeah, I do believe in team and I do believe in community, but sometimes that gets heard at least in the early days. You hear that as I need an attorney. I need a so-and-so I need, and you’re kind of almost looking in a, I need to build this to lift me. And I think after a while you realize, collaboration starts for me at least to become this tribal community family. And I don’t mean to overstep. Family can have dysfunction with it, you know, they can have negative connotations, but I mean it in the sense of, honestly, I mean it in the sense of, I think a lot of co-writing for songs is really about listening. That’s what Tom was doing. He was listening for when I said something true. That’s what he was in retrospect. Now he was waiting until I said something that was really worth mine and his heart.

Right? Something that brought us joy or sadness, something that mattered to us because so often that first inclination we’ve been taught is to think it through instead of kind of let it feel for a minute, let it walk our way through it. We were looking for an answer pretty quick to the question. He wasn’t, he was willing to sit there and look around and, he knew, I think he would never say this, but I think he knew I was very nervous to be writing with him. So we’ll get some food. Now, let’s see. Now that we’re talking for real, let’s have a conversation. and I do think listening is, is writing for at least collaborating on songs and things like that. And, I  think it is a community. I mean, Natalie at the, I’m going to use Natalie as an example I didn’t ask her permission, but we’ve written great songs and she’s incredible. She’s magic. That said, she’s going to speak at the Kennedy Center for a woman who means so much to her IN Amy and all of us. So Jen and I were driving back from that we’d gone to a funeral in Kansas and we’re driving the two hours to the Kansas city airport. And Natalie texts, can you talk? And I, we just call her and she says, I’m working on what I’m going to say. And I’m, really, struggling with it. Well, she doesn’t mean she has nothing she wants to say. She’s struggling with how to put a lifetime of importance into her 45 seconds or whatever she got. SoI just said, talk to me.

And so she talked to me for a lot of the drive. And then in that case, my role was just to listen, absorb what she’s saying and then go, okay, I’m going to, excuse me, I’m going to send you a whole bunch of material. But she just needed someone to show it back to her to say, Hey, your cooking is good. And say, here’s what, because she had a willing participant in me too, because I, Amy Grant is such a big deal and Vince Gill, but Amy is a big deal to a guy like me. So I then helped her send that. And then she made it her own and did her own thing. You know, it’s a joy to get to be in the room. Sometimes we’re making something commercially, but, and we have the same attitude, but, every time I’m there, cause I can’t wait to hear what she’s going to do. I delight in what she does. And Lori McKenna is exactly the same way. I mean, Lori is so close to me too.

Tricia  (39:52.93)

Yeah. When we’re talking about collaboration, one of your greatest collaborations is with your brother, creating Luci. I mean, you created Luci because Catherine couldn’t go where she needed to go. That’s right. In her chair. 

Barry  (40:07.214)

That’s right, the chairs, yeah.

Tricia (40:19.606)

What I love is the line that you have that Luci is smart technology for the most fearless people on earth. And I love that line because it’s true that those people who are struggling with mobility issues that we can’t imagine, they have to be fearless every time they wake up in the morning just to get things done that seem so easy for the rest of us. So talk a little bit about that collaboration between you and your brother, who, and he’s a systems engineer, right?

Barry

That’s right. He’s, he’s really the smart Dean. Yeah. He’s, my sister is too, but he’s really our best. He’s our trivia guy. He’s our science guy..

Tricia

How old was Catherine when Luci became created? How old is Catherine now?

Barry

She’s 24 now and she’s a diva.

Tricia

and Luci came together when?

Barry  (40:57.408)

Well, we first started working on it, well, I guess eight years ago we had a, we built the prototype, but we didn’t tell anyone. And then seven years ago we started the company and five years ago we announced that we existed to the industry. So we had spent two years as a company with our small team developing the software and the technology and all that stuff. But it’s been, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s not something either of us planned to do. He was very successful. He had been, he developed a design program at this college called Colorado School of Mines. He was an in-demand systems engineer. He was, he was really

Tricia

This is your brother.

Barry

 My brother. He’s 14 years younger. So most people think he’s my son when they see him, see us together. But, but, and I was having a great time being a songwriter and producing a few things and working on stuff.  But then a friend of ours, Troy Verges, he’s a great songwriter. His mother was injured in a wheelchair accident, same wheelchair as my daughter. We couldn’t believe that we couldn’t find primitive tech. I mean, honestly, our toasters and our scales and I’ve got an aura ring, they were smarter than this wheelchair. And a lot of people don’t know those medical wheelchairs cost as much as a car. It’s really crazy, right? And so at that point, we went looking for it and we couldn’t find it. So then I called Jered.

Tricia (42:19.082)

It being something that could protect her while she’s in the chair or make her safer while she’s in the chair.

Barry

Yes. And maybe even the way to say it is it allowed her chair to live up to, we say the wheelchairs as they exist have not been living up to the potential of the people who we meet who are in the chair. They want to be connected to their apps, to their, they want to be able to ask Alexa about things about their chair. They want to be able to drive in a restaurant and know that they’ve got a little help for collision avoidance. They want to make sure that they won’t drive off their porch or drive off the opposite side of a van and become horribly injured. A lot of people aren’t aware that there’s more wheelchair injuries going to the ER than motorcycle accidents, right? It’s crazy that it exists, but it’s an invisible market. It is an invisible group,a  lot of times group of people, not all the time, and they aren’t invisible people. They are incredible people. Just like my daughter. I’ll put her up against anybody on Beatles trivia. She can identify any Beatles song and, and she’s in, she’s in these musicals. There’s a company called Backlight that does musicals every year with kids like Catherine. And then, some actors will come in from New York and Nashville and they’ll perform a musical. They just had their show. It’s phenomenal.

Tricia

Oh that’s fantastic.

Barry  (43:49.042)

But yeah, so we started, we weren’t going to start a company. We were just going to solve a problem and we did that. And then we were writing, trying to.help write IP patents and get the technology moved across. And then we realized there was a problem in that industry, if I may be so bold, that there’s a lot more money to be made in the status quo than in change. And we saw a history as we researched it of innovative things happening and not being allowed in. And we also saw that research institutions that serve that need, they didn’t have access to any data, any new technology to do the research to help with ALS patients or pediatric patients or vets. And so we decided we’re going to start a company. We’re going to build a research platform that accelerates research. We’re going to make this available to anybody who needs it. And we’re, you know, it’s a for sale and we’re going to, we’re going to do it. And now five years in, we have, I don’t know how many exact number of users, but hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of users, not quite a thousand though. I know that.

But they’ve driven users have driven over 50,000 miles. And, and what it really means is instead of going, I better not try to drive outside my house or I better not go to the restaurant or go get a job or go to the museum because I’m nervous about it or, you know, or, I get injured. So now I’m I’m without my chair. You know, even if they have a service industry call, the service calls in that industry take weeks. Well, and forgive this analogy, but it’s, like saying, I know you, you can’t use your legs for four weeks because we can’t schedule to come over and fix that. Yeah. So it’s a real problem. We feel like it’s been rewarding and a joy to see and meet so many people. About a third or a little more than a third of our, are the people that we work with are vets and a lot of them were going to be put in a wheelchair that they couldn’t self-propell, parked in a room and somebody has to move them. And now they’re able to still safely and effectively navigate their world and have that. So that’s been incredibly rewarding. And the music industry has allowed me to, I’m so grateful to my songwriting community. They’ve allowed me to continue to write. I don’t write a lot. I write 50 songs a year instead of 150 or something like that. But it’s still able to be a part of it and it’s a joy to get to be in both.

Tricia (46:13.396)

One of the things that I really loved when I was researching Luci was the test chairs you have that have the names of the original owners embroidered into them. Talk about that because it was very moving. It’s very moving.

Barry

And that really comes from Jered’s wife, Agita, in a lot of ways. They, we, we wanted to buy some chairs to work on, you know, to use for testing. And I asked a guy who was the CEO of a large company in the industry. And I said, if we wanted to buy a few of these for testing, could you help us with that? And he said, I’m not making this up. He said, if I sell you chairs, I should get to tell you what to work on and what not to work.

Tricia

Oh dear God!

Barry

That’s a status quo entrenched position, we would call that and so I said well, we’re probably not gonna do anything I’ll let you know if we do. And then we went in then that was seven years ago. We went into the dark basically is what we call it. We went we went alone for two years before we announced we existed.  So now I need chairs so we go on eBay and Craigslist actually and we look in where, he my brother’s in Denver where our engineering team and manufacturing are. And so I was looking around there and we found a couple for sale and quite a few, actually. He went and bought the first one and then he went and got the second one. And at that place, that man’s name was Bruce. I never met Bruce, but, they had, he had moved back from California to Colorado so he could watch the mountains. He had ALS and he was in the late stages of that and he wanted to look at the mountains. Now the chair arrives, he tries to drive it out on the porch where he’s going to look at the mountains and he and it doesn’t quite work. He ends up pinching his wife’s arm between the doorframe and the chair. He’s horrified. He never rides in it again. So they park it in the garage. It becomes a dog bed basically. And then he passes away and his wife is selling the chair on Craigslist. My brother and Agita, his wife meet this woman. She tells them this story and they are obviously overwhelmed by the story. And so, he paid her more than she asked. And then he asked, he said, would you mind if I wrote this story down so I could share it with my engineers and Agita said, and we could put their names on the chairs. And she said it was okay. And so from that point on, we named our test chairs and, and, and that got up. Now we have a lot of chairs from companies. They send them to us. It’s a much more open conversation, but those first,I don’t know, 18 to 23 chairs have their names stitched in the leather on the chair and the stories. And we didn’t count on this, but during the COVID world, when we all locked down, the engineers had developed affinities to certain chairs. So they were like, well, I’m going to work from home, but I’m taking Bruce or I’m taking Carol with me. And it’s very funny. We still get it. There’s a chair here that’s at one of the original named chairs is in our COO Pete, his garage. And the engineer will call him. You didn’t update. You didn’t update Patty. Why are, what are you doing? Why is Patty not plugged in? 

They have a real personal affinity. And what it really did for our engineering team was I think if it had been test chair two or just, you know, 46, it made it personal. We were now focused on the people we were here to serve. And it really gave us that, that fire to move at the speed of the need. You know, we, while people were waiting on us, things are changing. We need to move.

Tricia (49:54.166)

It’s the power of story. 

Barry

Absolutely.

Tricia

If you know the story behind something, it’s going to make a difference for you. 

Barry

It changes it. 

Tricia

When Deanna and I were talking yesterday, she said in music, you are touching people’s souls and with Luci, you’re changing people’s lives. So just, just, just so you know, and it is, that’s what you’re doing. That’s what you’re doing. 

Barry

That’s very moving.

Tricia

So I have a question for you. I asked all of my guests this. What do you need courage for right now?

Barry  (50:24.206)

That’s a great question. I think courage right now on the Luci side has to do with, you know, we’re moving into this season where we’re growing and our technology is moving. It doesn’t make any sense. It has nothing to do with wheelchairs. It has to do with the software that we’ve built applies to airports and hospitals and running the insides of that. And so we’re now in meetings with lots of people and it requires a lot of courage because you feel like, wow, this is so much bigger than I thought I was going to. I thought we were kind of reaching the end of this. We were kind of growing it and now it’s kind of getting everywhere. And, now you’re suddenly being put in this larger, different space. You’re being asked to use something that you built for very clear reasons in a new way. But I grew, you know, I was attached to this for the last seven years. So I think the transition and the change and kind of trusting that curiosity will help me with courage a little bit. I think just looking at growing the company and dealing with change that comes from that. Because you get pretty comfortable, even if it’s a hard road, you get comfortable with the road you know. And so I think that’s a big deal.

And on the music side, I used to write music. And then I switched, I changed my whole approach and became much more focused on melody and lyrics, cause I wrote with so many great musicians. There’s no point in me, I remember saying when I wrote with Vince Gill, he was on here and I loved that. But I, when I wrote with him, I said, I brought a guitar and I said, if we end up with me playing the guitar, you’ve done something horribly wrong. You get to a point where now I’m comfortable. What used to be, I wasn’t comfortable with lyrics and I became now I’m very comfortable with lyrics. And I think most people think of me in Nashville as a guy who can help with lyrics and melodies and stuff. But, now I’m trying to embrace that, the music side again, and even writing by myself, you know, once you fall into heavy collaboration, it’s harder and harder to sit alone and let it take time. And, and I think most of the Nashville writers, get to a place where solo writing becomes a real like, that’s, that’s, you’re alone with your thoughts and no one to go, you know, some of this collaboration, some of this experience of the community is, what’s that guy, Brian Andreas with StoryPeople. He had a thing where he says, there are some angels whose whole job is just to shake up your world so you don’t fall asleep. And then there are, then there are friends and their job is just to show up and tell you you’re cooking is good. And I think that’s kind of the community, right? Like some of them are like, I need to push. So those are the two areas I think right off the top of my head, I would say that’s where I need more courage.

Tricia

Thank you for that and tell me, do you feel that the music is feeding Luci and Luci is feeding the music? Do they overlap?

Barry

Early on, felt like one was bigger than the other. And then there was a season where it felt like they were colliding. They were, they were at odds with each other. I remember saying to my wife at one point, this Luci thing is really, it’s going to, I worry that, this is a true story. I don’t know how to say it. I said, this Luci thing is really becoming pretty serious. Are you going to be okay if the music community doesn’t let me be a songwriter and I’m no longer a songwriter and now I’m doing Luci and doing this all the time? And she started laughing and she goes, you really don’t remember that I did not marry a songwriter, do you? And I had forgotten that. You live in the moment you’re in. And she was like, you know, maybe you were there. So there was a collision season. And then somewhere in there, I remembered my earliest publisher, Chris Oglesby had told me when we were going through something with one of our kids and it was hard. And he just said,

Songwriting for you is not, it is not in competition with the reality of life. It is your one pure escape for a moment. It is your enjoyment. And so at that point I thought, no, they’re going, I’m choosing to make them do this and work together. And, I have a great team. My brother, course, but Pete Knapp, our COO is key to all of that. And they support that. And I find, there are moments out. don’t, wasn’t, I not thought of this since, you know, many years ago. So five years ago, right about this time, right before we announced, it was locked down, COVID lockdown, complete lockdown. And so Shepherd Center is an incredible place in Atlanta that works with spinal cord injury folks. And so they were wondering if we would come down and we needed to travel safely. We had to go from Denver to here and then there to Atlanta, and then go over to all these places. How do we do that? And we were sitting here trying to figure it out, you know, and then all of sudden I went tour buses, all the tour buses, there’s 800 tour buses parked on a hill out here because nobody’s on the road. So I called and we got some tour buses and we used those to safely navigate that. We drive down to Shepherd. And the point of the story is we go in and we’re talking about Luci and showing what we’re doing with their clinicians. But at a certain point, one of the clinicians says, Hey, there’s a guy here who’s a spinal cord injury.

It’s really in the first couple of weeks, he’s having a tough time and he’s a musician. Would you, I know you’re a songwriter, would you come hang out with him and just talk music with him so he can think about something else? And that really was the moment when I thought these are going to live together. We are going to move together and that’s going to be how we do this. And so we’ve tried to do that. Now I don’t get to write as much as I want.

But I feel that I’m able to be a really, probably a better co-writer. When you start writing 150, 200 days a year, you can start getting kind of blurry and kind of being, what’s the old Stephen Fry play where he says the priest was dead to the cloth he worked in. You can do that as, you know that, as you’re painting, you’re writing, you’re speaking, you kind of have to balance those to find that spot. And for me, I think I am now

I’m older than a lot of the kids I write with that are pop kids and country kids, but I promise you, I’m a kid at Christmas when I get there. They’re all tired and I’m like, woo, you know, and let’s write, you know, and I really enjoy being a part of that. And, and the team we have at Luci and again, Pete and Jered get most of the credit for those hires and who they are, but I will tell you they are collaborators and they are people who cared so deeply about being in this moment and doing good work, that it makes it easy to do that. So I know I’m spoiled.

Tricia

It has just been a total, total delight to have you on the show. And yourself being so brave and then the community that you’re serving, they’re so brave. It’s just been, it’s just been really wonderful to have you on the show. Thanks so much for joining us..

Barry

Thank you, it’s an honor. Thank you so much.

Tricia

Thanks.

I’m pretty sure I would listen to Barry’s stories for the rest of eternity and never retire of them. I mean, what an inspiration. And he left me with some questions to ask. What is success for you? Are you running towards something you’ve been taught to run to? Or is that where you really want to go? Are you a shadow artist? Or are you pursuing your own creative potential? And are you holding back on a creative journey because you think you’re too old or it’s too late?

You can follow Barry on Instagram @thebarrydean and learn more about him and his music at creativenationmusic.com. You can follow his company on Instagram @lucimobility and Luci is spelled L-U-C-I and learn more about them at Luci.com.

Tricia (58:40.494)

Thanks for joining us. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at podcast@triciaroseburt.com. And if you like what you hear, please review our podcast, subscribe to the show, and spread the word. It really helps build our audience. For more updates, you can follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn @triciaroseburt. And if you’d like to be added to my mailing list, please go to my website triciaroseburt.com. And remember, this is no time to be timid!

No Time to Be Timid is written and produced by me, Tricia Rose Burt. Our episodes are produced and scored by Adam Arnone of Echo Finch. And our executive producers are Amy Grant, Nancy Perot, and Sage Wheeler. I’d also like to thank contributors to my Fractured Atlas Fiscal Sponsorship, which helps make this podcast happen. No Time to Be Timid is a presentation of I Will Be Good Productions.