While traveling the back roads from Shreveport, LA to Magnolia, AR on a 1974 business trip I ran into a dead zone where I was no longer able to pick up my favorite rock music station at the time, KEEL radio in Shreveport. I started twisting the dial and had no luck finding a station without static. Getting bored quickly in the disconnected world we had back then, I soon resorted to humming and singing country lines I was making up on the fly. By the time I got to Magnolia I had written my first song, “Nashville Dreams.” If you could call it “written,” because it wasn’t on paper. I had memorized each line by singing them over and over. As soon as I checked into my motel room in Magnolia, I rush to my room and wrote down the lyrics using the free note paper and ball point pen provided by the establishment to every guest.
Over the years I would sing that song over and over, so as not to forget it. My first wife of 24 years thought it was corny and would roll her eyes each time she heard me singing the song. Twenty-nine years ago I remarried to my wife Jonette and got a similar response. But I never gave up on the song. Don’t forget, I wrote Nashville Dreams in 1974 — pre PC’s and laptops. It stayed on those motel room note sheets for years and in the late 1980’s I typed it up and saved it to my laptop as an electronic document. Since the 1980’s I’ve probably owned 15 or so laptops and desktops. Not long after buying a new one, I would copy Nashville Dreams over to my newest hard drive. I also maintained in on numerous thumb drives.
My plans were to one day learn to write melody and create the music behind the words. The same music idea, cadence, flow and pace of the song was trapped in my brain for years. In 2015, ten years ago, I wrote down a bucket list of 20 goals I wanted to accomplish before I died. One of those 20 goals was to publish a song before I died. I will be 77 on August 14. it’s now been 51 years since “Nashville Dreams” was first written.
And finally, at last — as we approach August of 2025, I have composed the music and have an mp3 file to share with my kids, with one exception. Today is July 29, 2025, and I don’t have one mp3 file, I now have 13 mp3’s. I’ll explain how . . . bare with me.
In 2017 I had a stroke, an ischemic stroke took place simultaneously in both of my optic nerves. It took place while taking a 20-minute “power nap” in my recliner, with my Dachshund puppy Sophie sleeping on top of my chest. I woke up from the nap with a black curtain covering the upper half of my left eye and realized I had blurred vision in my right eye. The short version of what turned out to be an 18-month long story is that this health event left me permanently blind in left eye, along with partial vision loss and blurriness in my right eye.
Don’t worry, I have functioned just fine with the one eye and still drive. But being blind in one eye causes loss of depth perception for about a year, until the brain recalculates everything properly. However, while that depth perception is missing, I learned that one has to prepare to bust your ass a lot, which I did. 2017 was a year of multiple falls, including a broken femur, a broken ankle, 6 torn ligaments in my left foot and a 9-stitch wound to my left wrist. I’m not sure, but I think I fell more in 2017 than Joe Biden fell during his entire four-year presidency. The gist of this health saga is that not only did “Nashville Dreams” get postponed, but reading books became a chore, delaying me from learning how to write melody.
I have always stayed on top of the high-tech world, much more than most of my aging peers, so when AI started becoming the flavor of the day I wanted to know how I could use it and put it to good use in my energy consulting business, a venture I founded after retiring from BP at the end of 2015. Twenty years ago I had purchased some audio editing software for my youngest son, John. Over the years I’ve needed to use audio editing software for various industry presentations I’ve made. Thus, while sitting alone one day a few weeks ago and pondering how I was going to make “Nashville Dreams” come alive and complete this music project, I sort of had an epiphany. Simply one of those ah-ha! eureka moments where it hit me that maybe audio editing software has improved a lot in the AI world we live in, and if it has, perhaps I can learn a new program to start creating my own music from the comfort of my home.
The experience of taking the music behind my lyrics from the imaginary music notes I’ve had running around my brain for 51 years, and bringing it to life has created a new adrenaline rush for me and led to me publishing not one, but 13 songs in my first month. I’ve been able to accomplish this because software now exists from multiple sources that have allowed me to create computer-generated vocals to go with the music I was able to compose using a computer.
After my first week of hearing “Nashville Dreams” become alive and real, I was inspired to put music to other songs I’ve written over the years, which numbered four (4) in all. After creating the music and vocals for those four, my creative juices have been running on overdrive. Over the past week I’ve averaged writing one new song a day. I don’t know when and if I will stop, but I do know from my past experiences in writing poetry, when you’re in a creative zone like this you shouldn’t stop. I say this, because after writing 50 or so poems, one day I woke up, the creative juices and energy were no longer there, the spark was missing, and I’ve not written a single poem since. I fear that might happen to my music, so for that reason I’m running at a prolific pace with these vibes, feelings and passion are running high.
I know that as long as I’m good health I want to transfer lyrics from my heart to paper and song with great urgency — while my creative juices are one fire, per se. To that end, and with requests for a download page from friends, I will start to post new songs on my growing “Song List” page at https://boudreauxslife.com/song-list/. As you listen to Nashville Dreams, picture me driving a 1973 Buck Century, two-toned bronze and white, butt-awful ugly, on a small Arkansas highway singing to myself without a care in the world. The old black and white photo at the end of this post was taken in 1976 and gives a fair demonstration as to what I looked like in 1974, with my hairdo still influenced by the early Beatles look (sorta).
My Songs – All Copyrighted 2025. Feel free to download and listen to these demos.
Nashville Dreams – my first song, written in 1974, but not introduced publicly until July 2025.
For my complete catalog of songs, to to my Song List page.