2024 marks the 20th anniversary for The Long Players. Back in March of 2004 they played The Rolling Stones’s Let It Bleed to a full house at 12th and Porter, one of Nashville’s hot spots for many years. Built on the concept of doing a tribute to an album rather than one band or singer, they’ve become known for celebrating the LP (Long Playing) records that so many have loved and absorbed into their DNA. On these shows, they (along with a long and impressive list of guest vocalists) perform that album, take a break and come back with a second set of music from the artist whose album they’re celebrating.   Twenty years later, the band has performed over eighty different albums. That doesn't include the number of “theme nights” where they tackle genres like Motown, Stax, British Invasion, New Wave and others. While they’ve played many venues in Nashville (definitely the early-birds high-concept tribute bands) doing their own shows, they’ve also been a “band for hire” playing out of town festivals, corporate events and even weddings. Taking stock of twenty years of this labor of love, the band has a steady schedule of shows lined up at 3rd & Lindsley in Nashville with no sign of stopping.

“I started off that record scared to death,” Kim Richey recalls of making ​Glimmer​ with producer Hugh Padgham back in 1999 in New York and London. A disastrous haircut, unfamiliar musicians, and oversized budgets didn’t help matters. “It wasn’t the way I was used to making records.” The way Richey was used to making records was with friends in a vibed-out, low-key setting. That’s how she made her debut album with Richard Bennett, and it’s how she made her new album, ​Long Way Back… The Songs of Glimmer, ​with Doug Lancio. So Glimmer​ was different, and not just on the production side. Then, as now, the compositions that comprise ​Glimmer​ were the Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter’s first collection of true confessionals. Prior to that she’d been a staff writer at Blue Water Music writing from a more arm’s-length vantage point for her first two releases, 1995’s ​Kim Richey ​and 1997’s B​itter Sweet​. But ​Glimmer ​was all her. Revisiting that history for ​A Long Way Back​ was both emotional and edifying for her. “I was pretty broken-hearted when I wrote and recorded most of those songs and I remember feeling that way,” she says. “At the time, I needed to really get out of my head and out of Nashville. I think that was what appealed to me so much about making a record somewhere that wasn’t home and with new people. Recording these songs again was a good way to look back and remember I made it through those times.” The 20 years of distance between then and now provided another benefit, as well: Richey is more comfortable with her voice, both literally and metaphorically. As a result, Long Way Back​ sounds like it has nothing to prove and nothing to hide. It’s more spacious, but not less spirited, with Richey’s voice, in particular, feeling more relaxed and rounded than on the original. Starting with “Come Around,” the 14 new renderings take their time to make their points, meandering casually around, much like their maker. An Ohio native, Richey’s passion for music was sparked early on in her great aunt’s record shop where she’d scour the bins and soak it all in. She took up the guitar in high school and, while studying environmental education and sociology at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, she played in a band with Bill Lloyd. But it didn’t stick… not right away. After Kentucky, Richey worked in nature centers in Colorado and Ohio and traveled to Sweden and South America. She eventually landed in Bellingham, Washington, where she worked as a cook while her boyfriend went to grad school. Their deal was, she got to decide where they went after he graduated. One night in 1988, some old friends — Bill Lloyd and Radney Foster — rolled through town. She sold t-shirts at their gig, and they talked up Nashville. To drive the point home, Lloyd sent her a tape with Steve Earle and others on it. So taken by the songwriting, Richey and her partner loaded up their Ford F150 and headed to Music City. In Nashville, Richey cooked at the famed Bluebird Café and gigged around town at writers’ nights. At a show one night at 12t​ h​ & Porter, Mercury Records’ Luke Lewis approached her. In classic Richey fashion, she didn’t know who he was. Still, she went to a meeting with him and Keith Stegall, played one song, talked a lot, and got a record deal at the musical home of Billy Ray Cyrus and Shania Twain. Remembering the glory days of major labels in the ’90s, Richey says, “They gave me way more than enough rope to hang myself with. I could do whatever I wanted.” What she wanted was to work with her friend, producer Richard Bennett. So she did. For Bitter Sweet​, she put Angelo Petraglia at the helm, before turning to Padgham for Glimmer.​ “​Bitter Sweet​ was recorded in Nashville with my road band and friends,” Richey says. “That record was as if the kids had taken over the recording studio while the adults were away. ​Glimmer​ was more pro and less messing around having fun. The musicians were all super-talented and gave the songs a voice I never would have thought to give them. Hugh was up for trying anything and really encouraged me to add all those vocal arrangements that ended up on the record”. For 2002’s ​Rise,​ Richey took another left turn, signed to Lost Highway Records, and hired Bill Bottrell as producer. Though it was her first time writing in a studio with a band, the players’ talent and Bottrell’s whimsy proved to be great complements to Richey’s own rule-breaking style. The resulting record was quirky, confessional, mesmerizing, and masterful. And it officially set her outside contemporary country’s bounds which was fine by Richey, whose music had always broken barriers. A greatest hits collection dropped in 2004, buying her some time to tour, write, and make 2007’s ​Chinese Boxes​ with Giles Martin in the UK, followed by 2010’s ​Wreck Your Wheels a​nd​ 2​013’s ​Thorn in My Heart, ​both produced by Neilson Hubbard in Nashville. The latter landed her at Yep Roc Records, where she also released 2018’s ​Edgeland, made with producer Brad Jones in what she has described as the easiest recording process she’s ever had, despite working with three different tracking bands in the studio. Through it all, Richey has worn her heart on her lyrical sleeve, revealing herself time and again. “I started writing songs because of Joni Mitchell, probably like most women songwriters of a certain age,” Richey confesses. “I loved being able to write songs because I was really super-shy. I couldn’t say things to people that I wanted to say. If I put it in a song, there was the deniability. If I ever got called on it, I could say, ‘Oh, heavens no, that’s just a song! I made that up.’” Though she ​could​ fall back on plausible deniability, with Richey, what you hear is actually what you get. “I don’t have a lot of character songs because I’m not that good at making things up out of thin air.” Even when it comes to the main narrator of a song like Edgeland’​ s “Your Dear John,” Richey demurs with a laugh, “I do think that song is probably just another song about me and I’m pretending to be a barge worker.” On ​Long Way Back… The Songs of Glimmer​, though, she’s not pretending to be anything or anyone she’s not, and neither are the songs. Richey and Lancio set out to make a guitar/vocal record, but the songs had something else in mind, and that something included drums by Lancio’s legendary neighbor, Aaron “the A-Train” Smith, among other things. “Once we stopped making rules about what could and could not be on the record, the songs spoke for themselves,” Richey says. “I knew all along I wanted Dan Mitchell to play flugelhorn, and the two tracks he played on are two of my favorites. In the end, the songs decided.” From her move to Nashville to her making this record, for Kim Richey, the songs have always decided.

Jim Photoglo has musically spanned four decades as both a songwriter and artist, bringing his unique creative voice to the R&B, Pop and Country arenas. Growing up in Los Angeles, he began playing in bands as a teenager but never considered music as a “career” until he was in his early 20’s. Photoglo reminisces, “I wanted to get out of L.A., so I took to the highway ‘James Taylor’ style with an acoustic guitar, a sleeping bag and a lot of time to think…and all I thought about was music.” Returning to Los Angeles with music as a career goal, Photoglo began paying the usual dues. He took every kind of gig from playing in a funeral band to putting together a group to back John Belushi’s “Joe Cocker” imitation at a party for Paul McCartney. His solo career took off when he was signed to the Twentieth Century Fox label in 1979, culminating in a pair of Pop hits: We Were Meant To Be Lovers in 1980 and Fool in Love With You in 1981. Photoglo hit the TV talk show circuit, toured the Orient twice, and opened for the Beach Boys on a national tour. By the time his third album was released, the financially- troubled Fox label was unable to properly launch the project, and once again Photoglo took to the road. He spent the next 2 years singing back-up for Andy Gibb, and concentrating on songwriting. His influences were diverse: the behind-the-scenes writers of the Brill Building (Mann and Weil, King and Goffin) and Motown, to writer-artists like the Beatles, the Young Rascals and the Rolling Stones. Photoglo’s eclectic style fostered recordings by a variety of artists, including James Ingram and the Everly Brothers. While enjoying this sabbatical from recording, his songs began to catch fire with the creative “powers-that-be” in post-“Urban Cowboy” Nashville. Before he knew it, he had cuts with Kenny Rogers, Marty Robbins, Gary Morris and Brenda Lee. Further encouraged by good friend Wendy Waldman, a fellow L.A. popster who’d recently relocated and was enjoying a few country hits of her own, Photoglo moved to Music City in 1984 to pursue a full-time career as a songwriter. He took the occasional tour as a bassist for the likes of Carole King, Vince Gill and Dan Fogelberg, but his main focus was songwriting, successfully quadrupling his creative output over the next few years. His devotion to his craft paid off with recordings by Garth Brooks, Faith Hill, The Everly Brothers, Dusty Springfield, Leroy Parnell, Patty Loveless, Highway 101, The Oak Ridge Boys, Pam Tillis, Tanya Tucker, Travis Tritt, Neil McCoy, John Anderson and Kathy Mattea. Four of those recordings ended up in the Top Ten of Billboard Magazine’s Country Music Charts, and two went to Number One: the now-classic Fishin’ In The Dark by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Hometown Honeymoon by Alabama. By the early 90’s, Photoglo was ready to “settle down” (literally – marrying Lee Ann) and return to making records. After recording two solo albums in 1993, his career took a bizarre turn. He and Russell Smith of The Amazing Rhythm Aces, Bernie Leadon of the Eagles and hit-songwriter Vince Melamed formed the band Run C&W. Taking classic soul songs of the 60’s and 70’s, they rearranged and performed them as bluegrass songs with comedic undertones. Their antics led to recording two albums for MCA Nashville and gained them a worldwide cult following. (For a look at some other Run C&W shots from Jim’s own collection, plus a few comments from Jim about his particular costume, click HERE). Around the same time, he co-founded the band the Vinyl Kings, formerly known as The Fabulous Del-Beatles, a group of studio all-stars, which became the toast of the town. The Vinyl Kings have released two CDs of new songs, A LITTLE TRIP and TIME MACHINE, and are performing live after a long hiatus. The 90’s ended well for Photoglo: writing songs, performing and enjoying his status as one of Nashville’s top songwriters. You Give Me Love (recorded by Faith Hill on her Faith CD) was chosen by NBC to close the final episode of Mad About You, starring Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser. The Meaning of Love (co-written and performed by Michael McDonald) was featured in the Mike Nichols’ film What Planet Are You From?, starring Gary Shandling and Annette Benning. Photoglo continued to perform regularly at Nashville’s legendary Bluebird Café and tour solo, combining songwriter workshops with concerts at colleges, coffee houses and clubs around the country. Since 2000, he has released 4 critically acclaimed solo albums. Sparks In The Radio (2005), Is It Me? (2009), and Halls Of My Heart (2014) all had extensive play at Folk Radio. Halls Of My Heart contained the #1 most played song in August of 2014 (#25 for the year), as well as 2 more in the Top 20. It was the #3 most played album (#35 for the year) and he was the #4 most played artist. Is It Me? and Halls Of My Heart have both been nominated for Grammys.

Grammy Award winner Don Henry's songs have been recorded by legends like Ray Charles, Patti Page and Conway Twitty,   by country crooners like Gene Watson, John Conlee and B.J. Thomas and by young hit makers of today like Blake Shelton, Lonestar, Miranda Lambert, and the list goes on. And he’s shared the stage with performers as diverse as Joey Ramone to Keith Urban. The wit and wisdom of Don's songs are widely renowned whether it's campfire favorites, the hilarious "B.F.D." and biker lullaby "Harley", to the wonderfully poignant tribute to Martin Luther King "Beautiful Fool", and of course his Grammy Award winning country classic "Where've You Been". In addition to a Grammy, Kathy Mattea's version of "Where've You Been" won Don (and co-writer Jon Vezner) song of the year honors from ACM (Academy of Country Music), CMA (Country Music Association) and NSAI (Nashville Songwriters Association International). "Where've You Been" was the first song in country music history to be awarded all four honors in the same year!

Singer, songwriter, entertainer, poet and teacher, Tom Kimmel is all of these things and more. Since 1980 dozens of Tom’s compositions have been recorded by a host of major artists, including Linda Ronstadt, Johnny Cash, Joe Cocker and Randy Travis. They’ve been featured in films from Twins to Serendipity and Runaway Bride, and in television shows from Miami Vice to Touched by an Angel.  An award-winning artist in his own right, he has released seven solo albums, published a book of poems and led songwriting workshops and classes across the US and in Europe. Once an eclectic rock and roller, Tom found his voice as a singer-songwriter while touring with Nanci Griffith in the early 90’s. A New Folk winner at the Kerrville Folk Festival in ’93, he began performing solo, stressing a lean, acoustic approach to his music and bringing a humorous spirit to his poetry and storytelling. After releasing two critically praised major label albums (in ’87 and ’90), Tom released his first independent album, Bones, in 1994. It was followed by Short Stories, which featured guest performances by Emmylou Harris, the Fairfield Four, Jerry Douglas and other Nashville luminaries. Then came Shallow Water, a collection of spirit-centered songs and hymns, and Light of Day, fourteen raw vocal-guitar tracks recorded in Tom’s home studio. Never Saw Blue, an anthology of TK songs featured in film and TV is his most recent release. Other TK projects include well-received records written and recorded with three trios:  The Sherpas (1998) (with Tom Prasada-Rao and Michael Lille), The Waymores (2013) (with Don Henry and Sally Barris), and The New Agrarians (2014) (with Kate Campbell and Pierce Pettis). A self-described “closet poet” until the publication of his collection The Sweetest & The Meanest, Tom has been a featured writer at book festivals and writing retreats, and his poems have been published in a number of  poetry and literary journals. In demand as a songwriting teacher and lecturer, Tom offers workshop instruction tying the creative spirit to the nuts and bolts of composition. Bottom line: Now into his sixth decade making music, Tom Kimmel is a unique artist who continues to write, record, entertain and inspire at the highest levels!

singer songwriter - producer - original music for media - mixing - collaborative writing

Ben Cyllus is a singer-songwriter, composer, and actor known for his album Cinnamon Matinee and film and television work. 

Kent Agee first gained recognition as the creator and lead-singer of the Warner/Chappell rock band, “Jane His Wife”.  The visually striking, sonically lush band, with George Bradfute-guitar, Kyle Miller-bass and Scott Miller-drums, played to standing-room-only audiences and featured Agee’s intense presence and his transformative lyrics. The band was courted by labels from L.A. to London, but the music business was in a state of change and Nashville wasn’t the place to birth a band that sounded like Pink Floyd meets the Doors. So, in spite of an international buzz, Jane His Wife never got a record out. But Kent had created fans of his writing on Music Row.   As a staff writer for Warner-Chapell, Sony, then Wrensong, Windswept-Pacific and RPM Music, Agee focused on writing songs for other artists. During that time, and later writing for his own publishing company, Bolt Upright, Kent had songs recorded  by artists from Barbra Streisand to Rodney Atkins to Tom Keifer among many others. He became recognized in the industry as a diverse writer of rich, image driven lyrics, and songs that are always honest and often brilliant.  Kent’s first solo project, “Fields and Fences” was an Americana record, beautifully bridging his transition back from writer to artist. The song, “Omens of the End” off of that record was picked by music journalist Bob Oermann as one of the best indie releases of the year. Now, with two new EP’s just out, “The Meteorite” and “Crop Circles”, Kent is picking up where Jane His Wife left off, combining the creative impulses and vision he had then with the craft he’s developed and the wisdom he’s acquired since,  using words and imagery like a combination lock to open up the mystery and meaning of being human.

Seth Timbs is a Nashville-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist renowned for his sharp songwriting and piano-driven pop-rock. Seth first gained attention in the late 1990s as the frontman of Fluid Ounces, a Murfreesboro, Tennessee band celebrated for their intricate arrangements and witty lyricism.