Eric Heatherly
Swimming
In Champagne
The
late night denizens of Nashville’s Lower Broadway honky-tonk district already
know these songs by heart. When
Eric Heatherly blasts into “She’s So Hot,” “Swimming in Champagne” or
“I just Break ‘Em” they sing
along with every word. It’s quite
a scene – Vanderbilt college co-eds jitterbugging with hardcore winos,
alternative rockers dancing on the bar alongside hookers, music-biz millionaires
bopping with working-class hillbillies. They
are united by the extraordinary power of Eric Heatherly’s music.
The
young man with the sideburns, hepcat clothes, two-tone shoes and Bahama-green
Stratocaster has already inspired a fanatical following in Tennessee.
In testament to his expertise on the guitar, he scored endorsements with
Fender and Takamine before he had a record deal.
Now, with the release of the debut Swimming In Champagne CD, the rest of
the world is about to start singing along with Music City’s after-midnight
barroom crawlers.
Whether
it’s the roadhouse stomp of “Wrong Five O’clock,” the charming swagger
of “Someone Else’s Cadillac,” the lyrical insight of “Freedom Chain”
or the irresistible thump of Eric’s reworking of the classic “Flowers on the
Wall,” this is music that grabs you by your shirt collar and doesn’t let go.
This isn’t some cookie-cutter Nashville cowboy.
This is a true musical personality – a lead guitarist, a writer with an
individual outlook, a
son - of - the - South singer and a kick-butt showman.
“With
me, what you see is what you get,” says Eric Heatherly.
“When we went in to record this album, we turned on the tape and just
let it roll. ‘Someone Else’s
Cadillac’ is the first ‘take.’ It
just felt too good to mess with it. The
way you hear it is the way it was cut. That’s
all my guitar. This record is too
good to mess with it. The way you
hear it is the way it was cut. That’s
all my guitar. This record is about
spontaneity. I just want it
to ump out of the speakers … maybe blow some speakers, too.”
His
edge-of-the-seat enthusiasm is easy to understand.
Eric has had this record boiling inside him for more than a decade, even
longer, if you count his formative years.
The
29 year old Chattanooga native can hardly remember a time when he wasn’t a
musician. His parents, truck driver
Earl and postal worker Nola, are both big country music fans.
Their home was full of records and Eric was raised on weekly trips to see
country stars perform in concert, everyone from Ernest Tubb to The Oak Ridge
boys.
“The
first thing I remember musically is that my dad had this two-tone, red and white
’55 Chevy, and he’d take me out in the garage and turn on the power.
We’d sit there on the seat together and he’d pop in a hank Williams
tape and sing along with it at the top of his lungs.
I was maybe 4 years old. He
was a star in my ears.”
A
year later his dad brought home a guitar he’d rescued from the garbage dump
and taught Eric his first three chords and his first song, Johnny Cash’s
“Folsom Prison Blues.” The boy
devoured the sounds of Conway Twitty, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Ry Orbison,
and the Ventures, practicing so diligently that he wrote his first song at age 8
and was ready to make his stage debut by age 13.
that performance, a talent-show rendition of john Anderson’s “Swingin’,”
didn’t go over particularly well with his break-dancing school
classmates, but Eric Heatherly knew what he wanted to do for the rest of his
life.