Yet, it’s Nail’s soulful voice and personal lyrics that consistently drive this album. He co-wrote three other songs, including “Again,” a mid-tempo cut that relies heavily on his past. And “about 95 percent” of it is true, Nail offered.
He said he brought two verses and a guitar riff (“which is odd because I don’t fancy myself as much of a guitar player”) to co-writer Scooter Carusoe and “I think that he could tell, and by then we had become good enough friends for him to realize that was something that was important to me and something that I probably needed to get off my chest so I could move on.”
Which got Nail back to talkin’ baseball, a topic he thoroughly enjoys discussing as much as – if not more than – his new album. (He's shown at left with Cardinals manager Tony La Russa.)
Nail, who threw out the first pitch at a Cardinals game this season and was a mlb.com correspondent at the All-Star Game in St. Louis in July, addresses – among other things – his playing days in “Again,” when he was “chasing my father’s dream instead of growing up.”
“That was his dream – for him to play,” Nail said of his father, a Stan Musial fan back in the day who is now retired and still lives with his wife in Kennett right across the street from Nail’s grandparents. “I was chasing his dream. I don’t want to paint him as an overbearing parent that was trying to force me to play baseball. ... I think that it baffled him somewhat that I wasn’t more interested in having surgery (to stay in the game), because I think that everyone who watched me play, I was very competitive once I got out there; it was the motivation to get out there that was the problem at 18 years old.”
Married June 6 (he calls his wife Catherine “the breadwinner now”), Nail quickly dismisses the notion that he was one of Nashville’s most-eligible bachelors. “Yeah, that was just a rumor on the street,” he said of articles that appeared in Nashville Lifestyles and Country Weekly. “I really wasn’t that big of a catch; in fact, there’s probably a select group of ladies out there that say quite the opposite.”
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