Chapter Two - Music City

I awoke on the second morning and swallowed tentatively. The pain was still there. But I wasn't discouraged. One day isn't long enough to see if a medication works. As I began to get dressed, I thought back to that day so long ago when I had left my home and family in Ohio to begin a new life in Nashville.

*****

From the age of eight, Blaine knew he wanted to be a musician. He and his brother had awakened each morning to the sounds of old and new Country Music being played on the stereo. Names like Paul Overstreet, Martina McBride, Taylor Swift and his personal favorite Overdrive, who were slowly crossing over into the mainstream pop market much to his delight, were as familiar as family in the Anderson home.

Blaine received his first guitar from his father's friend, Thomas Montgomery, who had underwritten the cost of the boy's album. Thomas had a guitar he was planning to sell, but instead gave it to Blaine. Owning a guitar opened up a whole new world to Blaine. He would sit in his room for hours, teaching himself the notes and chords, imitating his favorite musicians and writing his own songs. He would even fall asleep on the floor of his bedroom while playing along to TV commercials!

Blaine continued on into his teen years learning the guitar, spending hours each day trying new fingerings and new styles. He became proficient enough to start teaching others at a local music store when he was fifteen years old. He had also learned other string instruments. At one time, his father had a second job putting up satellite dishes. One day instead of money, he traded out his work for a ukulele. The day after Blaine got the ukulele, his family went shopping in Columbus but Blaine wanted to stay home by himself. When his parents got back he told his mother, "Dad is going to be livid." "Why?" his mother asked. "Well," Blaine replied, "He gave up his pay for this. It's been a whole day and I still can't play it yet."

Through all his teen years, Blaine's dream of being a musician increased. But he also knew for that dream to come true, he would have to take a big step. And so at the age of seventeen, he was faced with a major decision: He could forgo his dreams in music, continue in school, get a job, settle down and lead a 'normal' life. Or, he could risk everything and follow his heart. To do so would mean giving up everything that was comfortable and familiar: his family, his hometown, his friends and way of life. He would need to move to a new state, find a job to support his dream, give all his free time to writing and performing music, and live with his pain on his own. Difficult as it was, this was the path he chose. Two days after his high school graduation, Blaine packed up all he owned and left the comfort of Lima, Ohio for Nashville, Tennessee, otherwise known as Music City USA. "It was hard to see him go," his mother admits. "We knew what he was going through, but he was determined not to let anything get in his way."

Blaine ignored the nagging soreness in his throat as he began to think about all that was to come. As he drove his black Dodge Neon down the highway and looked into the rearview mirror to see Cooper trailing behind him, he realized that this move was as hard on his family as it was on him. "They had to be scared," he says. "Probably in the back of my mind I was making all these plans, never dreaming my family would let me go. But I was seventeen and very afraid that if I stayed in Ohio I'd end up with a dead end job and never get to pursue my dreams. But somehow they knew I was serious. They believed in me unconditionally and never tried to talk me out of going. Not once."

Cooper remembers that day vividly. "I had been enjoying my break from OSU where I had just finished my first year studies. Blaine hadn't left the house two minutes when mom was throwing the keys of the Toyota at me and shouting, 'FOLLOW HIM!' What she didn't know was that I had packed a bag the night before and had every intention of doing just that. There was no way I was letting Blaine make that trip alone."

When they arrived, the two brothers unloaded Blaine's belongings from the car and into the not-so-glamorous apartment and grabbed a bite to eat. Cooper was getting ready to settle in for the night when Blaine told him to leave. "As much as I love my brother, I needed to do this by myself. I was afraid if I let him stay too long, I wouldn't be able to go through with my plan, " Blaine remembers. "The reality of what I had done was hitting me hard with a mix of fear and excitement. Having Cooper around too long would allow the fear to take over the excitement and that was the last thing I needed at the time." So Cooper reluctantly hugged his brother good-bye and headed to his car to make the seven hour journey back home.

A month later, the Duval family just 'happened' to find themselves in Nashville for a weekend and 'decided' to look in on Blaine and see how he was managing on his own. "He was in an apartment that didn't look fit to be lived in," says Katherine. "Not having much money for food, it looked like he was living on bread and butter and had gotten scarily thin. All I could think was how Blaine was amazingly dedicated to pursuing his dreams. I was truly amazed."

When Blaine first arrived in Nashville, he was alone in the apartment for almost two months, but that all changed when Cooper put in a transfer from OSU to the Academy of Art University. Cooper remembers stating his case to Blaine for letting him move in: "Their acting program is the Bee's Knees, little bro," he said with too much enthusiasm. "OSU is overrated and I always wanted to act and I'm good at it. Look how I've pretended to like you all these years. You totally bought it!" So in spite of Blaine's initial reluctance, Cooper moved in the day before classes. The Anderson brothers were reunited and Blaine had to admit that it did feel "so good."

Knowing that cooking wasn't something that Blaine was entirely good at, Cooper felt it was his duty as the older, 'more mature' brother to take on the responsibility as often as his schedule permitted. Fortunately, Blaine won a jingle-writing contest for a local McDonalds and the prize was an unlimited supply of Big Macs for a year. Cooper immediately stopped cooking.

The food situation had improved some, but the job front was another story entirely. The only jobs Blaine could get were temporary ones. From assembling clothing displays at a local department store to assembling furniture displays at a local furniture store, he started to feel that maybe the move was a bad idea. That was until he found his first music related job. A new music store had opened up in the neighborhood and he was immediately hired to teach guitar lessons three days a week. It wasn't much, but it was enough to keep his dreams alive.

At thanksgiving, Blaine and Cooper returned home to Lima for the holidays. While the unlimited supply of Big Macs was keeping them alive, Blaine had still lost so much weight that he literally had to hold his pants up to keep them from falling down. When he walked into the house, his mother just started crying and begging him to move home so she could look after him. When Cooper and Blaine returned to Nashville after the long weekend, the Anderson's immediately sold their house and relocated to Hendersonville, just 30 minutes outside of Nashville!

By this time, Blaine's throat problem was growing increasingly worse. "At the time, I felt like I had accepted it, but Mom and Dad never did," Blaine recalls. "They were convinced that we just hadn't found the right doctor or medicine yet. As a parent, I understand that now, but at the time I had just accepted that this was going to be part of my life. So the hardest struggle for me was not dealing with the pain, but with my mom constantly wanting to look into my throat with a flashlight. She would always walk away crying. It always tore me up to see her hurting."

One of the good things about the Anderson's moving to Hendersonville was that it gave the family a chance to start singing together again. On weekends "The Anderson Family" would travel around the area and perform in nursing homes, senior citizens complexes and even shopping malls. It didn't take long for their name to start circulating and the the brothers were receiving invitations to perform outside the group. Cooper would go whenever his schedule permitted, but Blaine never missed a chance to perform. Martin and Cecelia Anderson happily gave up the spotlight for their son and for the first time since moving to Nashville, Blaine felt like he was finally on the right path to make his dreams come true.

Over the course of just a couple of weeks, Blaine's name was circulating around the Nashville music scene so fast that he could barely keep up with the invitations. But during this time, his throat condition was steadily getting worse. He would work all day at whatever job he had at the time, teach guitar lessons three days a week and still gather up as much strength as he could to perform every free weeknight and weekend he had available. On one rare occasion, Blaine casually mentioned his throat condition to an elderly lady who had come up to him at the end of his set at a local cafe. It just so happened that the woman had connections with a doctor at Vanderbuilt University and was willing to help Blaine connect with him. The only problem was that it would be expensive.

Two weeks after the encounter at the cafe, Blaine was invited to sing at an open-mic night. When he arrived at the address, he was surprised to find it was a church. He was greeted in the parking lot by the lady he had spoken of his condition to and she invited him in. The open-mic night was actually a fundraiser she had organized on his behalf. Blaine sat in the seat of that little church and watched person after person perform all styles of music. They asked him to come and sing a couple of songs for them and at the end of the evening, after a collection plate had been passed around, this group of strangers had raised enough money for him to see that doctor. "I went up to the lady at the end of the evening and asked her, 'Why?' Blaine recalls. 'Why would a complete stranger want to do something like this for a no one like me?' Her reply still shakes me to the core to this day. She simply told me that she knew I was going to make something of myself someday and this was her way of contributing to my life and career."

Blaine moved to Nashville with three goals in mind: he wanted to have one of his songs assigned to a publisher, to have one of his songs sung by a major artist and to meet Taylor Swift. Within six months all these goals were fulfilled. First, his song "Don't You" was signed with StarKid records. The same song was recorded by Kelly Clarkson fulfilling his second goal. And he reached his final goal when he started teaching guitar lessons. One of his students, Amy, was Taylor's cousin who gave him the opportunity to meet the lady he had listened to and admired for so long. But he still wasn't satisfied. He had come to Nashville to be a musician...and that dream was about to come true.