With his eyes closed in a quiet Nashville studio, 65-year-old John Anderson let the title song of his comeback album unfold at an unhurried pace, and the seasoned musicians around him fell into a stunned and reverent silence.
Not long before that moment, Anderson could not even bear the sound of his own acoustic guitar at home in Smithville, Tennessee.
Between 2017 and 2018, a mysterious and severe inflammation swelled the nerves inside his brain, draining his physical strength, upsetting his balance and forcing him to cancel tour dates and retreat to his Tennessee farm convinced that he might never sing again.
At the worst point of the illness, every sound reached his ears out of pitch and at a painful volume, and when he sat alone and strummed an acoustic guitar, the instrument sounded like harsh and clashing noise that left him certain his recording career was finished.
His recovery demanded months of complete silence, rest and steady care from his wife Jamie and their two daughters, and slowly in late 2018 and early 2019 the swelling around his cranial nerves subsided and musical notes began returning to their natural pitch, although he remained thin and unsure whether his vocal stamina would ever hold up in a professional studio.
To fans who had followed his unmistakable voice since the early 1980s, the five years after his 2015 album “Goldmine” had looked like a quiet semi-retirement, yet behind closed doors he was fighting a medical crisis that nearly ended both his life and his ability to hear music.
The turning point came through longtime Nashville engineer David “Fergie” Ferguson, best known for his decades of work with Johnny Cash and John Prine, who introduced Anderson to The Black Keys frontman and producer Dan Auerbach at Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville in 2019.
Walking into the building after five years away from songwriting, Anderson kept his hopes modest and agreed to sit down with Auerbach for a single afternoon just to see if they could finish one song together.
Instead, that first conversation opened a floodgate of reflection that neither man had expected, and sitting in a circle with acoustic guitars, Anderson and Auerbach found an immediate rhythm before bringing in trusted veteran songwriters Paul Overstreet, Pat McLaughlin, Bobby Wood and Ronnie Bowman.
Over a string of relaxed two-song-a-day sessions, they co-wrote ten tracks drawn directly from the clarity of a man who had just stared down his own mortality, and songs like “I’m Still Hangin’ On”, “Celebrate” and “Chasing Down a Good Time” grew straight out of the gratitude Anderson felt while watching the seasons change on his Tennessee farm after months of being bedridden.
When it came time to record the album, Auerbach and Ferguson refused to use modern studio tricks and placed Anderson in front of vintage microphones surrounded by the Easy Eye Sound house band, including legendary keyboardist Bobby Wood and guitarist Gene Chrisman, the famed Memphis Boys musicians who had played on classic hits for Elvis Presley, Dusty Springfield and George Jones.
Country star Blake Shelton also stepped into the studio to join his longtime hero for a duet on the album’s lead single “Tuesday I’ll Be Gone”.
Time moves quickly, and healing comes only when a person slows down long enough to cherish what remains.
That meditation on the swift passage of time became the emotional heart of the title track, and Anderson delivered its verses with a weathered and unhurried phrasing that left the veteran session players and the control room crew in quiet awe.
Released on April 10, 2020, “Years” earned widespread acclaim as his most personal and reflective record since 1992’s “Seminole Wind”, setting the stage for his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame four years later.
The illness that took away the sound of John Anderson’s guitar could easily have been the final chapter of his career, yet when his hearing returned he used his voice to sing about how precious every extra year really is.