Posted 09/17/2012
Please join us Thursday, October 25, at 5:30 p.m. for our final Music on the Porch at the Love House and Hutchins Forum. Acclaimed country music songwriter Mark D. Sanders will join us to discuss his craft and to perform songs from his latest album. CSAS director Jocelyn Neal will moderate the program, which is co-sponsored by the Department of Music. Bring a friend, bring a picnic, and enjoy a gorgeous fall afternoon on the porch!
California native Mark Daniel Sanders was a literature major, a basketball player, and a surfer who, at the age of twenty-nine, came to Nashville to try for the title of Songwriter. After ten years of “paying his dues,” his career skyrocketed in the early 1990s, thanks to hits by Diamond Rio (“Mirror, Mirror”), Tracy Lawrence (“Runnin’ Behind”), and John Anderson (“Money In The Bank”), and a song on Garth Brooks’s No Fences (“Victim of the Game”). Sanders was NSAI Songwriter of the Year in 1995 and 1996 and ASCAP Country Songwriter of the Year in 1997. He had five #1 songs in 1995 alone. His “No News” (by Lonestar) was ASCAP’s 1996 Country Song of the Year. He received four CMA Triple Play Awards, given for three #1 songs in a twelve month period. His “I Hope You Dance” (by Lee Ann Womack) was Song of the Year for NSAI, ASCAP, the ACM and the CMA, and earned a 2000 Grammy for Best Country Song. He and Tia Sillers wrote a book, inspired by the song, that has sold two million copies. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriter’s Hall of Fame in 2010. Among Sanders’s recorded songs are hits for artists such as George Strait (“Blue Clear Sky”), Ricochet (“Daddy’s Money”), Jo Dee Messina (“Heads Carolina, Tails California”), Trace Adkins (“No Thinkin’ Thing”), and Faith Hill (“It Matters to Me”).