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“Tune My Heart” – released Summer 2012 (Elder Group Publishing BMI) Artist: Dick Wells (vocals) & Joe DiBlasi (acoustic guitar, mandolin, dobro, accordion)

“Tune My Heart” is a roots music experience celebrating the redemptive power of the most loved hymns of all time (O, Brother Where Art Thou meets Sunday morning in the South). The album is born out of Dick’s Southern Baptist roots and early days of country and folk music played in bars, churches, backyards and recording studios.

Acoustic guitar, mandolin, dobro, accordion and intricate vocals create a palette for original arrangements impeccably recorded to transform and inspire.

Born and raised in the Texas Gulf Coast town of Bellaire and steeped in the musical traditions of the South, Dick Wells fell out of the cradle singing. Family dinners ended with granddad clanking a spoon against a water glass to herald singing of West Virginia folk songs like, “The Little Fly Flew In the Grocery Store” and “Standin’ on the Walls of Zion”. Dad sang lead, Aunt Mary, tenor, Pa John, bass and Mother, alto with her youngest son, Dick, held in her lap.

It seemed everyone sang in church and the post WWII public schools. Dick recalls his second grade teacher had a piano in the room and he along with the other children would sit at her knee to watch her pound out tunes during lunch.

He picked up the very guitar pictured on the album cover at age 11 and then moved on to bass at age 13. His first band was a folk-rock church band in 1967 when The Letter, Ode to Billie Joe, Windy, Light My Fire, Brown Eyed Girl, Ruby Tuesday and other such classic songs poured from what are now classic American car’s Philco Radios.

Weekend and summer church band trips to local cities and states bore opportunity to hone his craft until paying gigs surfaced in the fall of 1970 with Dale Seabaugh, Charlie Eubanks, and Don Day in Houston’s local Shakey Pizza Parlor music scene with the band Shallow Water. Summer brought Shallow Water a job at Hill Country’s lake LBJ, later to become Horse Shoe Bay.

Pizza parlors, local clubs and High School sock hops gave way to studies at Stephen F. Austin State University. Brother, Pruett, and friends formed a country-rock-bluegrass band, The Saddle Mountain Rangers, playing the Hole in the Wall bar in Nacogdoches, Tx on weekends while the weekdays brought composition, music history, voice, keyboard, and choir at school.

Through it all Dick managed to make it to church choir come Sunday morning (mostly, anyway).

Dick Wells relocated to Hollywood in the summer of 1978 to pursue a career in music. Of course, that meant odd jobs in between bands (restaurant work, wine delivery, computer parts sales). Marrying his wife (now of 28 years), met while she waitressing and he playing in the band at a restaurant in Marina Del Rey, Dick set his sights on studio recording and started the long process of “breaking in”.

Two children later and countless singing jobs from demo recordings to major motion pictures, he is returning to his roots vocationally and musically.

Teaming with associate, Joe DiBlasi (world-class guitarist and producer) to produce recordings for Western artists, they happened upon the concept for this new release.

Joe DiBlasi has played for and recorded with many artists including Peabo Bryson, Christopher Cross, Melissa Manchester, Michael McDonald, Bert Bacharach, Dion Warwick, Frank Sinatra, Chicago, George Benson, Kenny Rogers, Pink Floyd “The Wall”, Ray Charles, Diana Ross, Lionel Richie and Phil Collins.

Joe says, Dick would come in with simple little guitar/vocal arrangements of these great old hymns and I would think, “How’s this gonna work”? Then the vocal arrangement would come next and the course was set. I would fill in the rest, a piece at a time, until there were these transparent arrangements of these amazing songs of faith.

Dick and Joe had so much fun working together on “Tune My Heart” that their only concern is, “What do we do next”?

Stay tuned…