User:Dcolosio

Doug Colosio started playing the piano when he was eleven years old. After a few years in the Christian music field and some success as an artist he moved to Nashville, Tennessee. There he worked with the Marcy Brothers (Warner Brothers, Atlantic) recording artists and also worked in studios around Nashville to try to get involved in the creative end of making music. He rubbed shoulders with many established artists in Nashville. After a frightening experience being lost in east Nashville and a quick audition he was onstage with Mindy Mcreedy.. (Guys do it all the Time, Ten Thousand Angels).. The Mindy experience was short lived... as the keyboard player (Jimmy Nichols) Doug was filling in for left Mindy's organization that night. Doug had become friends with Jimmy and in Nashville it is all about keeping unpleasantness swept under the rug so that was the last show he played with Mindy.

After the experience with Mindy Doug became skeptical about the music business altogether and decided to stay in Nashville installing fire alarms at retirement homes. The opportunity to work as a sound engineer with Merle Haggard arose when Colosio was living in Nashville. Merle Haggard happened to live in the very town where Doug was born, Redding California. Merle be-friended Doug almost instantly. Doug and Merle shared the distain for the superficiality of the music business and the hardships of a life that revolved around music. After two years as the man who loaded the trucks and mixed the sound in the audience for Merle, Doug got his lucky break. One day at the Haggard ranch Doug was helping with a recording session at Haggard's studio in Palo Cedro California. The grand piano sat there in the iso booth and Doug was alone in Merle Haggard's studio. Colosio sat down and started noodling. Guess who was in the other room quietly listening? Merle Haggard! Merle came into the room and these are the words that Doug recalls.. "I can teach you how to play piano for me if you want?"

Colosio has co-written several songs with Haggard and in an interview Merle once said... "Over the last couple years he's been doing real good with the writing, and that gives him another edge, in my book. Not only is he doing some writing, but he's having success with it. A lot of people write, but don't have success." Colosios song "Lonesome Day" speaks of trading freedoms for security. "That's a song I had to write." Colosio said. "There are so many elaborate smoke screens. It just seems like there's a wide-open door for a totalitarian society. It's getting wider and wider every day. Personal freedoms get taken away. They're making criminals out of people who weren't criminals."

(Date Magazine, Thursday Dec 4 2003)