NASHVILLE, TN. (Country
Music Association, Inc) - Not too long ago,
Chris Cagle seemingly had it all. His music career was gaining momentum with two Gold albums. His home life was happy.
Then it all came tumbling down.
Things began to unravel. He started having trouble with his voice. There was a change in his management. His relationship with his girlfriend got rocky. He was drinking and smoking, making the vocal problems worse.
Shaken, Cagle consulted renowned voice specialist Dr. Robert Ossoff, Chairman of the Department of Otolaryngology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.
Ossoff immediately placed him on vocal rest and gave him an ultimatum - change his habits or lose the ability to sing. The words weren't particularly surprising to the hard-driving Texan.
"The doctor gave me a choice - you can drink and smoke or you can sing," Cagle said. "And I stopped both. You can go back and listen to the first two records and listen to this new one and tell that I quit smoking."
Many artists experience vocal problems, usually due to pushing beyond the limits or straining the vocal chords through overuse or improper singing techniques. Ossoff says many of these problems can be diminished and even eliminated with some common sense practices and lifestyle alterations.
"Generally our suggestions include smoking cessation, alcohol reduction and cessation, control of respiratory and food allergies and proper dietary and eating habits," Ossoff said. "The latter include not eating within two hours of sleep to reduce the risk of reflux and the laryngeal irritation that it causes.
"We often use resting the voice 24/7 as a non-invasive, non-medicinal treatment for benign vocal fold lesions. The goal of the treatment is to promote the healing of the larynx by stopping the abusive insults the folds receive as a result of labored voice use. Often voice rest, coupled with steroids to help reduce the inflammation of the folds, increases the success of voice rest. Lesions that survive the treatment can then be addressed with therapeutic interventions such as speech and singing instruction. That type of treatment gives voice use guidelines such as staying out of noisy places, drinking plenty of water and proper use of the voice with appropriate voice inflection and airflow. In most cases, we do not recommend that voice rest exceed two weeks."
At one low point, Cagle considered completely throwing in the towel on his career.
"The last year was just really a year to get through, that's all I can say about it," Cagle said. "You dream of something for so long and then all of a sudden you're faced with the possibility that you won't be able to continue. It's not even having to stop. It's just not being able to see what you could have done with it all, you know?"
Even coming off of a successful album with hit singles "Beautiful Day" and "Chicks Dig It," Cagle wondered if fans would wait while he took the time to regroup.
"I remember when I was a fan, listening to the radio and noticing somebody was gone and wondering what happened to them," he said. "The thing that scared me most is there were some folks I knew that went through the same situation, dear friends of mine, who really haven't made it back."
Forced to walk away for a few months, Cagle passed time working on a horse farm in Kingston Springs, Tenn. The physical labor proved therapeutic. "I just had to go occupy my time and do something and it helped immensely," he said.
Time spent in therapy in Arizona helped Cagle deal with depression and demons that plagued him from childhood. "I'm the last person I would have thought in life would do that. I'm a blue-collar man and some men don't go to therapy you know, but it really helped. It was pretty amazing."
Cagle returned to music rested and rejuvenated. The result is the fastest-selling project of his career, Anywhere But Here, released in October 2005 on Capitol Records Nashville. The album, co-produced by Cagle and Rob Wright, has already yielded one Top 10 single, "Miss Me Baby," a sweet-sounding serenade that masquerades as a love song but is really an "I hope you miss me" tune, co-written by Cagle and Monty Powell. The title track, written by Wendell Mobley and D. Vincent Williams, about an alcoholic, is the song Cagle most identifies with on the album.
"Anywhere But Here is where I want to be, absolutely," Cagle said. "It's funny because it's not as hot, not as uptempo as my other records, but I think it's better. There's a growth and a maturity in the studio and craft, a maturity of topic, but it's still me."
That new sense of maturity and control comes through in songs "Maria," a sultry and powerful look at passionate love and "I Was Made For You" and "You Still Do That To Me," songs that celebrate lasting love. On the rowdier side there is "Hey Y'all," a flat-out rocker about the joys of outdoor partying and "Might Wanna Think About It," which finds the tough-minded Texan staking out his territory in the modern-day battles over rights and obligations.
Happy that the album has been well received, Cagle has been hard at work touring, though he admits he was apprehensive at first about going back out after the vocal problems.
"It was harder than I thought it would be," he said. "I had to stop and relax and go, 'Wait, now you're rebuilding this muscle.' But vocally now, I can start to sense when I'm getting tired - and I'm learning now that it's OK to stop and fix things when they're not right. I've never known that before. So that's a big thing."
Cagle foresees 2006 to be a healing year. "I'm going to be doing my thing with music, but I'm really going to be working on me," he said. "I'm going to find my balance.
"I love what I do and I'm very grateful for my fans," he said. "I care tremendously for them, because right now that feels like all I've got. That's the one thing in this whole deal that hasn't let me down."
On the Web: www.chriscagle.com
