Kent Blazy: The Tulsa Sessions, Bob Dylan and Nothing But the Song

Hall of Fame songwriter Kent Blazy returns to Boomerocity for a conversation about The Tulsa Sessions and a lifetime spent chasing great songs. The album happened almost by accident. Kent had written a collection of songs while spending time in Florida and wasn't sure what he wanted to do with them. An opportunity arose to spend a day recording at Tulsa's historic Church Studio, the legendary facility associated with Leon Russell and generations of remarkable music. Kent walked in with his guitar. Engineer Gary Laney captured what happened. By the end of the session, Laney told him they had a record. The result is The Tulsa Sessions—an intimate collection built around Kent's voice, acoustic guitar and songwriting. In this conversation, Kent and Boomerocity's Randy Patterson talk about the history that seems to live inside great recording rooms, the vulnerability of performing with nowhere to hide, and why some songs become more powerful when everything except the writer and the song is removed. Kent also shares how Bob Dylan helped inspire his own songwriting journey, what a Kris Kristofferson concert taught him about simplicity, why he believes some of Nashville's songwriting culture became too much like an assembly line, and how technology, social media, streaming and AI are reshaping the lives of today's writers and musicians. And Kent tells the wonderfully unlikely story of how "Getting You Home (The Black Dress Song)," the Chris Young hit he co-wrote with Young and Cory Batten, began with Batten sticking his head inside Kent's refrigerator while they were making lunch. It's a conversation about music—but even more than that, it's about creativity, history, relationships, aging, gratitude and what happens when a songwriter finally earns the freedom to write exactly what he wants to write. Listen in as Kent Blazy returns to Boomerocity.