Blindsided By True Love, Travis Tritt Changes His Tune

The Travis Tritt hit love song “More Than You’ll Ever Know” is a far cry from Tritt’s earlier, rollickingly unromantic “Here’s a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)” and for good reason.

The reason is Tritt’s fiancee Theresa Nelson, a Nashville student and model whom he expects to marry on April 12. Asked how impending nuptials could have befallen the “Here’s a Quarter” man, the singer admits to wondering the same thing.

“I got blindsided,” he says. “The last thing I was looking for or expecting was to have this relationship come about.”

But it did, thanks to a chance, near-miss meeting after a “Marty Party” videotaping with his friend Marty Stuart at The Nashville Network.

“The next thing I knew, she was a really huge part of my life,” he says, adding that “More Than You’ll Ever Know,” a song of aching longing, was written “three or four months” after they met.

“When you first meet somebody and you’re falling in love with them, if you’re like me you want to spend every waking moment of your day with her, get to know her as much as you possibly can,” he says. “We were able to do that for about the first three or four months we were together.”

Then came a couple of weeks in which Nelson went back home to Florida to visit her parents and Tritt went out on the road to discharge some performance obligations.

“We were apart for about two weeks after having been together practically every day for three months,” he recalls, “and I missed her much more than I thought I was going to - and much more than I wanted to let myself miss her.

“We (he and the band) were out in the middle of East Bumble somewhere, and my cellular phone wasn’t working, so I’d get off the stage and couldn’t call her, and I’d be wondering what she was up to and if she was feeling anywhere close to as miserable as I was.

“And I sat down one night on the bus and wrote that song out in the middle of nowhere. It’s one of those that’s nothing fancy, nothing flashy, just comes directly out of circumstance - right out of your heart. I was able to get hold of her the next day, and I told her, ‘When you get back, I got something I wrote for you that I want to play for you.”’

So what happened when he did?

“She just grinned,” Tritt reports. “She loved it.”

New Alan Jackson album coming

Alan Jackson’s first all-new album in two years - the first following his 1995 greatest hits collection - is due Oct. 29 under the title “Everything I Love.”

Jackson’s seventh album is expected to contain 10 songs, half of which were either written or co-written by the singer. One of the songs by other writers is a ‘90s Tom T. Hall song, “Little Bitty,” which concerns the microcosm of life.