It’s the music, man!
For a Grammy-winning artist from Clinton, it’s all about the experience
Isaac Wriston stands on the red carpert at the 65th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. (photo:Isaac Wriston )
He grew up around the business of music — the ins and outs and the little things, the unseen things that go into making a song, or going on tour — the things you don’t know are there when you hear a song.
And it’s the love of music, everything about it, every aspect of it, that has shaped Isaac Wriston, has molded him, guided him, led him to the red carpet of the Grammy Awards.
The music
Not the fame or glory or fans throwing things at your feet.
He grew up Charleston, W.Va., and he would go to churches with his mother, where he saw how she had to take control of the message she wanted to get across. And he learned, first hand, that sometimes singing takes more than a good voice.
“That was my early days with my mom,” he said. “And she would sing anywhere anyone would have her.”
And there was a lesson to be learned for young Isaac.
“She goes into a church and has to convey everything she wants to have happen, in her three-minute offertory special, to a bunch of dudes who don’t believe her because she’s a woman … And she would set everybody straight.”
The tour bus
Another lesson taken from those early days was that you don’t always need what you think you need.
He said his family was convinced to buy a tour bus.
Not just any tour bus — a big tour bus.
“There was the tour bus, 40-grand for this tour bus,” he said with a laugh. “Nobody had space for that. You go to Big Bottom Baptist Church in Big Bottom, West Virginia, and it’s like, straight up on an incline,” he said. “They don’t have room for that. Not many places had room for that.”
It was being on this tour Wriston fell in love with the drums.
“I became obsessed with drums when I was in high school,” he said.
“Any church we’d go in I’d get behind the kit and I’d ask my day, ‘Hey, can I …” he said. “And dad would say that it was up to the pastor.
“I learned to get in good with pastors.”
And in high school the world changed, shifted, a little.
“I went to a diverse high school. We had a lot of gospel musicians at my high school and I got to compete with those folks,” he said.
He wanted to be part of the show choir band and he wanted to play drums.
Fortunately — or unfortunately (depending on your point of view) — there was a drummer at his school who went by the name of T-Bear.
“Now, he knew how to play some drums,” Wriston said.
Because I thought the girl was pretty
In most people lives there is a turning point, a time when fate (?) steps in gives you a nudge, or pulls you along a certain path.
“I’m in the show choir’s director’s office and this comes up and she asks me if I’m friends with Bill and Ryan (two high school friends, and I’m thinking, she’s kinda pretty,” Wriston said.
He told her he was. She said they told her he could play guitar.
“I told her I could, ‘But I’m not trying to play guitar,’ I told her.
She told him that if could play guitar, he could play bass.
“We don’t have a bass player,” she told him. “It (the bass) has two less strings. You can probably play it,” she told Wriston.
“And I’m thinking, “She’s kinda pretty,’” Wriston said.