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>> It's great to be here.
It's great to see Phil Cone.
What a surprise.
We used to totally paper his house.
He was the mayor in Brooklyn Center.
Sorry, Phil.
It's, the truth is.
Yeah. I want to thank everybody.
Thank Jennifer and for having me here, and this is unbelievable
to think that I'm coming back here.
You know. I went, I graduated from high school in 1969,
and I know that you're going to find this really hard
to believe, but that's back when it snowed in March,
and it would get down to 0.
I know. [inaudible] So.
I love the snow.
I'm an only child.
My parents, we lived in, over by Earl Brown School,
and if you know where that was,
and we were surrounded by Earl Brown farm.
I don't know if everybody remembers that, but when I went
to college here, it was all, there, you were talking
about the houses across the street.
There were no houses across the street
when I went to college here.
It was all potato fields pretty much, and it was amazing.
It's amazing to see.
It's hardly the same place.
It isn't the same place, but you know.
I. I've been amazingly blessed for,
I was amazingly blessed by my parents.
My dad and mom didn't have much.
My dad was in World War II, and he went to,
he was on the cleanup crew at Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
First guys in after the bomb.
He got tuberculosis.
He came home, and he was in the hospital for six years,
and he never got out of bed for four years
and ten and a half months.
He did, there was a period in there where he went
into remission, and my mom and him went
to a lake cabin, and she got pregnant.
And I don't know how that happened, but.
And one of the things I have to, I have to say one thing, too.
I've been played out a lot around the country and stuff,
and I always made this disclaimer
that I'm not pissed off.
I'm just from Minnesota.
So, and I'm going to refer back to that, but anyway.
So my parents had me, and my dad was the hospital.
And when I was born, I was born with bilateral club feet.
My feet were kind of bent around like this and back underneath,
and I wasn't supposed to live.
I had a tumor.
My mom, there she was.
She was going back and forth between two hospitals,
me in one, me dying in one and my dad dying in the other.
The, she was afraid to tell my dad because he was so sick,
and finally one day the doctor said you have to tell him.
You have to tell him what's going on.
And so she did, and he said I got to get out of here,
and he got out of there.
He, my dad died in 2008 at the age of 90.
He worked out three days a week with weights.
He was missing half a lung.
He had had a heart attack and a bypass,
and he never got the memo.
But one of the things that, when my dad got out of the hospital,
my mom was working at the state board of health,
and they told me this story because I can't remember it,
but my dad wasn't supposed to work,
but he bought a metal lathe.
He was a machinist.
He loved machining and engineering.
He loved, he had a passion.
So he bought a, they were in a flat.
They bought a metal lathe.
You know, you turn these cylinder parts,
and he put the lathe in the kitchen.
And then he got, built this big speaker,
and he would play Gilbert and Sullivan and sing to the top
of lungs while I was in the high chair.
I think he fed me now and then, but that made, I've come to know
that that made a huge impact on me.
My dad, I've heard a great, great, great phrase.
When your children, you're victims,
and when you're adults, you're volunteers.
My dad was never a victim.
I never heard him complain once about that.
All he wanted to do is live.
He never told me I couldn't do anything.
So he got out of the hospital, but he eventually bought a place
on a, a little house for $11,000 on Fremont Avenue,
and there was all potato fields
around there, too, and corn fields.
And he said that he used to hear me, they used to put me to bed
at night, and they'd here this big clump,
and I would have crawling out of my crib, and I'd landed
on the floor, and I was sitting in the dark.
The *** was my cast hitting the floor.
And I was sitting in there,
playing with my toys singing Gilbert and Sullivan
at about two years old.
Well, I looked, I got back through the pictures of me,
and I always have this huge smile on my face.
I was a happy, happy kid until I got to where I wanted
to play Little League baseball,
and kids started calling me club foot.
Now I used to think how did they know.
I didn't tell anybody.
They didn't know.
That's just what you called a gimp.
So I didn't become a cripple
until they told me I was a cripple.
I think that happens to so many of us.
We start out on the right track,
and then we're given these messages of what we should be,
what we are, how we don't measure up.
One of the kids in the class today
or yesterday had a great line that he had heard.
Confidence begins where comparison ends.
Think about that.
I learned that message, and you can see on the timeline
of my pictures where my smile went away.
I spent a lot of lifetime trying to get it back, and sometimes,
that's why I say that comment about I'm not pissed off,
I'm just from Minnesota.
I say that as much for me to set myself at ease
because I still will look at.
We developed these survival skills I believe
when we're children just to try to deal with the world,
and I'm trying to shed that.
So I went on.
I got deeper and deeper in what I did.
I mean, who, hiding myself, creating this illusion.
I found alcohol.
I'm a recovering alcoholic,
and finally when I, it was interesting.
They said 33.
I got sober at 32, and at 33, I left my dad's business.
I graduated from Southwest State.
I did get a music degree down there.
I left my dad's business, and I moved to Nashville.
It was really hard because I was the only one to take over,
but he said, you know, you got to go do this.
You got to go try this.
Five years later, he was down at the CMA Awards watching me get a
CMA Award for a song that I had written about his parents.
You can't make that stuff up.
It's been so wonderful to be here at the school, you know,
and we've done a little songwriting seminar and had been
so wonderful to be here at the school
and watch the kids watch the light come on.
You know, this is not just about the money,
about giving the money.
The biggest desire we all have, the biggest fear,
I think, first of all.
The biggest fear we all have is to be known,
and the biggest desire we have is to be known.
We want to be heard.
We want to be seen for who we are, but it's terrifying.
I'm at a place in my life where, you know, I didn't shave.
I'm not going to prop up any illusions.
I'm a little bit disheveled and thank God I got a job
where I can wear t-shirts for my work.
I write songs.
It's been an amazing ride, and in North Hennapin,
Dr. Don Dallen was the guy.
I walked in here, and I couldn't,
I was going every good boy does fine.
I didn't know the notes on the line, and I said I want
to take music theory, and he said, well,
you probably should take introduction to music first.
And so I took that, and Mrs. Lanner,
who was the vocal teacher over there, I said I want to get
in the choir, and she said, well,
we got to do something about that lisp.
And I went what lisp.
I didn't know I had a lisp until she told me,
and she helped me practice.
I spent weeks walking around going s, s, s, s, [inaudible].
I remember going to a show in the theater,
and it was an all-day music day they had here,
and it's the same theater,
and one of the performers was Michael Johnson.
Anybody know Michael Johnson?
"Bluer Than Blue", big.
It changed my life.
Michael is now a contemporary of mine.
We do lots and lots of shows together.
The biggest thing about it is is that,
you know, I didn't plan that.
I did what I did because I love doing it.
It doesn't matter what you do.
If you work in a Home Depot, ask yourself what you want to do.
That's what I said to the kids.
What do you want to do?
What do you want to do with your life?
You know, when you lay your head on the pillow at night,
did you do what you wanted to do,
or did you do what you thought your parents wanted you
to do or somebody else?
I think the world would be a better place
if we all really followed that, but it's not true [inaudible].
I will end up real quick, and then we're going to do a song.
I'm sorry to run a little bit late, but one of the things
that happened with my dad when he was in the hospitals.
He said they used to try to bring in the entertainers
into sing for him, and nobody would come
because they were all afraid of getting sick.
One person came, and it was Patti Page.
She recently died.
She was, got a lifetime achievement award
at the Grammys.
How many of you know who Patti Page [inaudible]?
Well, she was one, still one
of the biggest selling female artists.
She did the "Tennessee Waltz" and "How Much is
That Doggie in the Window?".
I produced a record about ten years ago on a woman,
and when we got done, she said called up, and she said.
[ Pause ]
[ Music ]
Why are there so many chopped innocent [inaudible].
And [inaudible] we fall behind the rest.
And all Billy taught us is how to take tests.
It's OK. Stand out in the pouring rain.
It's going to be OK.
Who you are doesn't need to change in a world
that [inaudible] someone else.
Trust yourself.
[ Music ]
Why is there so many who [inaudible]
and they tell you it's your fault.
I know it isn't right, and I know it isn't fair,
but you try to blame a peach tree for not producing pears.
It's OK. Stand out in the pouring rain.
It's going to be OK.
Who you are doesn't need to change in a world
that [inaudible] someone else.
Trust yourself.
[ Music ]
But it's OK.
Stand out in the pouring rain.
It's going to be OK.
Who you are doesn't need to change in a world
that [inaudible] someone else.
Trust, and it's OK.
Stand out in the pouring rain.
It's going to be OK.
Who you are doesn't to need change in a world
that [inaudible] someone else.
Trust yourself.
Trust yourself.
Never [inaudible].
Trust yourself.
Trust yourself.
Trust yourself, and not out in the pouring rain.
Trust yourself.
The world [inaudible].
Trust yourself.
Trust yourself.