David Nail – HuffPost 11.16.11

Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists?

David Nail: Get your college education first. I moved to town at twenty years old because I’d dropped out of three colleges, and there have been a whole lot of sleepless nights where I wonder if I made the right decision. You look when my first record came out, and hell, I could have been a doctor. I could have stayed in school for eight years or ten years. I was so fixated on moving over here and getting in the business at an early age, and I just think that having that background in education is a really important part. I’d also just tell them to write and to sing as much as possible. I made a record–and thank God hardly anybody heard it–when I was twenty years old. I didn’t know how to sing then, and I didn’t know who I was, I was just singing. There was nothing unique or different about me, and I hadn’t lived enough to really tell the sort of stories that are at least interesting. I think that life experience is extremely important and I think that you have to have a little of that out before you start telling stories every night.