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Nashville, Tennessee There was something different about this one. The session players noticed it first. Usually, Nashville's studio musicians record with the practiced efficiency of an assembly-line worker adding a part and tightening the bolt. They play on hit records all the time, so they lay down their parts and make for the door when they're off the clock. It's the way business is done, and they've got it down pat. But Al Anderson noticed that the pickers weren't going out for coffee after they finished playing on these Vince Gill sessions. They were heading to the control room. "They'd come in and listen really intently to what was going down on Vince's record," recalls Anderson, the former guitarist for NRBQ who'd written several of these new songs with Gill. "They love to play on good stuff." Gill had already ensured his place in country music history. Having built a reputation as a gifted singer, songwriter and guitarist, Gill he'd become perhaps the most respected country music artist – at least within industry circles – of the past 20 years. He'd played and sung on hundreds of records before his recording career really took off in the early '90s with hits like "When I Call Your Name" " and "I Still Believe in You" – once Mark Knopfler had approached the Oklahoma native about joining Dire Straits.  Vince Gill's commercial heyday appeared well behind him until he began recordings songs for These Days during the summer of 2005. Gill had entered the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005 after winning the Country Music Association's Song of the Year award four times in six years. And he's a lock for eventual membership in the Country Music Hall of Fame – probably within the next five to 10 years. Still, Gill's commercial heyday appeared well behind him when he began recordings songs for These Days during the summer of 2005. But his creativity hadn't left him, that much was for certain. He might not have had a Top 10 radio hit in five years, but he'd written a bunch of good songs recently, so many that he didn't know which ones to cut for his new album. So he set a goal of recording one a day, figuring he'd sort out the best on the back end. "I felt like I had freedom," says Gill, who turns 50 on April 12. "And I had time. Nobody was beating my door down to get my new record. That allowed me to experiment some. "I was enjoying the creative process. I was enjoying the camaraderie of some great musicians. And the fact that the songs were kind of all over the place." Several weeks later, Gill came up for air and realized that he had 31 songs. "My mindset was, 'Well, shoot, I'm going to have to blow up two-thirds of this stuff and not get to use it,'" he says. Inspired by the Beatles memorabilia that surrounded him at Blackbird Studio, the Nashville recording house owned by Fab Four fanatic John McBride, Gill went to the head of his record label and proposed releasing a series of albums over the course of a year, as '60s acts commonly did. "I said, 'If we put all three of these records out every two or three months, my hardcore fans will go buy them all,'" Gill says. "We'll see three times as many records in a year, and I'll give people who have invested in me the opportunity to hear all these things."
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