"I was burning out on progressive rock and wanted a steady paycheck," Hill said. "We were a house band and the guitar player, Jim Williams, showed me how to play Country Music. He showed me color tones and pedal tones. He loved chords and could play blues and Country standards. He showed me how a song was built, which made me better at making up my own songs."
Hill left Bakersfield to play piano with the Palomino Riders, the house band at Los Angeles' Palomino Club. Mickey Gilley hired Hill in 1980 for his Urban Cowboy Band and the band won a GRAMMY that year for "Orange Blossom Special" from the Urban Cowboy soundtrack. By 1984, Hill was ready to take the plunge. He moved to Nashville to be a songwriter.
"I took my dad's truck, with a camper shell on the back of it, and drove to Nashville. When I heard the people playing the open mic at the Bluebird Café, I knew I'd have to knuckle down and get serious about my writing. I was glad I loved doing it, because there wasn't any money in it for quite a while. If my dad hadn't bailed me out a few times, I might have starved."
In 1987, Hill showed a few tunes to Karen Conrad and she took him on as a staff writer for her AMR/New Haven Music publishing house. Ten years later, the company was purchased by BMG Music Publishing. Conrad is now Senior Vice President of BMG Music Publishing's Nashville-based Country Music Division.
"Despite the regular paycheck, I was just about to leave town when Reba [McEntire] cut 'The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,'" Hill said. "Then it became a single, then a hit and the money from that held me over till I got the next cut. And since then, every track has sustained me till the next one, but you have to have a lot of persistence to make it."
"Every song is different," Hill declared. "Some are great because of the groove, some have a good message, but my goal is to write songs that are still going to sound good in 10 years. Sometimes they come quick, sometimes I'm changing the lyrics right up to the time we get a singer to sing it, but it's a fun adventure cause you never know where the song may go. And I know I'll run out of time before I can do everything I want to do. I saw a recent interview with Robert Redford and they asked him when he was going to run out of ideas and he said 'I'm going to run out of time before I run out of ideas.' That's how I feel. I know I'm lucky to be able to do something I love for a living. I want to do something good with the time God is going to let me have."
Hill lives in Franklin, Tenn. with his wife Laura and their three children, Savanna, Gracen and Beaux.