 When you want something, you don't really see them all as obstacles. You just see them as things you just have to do. I went to Fire College. There's a lot of people that quit the very first day. Some people quit by lunch. You learn so much about who you are and what you can push yourself to do. When I moved to Nashville, there was no particular plan for the music industry side of things. You make it happen one way or the other. What's going on, y'all? I'm Tyler Braden. I'm here with Uprocks and Straight Talk. We're in the kitchen and I'm about to make my amazing chicken and dumplings. I'm from Alabama and we love some dumplings down in Alabama. I made this chicken and dumplings at our fire station all the time. That's my claim to fame. Unlike so many of the complicated things that we do in the real world, food is simple. You get out what you put in and you can really get something amazing. It doesn't have to be complicated and I like to live by that. From food to my wireless service. That's why I use Straight Talk. They give it to you straight with no contract and no compromise. Plus, it's easy to switch. Our first step is we're going to boil our chicken. We're going to chop this up into relatively small pieces. I really started cooking more when I was in the fire service. We would basically take turns cooking. You live together and so somebody's got to cook for the family. If you do something simple, it just makes life a little easier because you never know when you're going to have to take off. I grew up in a really small town in Alabama. It's called Slap Out. We had one or two gas stations, a caution light, and a lot of people loved country music. That was a big part of my life and so I started really young with that. I was really, really little. When I learned that people would tip for singing, I would ask how much would you pay me to sing Friends in Love Places? That's like my earliest memory of wanting to get paid to sing. I put myself through fire college and recruit school. As the new guy, I literally had to go up a tree and get a cat. I had some moments you couldn't control. I touched a metal fence right at the power line, fell on it. It sparked really big, scared the crap out of all of us. That's what I learned the most from the fire service, was being able to just handle it and roll the punches and the ups and the downs. When I was first starting out as a songwriter, but doing this for a career just wasn't really in my mind for a long time. So now while that's simmering, we'll get our chicken chopped up. This is my wife, Marissa, and Marissa is going to chop this up and just get it in the chunks, how she prefers it. I've been in the fire service for a few years and I had some friends that had made this move to Nashville with relative success and they told me, and you have to be in Nashville if you want to do it. Literally within about six weeks of Googling Tennessee firefighting jobs, I was living and working just south of Nashville. The two careers started to overlap over about two years. I still had a career in the fire service and I went to so many meetings with a lot of different publishers. We got a lot of, yeah, let's set you up with our writers and we'll kind of see how you are as a songwriter. Going through those which felt super repetitive and they start to kind of get you down, that was probably the hardest part. My secret ingredient is using canned biscuits and I like to get the butter flavored. You can find those at the grocery store. They'll really plump up on you. I think just persistence and not giving up on who I was as a songwriter at the time was kind of what set us apart. 2019, we started getting what felt like more serious meetings and we started getting our first couple offers. Towards the end of 2019, I signed with Warner Records. I put in my two weeks notice, left the fire service and we got our first tour. Let's do brownies. Okay. I will listen to his songs when he is out of town because I'll miss him and it reminds me why we're doing all this so you can play music. And follow your dreams. If I didn't work hard in the fire service and put myself through these grueling things you have to do there, I couldn't handle the consistency of the stress and just how constantly you're moving in the music industry. So then we'll add our chocolate chips. We cover a song by a band called Need to Breathe called Brother to pay tribute to my time in the fire service. I could always go to the station and find someone to work for me. They're going to leave their family for a day or so at a time just so I can go play this show. And I'll never be able to thank those guys enough for that to repay them properly. So we started doing that cover song. The brotherhood you build there, the camaraderie. It didn't feel like going to work and that was the best part and that's the same way I feel about music. So the chicken and dumplings are done. So here we go. The first scoop. Here we go. Yeah. All right. You ready to try it? Yeah. Is it good? Oh god. Mm-hmm. Oh yeah. Yeah, that looks delicious. Your mom is going to love that. Yeah. She's going to be mad that she's not here. I know. To be quite honest, the thing I'm most proud of is the crew around me are my best friends and I'm getting emotional. My wife and they support me so much and to know that what we've done and what we've built together gets to help them pay bills and help them live lives they want to live. My guitarist was my best man. My tour manager officiated our wedding and my wife does tour photo videos so she's able to go out with us as well. We're just a tight-knit group and I'm glad that it's because of how hard we work that we get to support one another.