Johnny Hiland had only one thing on his mind when he took to the stage Friday: His music.
Forget that that the performance was his first shot at making a music video. Forget that he and his band have only two performances to get it right.
All of that was secondary to delivering an unforgettable concert to the people he has come to love.
“From here to Japan, I’ve played all over the world and could have shot the video anywhere,” Hiland said. “Johnstown is my first choice because it feels like home to me. I wanted to do it in a town that was down-home as I am.”
Hiland has performed at previous Thunder in the Valley rallies and even returned to do a benefit for the Women’s Help Center.
Each time, he said the welcome he gets from people here is unmatched. He will continue shooting footage for his video when he takes the stage at
7 tonight at the Train Station.
Hiland, 34, a native of Woodland, Maine, makes his home in Nashville and is considered a musician with few equals when it comes to taming the electric guitar.
He has a personality and humility that belies his talent.
Those attributes pale in comparison to his wonderful sense of humor.
He joked that the biggest challenge for video crews would be finding a lens with a wide-enough angle to capture his notable girth.
He considered producing the video in his hometown, but he lost his father in 2005 and his mother in 2007. He said returning there to do a video would be emptionally difficult.
“Out of all the places I have been, Johnstown is the most comfortable to me,” he said.
“When shooting a video, there are a lot of stresses, and worrying about pleasing an unfamiliar audience shouldn’t be one of them.”
Even Hiland’s video team is finding Johnstown to its liking.
Brad Wendkos, CEO of Florida-based TrueFire video productions, spent much of Friday taping location shots around Johnstown and interviewing people to incorporate into the video.
“We have been impressed by how this town has embraced this event, and the people here couldn’t be more friendly or accommodating,” Wendkos said. “We have not talked to one person who had one bad thing to say and we have done dozens of interviews.”
The highly anticipated video will be in post production for eight to 12 weeks. An initial release party most likely will take place in Nashville in October or November, but the breakout release will be conducted in January during the NAMM’s International Music Products Association trade show in Anaheim, Calif.
Wendkos said the music industry admires Hiland’s talent and personality.
“Johnny is a player that everyone knows as the sweetest guy on the planet,” Wendkos said. “Saying that, he’s also known as a monster player, which means there are few players who can do what he does and few who ever will do it.”
That’s evident with Hiland’s last album when Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs and Steve Warner played backup. Hiland credits Skaggs with getting him hooked on music. At age 10, his father took him to a concert and he knew what he wanted to do.
Ironically, when Skaggs won a Grammy for his “Brand New Strings,” album, Hiland played guitar on the recording.
The self-taught guitar prodigy plays 22 instruments. He first picked up a guitar at age 3, and by age 4 was making money from his music. He started playing in the family band, the Three J’s, at age 8.
“They’d put my cowboy hat in the middle of the floor and I would play,” he said. “I enjoyed it and there was sometimes between $300 and $500 in it.”
Hiland was born with a condition called nystagmus, which causes his eyes to move involuntarily and had him declared legally blind.
But when Hiland plays his signature six-string Paul Reed Smith guitar, he has a vision few people with perfect eyesight can duplicate.
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For guitarist, Johnstown is ‘like home’
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