Timothy Wayne is Tim McGraw’s nephew, but he hopes that’s not the most interesting thing about himself or his fledgling music career.
Wayne is a full-time college student in Louisiana who grew up near Nashville with plans to join the Marines. He’s majoring in history and went to college to attend officer candidate school. But music intervened.
“Once I finally picked up a guitar and started playing music, I fell in love with it,” Wayne said. “I was like, ‘I really want to be a Marine, but man, this picking in the guitar and playing for crowds every night is something else.’”
Wayne says he decided to give music his all, while staying in college to continue his education.
“It doesn’t matter where you come from, who you are, who you know, there’s absolutely zero guarantees,” he said.
But for Wayne, so far so good. An impromptu walk-on performance at Bluebird Café piqued Capitol Nashville’s interest. He’s now signed at the label and recently released new song “That’d Be You,” which he co-wrote with Mark Collie and Jamie Moore. Famed producer Byron Gallimore and McGraw co-produced the track.
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Timothy Wayne Co-wrote “That’d Be You” with Mark Collie
The fast track to music industry success wasn’t anything Wayne pursued. He wanted to pay his dues like everyone else. But when offers started to roll in – he showed up to accept them. Wayne’s path to a major label record deal was short by any measure. He didn’t play guitar as a child – he just occasionally fiddled with his brother’s instruments.
“Cats dying with a tin roof flapping in the wind is what I would describe the noise as,” Wayne said of the early days of his guitar playing. “I just never applied myself at it.”
,As his high school years progressed, Wayne needed another arts credit. He’d already taken many of the other arts classes. When he saw that rock band was a choice, he decided he’d finally learn to play guitar. He was the only person in the class who didn’t already know how to play.
“I was completely blown out of the water,” he said. “I wound up every day after school practicing for about three to four hours until my fingers literally were bleeding.”
He realized most songs had the same few chords and started trying to write songs soon after he started playing. Wayne just sat home and strummed his guitar. He stumbled on a melody and a chord progression he liked. Around that time, Collie told Wayne he’d heard he’d been trying to write songs. Collie, an accomplished country singer and actor, is friends with McGraw and Wayne’s mother. He offered to write with Wayne.
Timothy Wayne Didn’t Chase Fame—It Came to Him
“I had my first writing session ever actually inside of my living room with Mark Collie,” he said. “Not a lot of people get to say that. He’s the one that really got me into songwriting. He’s really always been in my life.”
Wayne was a sophomore in college in Baton Rouge when Jamie O’Neal invited him to sing with her at Bluebird Café. He doesn’t remember what song he sang, but someone in the audience filmed it and sent the clip to UMG Nashville – now called MCA. Wayne went back to Louisiana, and his mom called him as soon as he arrived and told him not to unpack.
“She said, ‘I just got off the phone. We just made you a meeting with UMG,’” Wayne recalls. “It was like, ‘You’re joking,’” he said. “She goes, ‘No, I’m not.’”
The young singer chose what he wanted to wear to the label meeting, washed his clothes, and figured out what he would sing.
“I wasn’t expecting this because freshman year, I had decided that I was not going to, in any way, shape, or form, really pursue a record deal yet,” he said. “My mom didn’t think I was ready. I thought I needed to pay my dues before I ever got to that stage. I also didn’t think that I had honed my skills enough to even get noticed. When they called me, I was like, ‘Alright.’
The rest is history.”
Later that summer, his uncle called and asked him to join the Standing Room Only Tour.
“It’s all surreal,” he said. “It still doesn’t feel like it’s happening. But it’s been a really cool journey.”
Photo Credit: Tyler Conrad via UMG Nashville
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