“(The divorce) was really hard for me emotionally,” Seals said by phone from his home in Nashville. “I decided to go deep inside and figure myself out, because what she said I was didn’t line up with who I thought I was. I started reading a lot of Max Lucado, who writes from a Christian perspective. I wrote the book because I felt like my story might help somebody else.”
Many musicians have compared being in a band with marriage. Seals joined his first country band when he was 16 years old, a year before he graduated high school. He did his schoolwork while on the road and playing honky tonks at night. After joining Little Texas, the band’s fame skyrocketed, with Seals co-writing all of the band’s hits, but Seals himself struggled.
Although he said he wasn’t a huge partier, he said he frequently gave into temptation with women, which he felt was a violation of his Christian faith.
“(Women) were my vice,” he said. “I was lonely on the road. There was time to hang out during the day when we rolled into town, so I’d call someone. But I didn’t feel like myself, and some of my relationships suffered from it.”
When Seals ultimately left the band in 1994, he described himself as burned out and dealing with unsympathetic band members.
“I had all this anxiety and depression and nobody consoled me,” he said. “They treated me like an outcast, like I didn’t want to be in the band, which wasn’t true. So, I had to walk away.”
These days, Seals said he communicates with (Little Texas drummer) Del Gray and (ex-Little Texas singer/guitarist) Jim Rushlow (Little Texas reformed in 2004 with four of the six original members). “Much of the pain has been healed,” Seals said. His musical work today consists of studio recording and writing projects for Nashville musicians, and playing in two tribute bands. He performs in Seals and Croft 2, a homage to the 1970s soft rock duo, Seals and Croft, with Lua Croft (Brady is Jim Seals’ cousin and Lua is Dash Croft’s daughter) and The Petty Junkies, a homage to the music of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. He said he still gets recognized on occasion.
“It’s not like how it used to be,” he said. “But every once in awhile, someone will come up and tell me how they got married to my song. That’s always a pleasure, really cool.”
However, Seals has two goals for the future, making original music and testifying.
“I have all kinds of things sitting around and I want to get creative again,” he said. “I’d also like to make some church appearances, to talk about my testimony and maybe help their congregation.”
There’s actually one more thing Seals would like to do more of: come home to Fairfield.
“I haven’t been back in a long time,” he said. “I usually go once a year but COVID prevented that this year. I miss my Skyline, my Chester’s pizza and my Fairfield pizza.”
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