Claude Carmichael

Tennessee Hill — Claude Carmichael

Released: August 2026

On a dark night on a country road outside Franklin, Tennessee, Claude Carmichael watched a big silver crescent moon settle onto a hillside in the west and realized, for the first time since leaving New York City, that he was home. That moment gives Tennessee Hill both its title and its center of gravity, a record about arriving somewhere, after a lot of living, and finally putting down roots.

It's a homecoming a long time in the making. Carmichael grew up playing in rock bands and folk clubs in eastern Virginia before studying music and economics in college and heading to New York, where he built a career as a session singer and producer, recording pop sessions, radio and TV ad campaigns, and singing on national television specials, including the theme song for the ABC movie turned cult classic The Bermuda Depths. He sang alongside Billy Joel on The Stranger, at producer Phil Ramone's invitation, the same man who had first urged him to move to the city.

From there, Carmichael's work turned toward music with an environmental and documentary bent. He worked on National Audubon Society television specials, produced an award-winning music video for the Grateful Dead's "We Can Run," and co-produced, with Motown Records, a video marking the 20th anniversary of Marvin Gaye's "Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)," featuring David Bowie and Smokey Robinson and directed by Julian Temple, alongside a young Gore Verbinski. As music director for "This Island Earth" with Kenny Loggins, he won a Daytime Emmy Award. Under the banner of his company, Big Screen Music, he went on to produce and supervise music for IMAX films and soundtrack albums with artists including Lyle Lovett, Bonnie Raitt, Paul McCartney, Robbie Robertson, and Bruce Cockburn, picking up a Genesis Award, a Native American Music Award, and honors from the Environmental Media Awards and the International Film and TV Festival of New York along the way.

Eventually, the work and his family brought him to Nashville and then to Franklin, where he found a songwriting community that felt like home even before he knew it. He became close friends and co-writers with Pete Wasner, and taught music through the "Kids On Stage" project in Leipers Fork. Through Pete, he connected with Casey Wasner (Pete's nephew), the Grammy-winning engineer and Keb' Mo' band member behind Purple House recording studio in Leipers Fork, who recorded and co-produced Tennessee Hill from start to finish.

Tennessee Hill is Carmichael's first collection of his own songs to be pulled together as a record, and it plays like a life examined from a comfortable distance, funny in places, tender in others, and unafraid of either. There's real heartbreak here, in songs like "The Bottom of a Well," which channels the dark humor of Leon Russell's "Tight Rope" into a song about being flat out depressed and winking at it anyway, and "Instead of Me," built from a friend's line about a divorce that Carmichael originally wrote for a woman's voice and still hopes one will eventually sing. There's classic honky tonk storytelling in "Full Time Heartache," a cheatin' song co-written with Jeanie McQuinn and road tested on a country dance hall floor in Virginia, with Travis Toy's steel guitar pushing it along. And there's a wink at Franklin's own transformation in "Too Many Yankees (Bless Their Hearts)," a true story told with affection by a longtime local who, after a third of his life in New York, is more than qualified to poke fun, especially with a "Bonafide Yankee" like Casey Wasner co-producing the track.

The record softens into something more personal on "Precious One," a lullaby Carmichael wrote for his daughter, and "The Last Lullaby," an old fashioned, almost 19th century love song that traces back to a barefoot, overalls-clad serenade he once played beneath a girl's window with a violin he barely knew how to play, a story now carried on the record by violist Audrey Swank. "Sonia Lee" borrows its title from a fellow Nashville songwriter and repurposes it for one of Carmichael's most vivid summer memories.

And then there's the title track, "Tennessee Hill," the song that gave the record its name and its heart. It's a quiet account of the night Carmichael understood, driving home from the Bluebird Cafe, that Tennessee wasn't a stop along the way anymore. It was home.

Recorded and co-produced by Casey Wasner at Purple House Studio in Leipers Fork, Tennessee Hill was released in August, 2026. And somewhere outside Franklin, the hillside is still there, still catching the moon, right where Carmichael found it that fateful night where he stopped being a visitor and became a neighbor.

More on Claude Carmichael's career, awards, and film and TV work can be found at bigscreenmusic.com.

— Matt Bjorke