Trey Rollins

My Story: On the Road to On the Mend

Maybe my first steps toward this album started when I was four years old – when mom started me in piano lessons. Through the years, the pieces kept building – choir (don’t laugh), voice lessons, guitar – but music didn’t really get my full attention until it became clear I wasn’t going to be a professional baseball player.

Nope. Those dreams were dashed my Junior year in high school. At least with music I could keep dreaming.

So I left for Belmont University, in Nashville, TN, to study music and told my mom I wouldn’t even be finishing college since I’d have a recording contract by the end of my sophomore year. Um. Yeah. Not true.

Even without the dream of being an overnight success, I learned a lot in college about what was inside me. And what was not.

It’s funny the battle one faces in pursuing a dream. Doubt. Insecurity. Doubt. At several points along the way I just knew I had let my moment pass me by. I think what I’ve learned since, though, is that the fulfillment of a dream is not about a moment. It’s about becoming.

See. I think the life we live, the decisions we make, and the relationships we build, collectively play a role in helping us wander closer to living out the dreams we believed were so easy to obtain as kids.

Now. Dreams are a funny thing. And most certainly something I don’t fully understand. But, in dreaming, I believe we feel we have a purpose. And I believe there is a force out there that draws us, even pushes us toward our ‘personal legend’ (check out The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho).

In my pursuit of ‘becoming’, there has been a strong sense of belief, matched by an equally strong sense of doubt. To the point of putting down the guitar for close to 3 years. Ps. That’s a long time.

Yet even in those 3 years, I couldn’t shake the dream inside of me to create. The nudge. Something from within. Calling me, to be me. I just kept looking for happiness, hope, and fulfillment anywhere I could find it. But I was left frustrated with a life that didn’t fit the ‘who’ inside me.

As you go, more and more you find that it’s not the plans you make, or even the decisions. It’s the falling down. It’s the getting back up. And it’s the people you meet along the way who shape your life, shape your soul and lead you to the unexpected places you never could have guessed you wanted to go.

This album is a journey walked through relationships. It is a collection of conversations that have helped me feel – inspired, numb, angered, and hopeful.

It is a landscape of the beauty of raw emotions. I didn’t get the overnight storybook success I dreamed of as a kid. Instead, I lived, I grew up, and I took all the successes and failures and, most importantly, people that come with that. It hasn’t always been easy, it hasn’t always been fun, but every step and every scrape has brought me here and made me who I am. On the Mend is a product of a real life… one that I am better for having lived.