"Country music was on the radio in the truck, on the tractor, in the barn," he says. "Whatever was happening--if we were stripping tobacco, there was a radio with country music. I remember Daddy planting beans, and me riding on the fender of our John Deere tractor, holding on with an arm around that radio."

Like so much else about his young life, his musical tastes were based on the influences of his mom, dad and extended family.

"Music was just always around. I don't remember music not being around, to tell you the truth. I can't remember not singing."

In Nashville, Brice started hanging out with a group of similarly minded young singer-songwriters, finishing college at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro and eventually getting his foot in the door with an internship in the publishing division of Reba McEntire's Starstruck Entertainment company. His internship job involved "making tape copies, hanging out and getting to meet all the writers." One of those writers was another Nashville hopeful named Darryl Worley, still several years away from his smash hit "Have You Forgotten." Darryl gave Brice a place to sleep on the couch in the apartment he shared with another aspiring songwriter, where Brice later became a full-fledged roommate when the other writer moved out. He and Darryl remained roommates for seven years, until 2004.

His reputation as a writer grew and Music Row started to take notice as John Michael Montgomery, Josh Turner, Randy Travis and others put their imprint on tunes he had written. Gary Allan turned "Nothing On But the Radio" into Brice’s first cut to reach #1 on the charts. Currently Randy Houser is taking Brice’s “Anything Goes” up the charts.

"I've learned, especially from writing songs, that you have to live and you have to love to really touch people," he continues. "You have to take a shot; you have to take a chance at just about everything that comes along. Because if you don't, when it's all over, you look back and say, 'I wish I'd done that,' or 'I wish I had just called her' or 'I wish I'd gone swimming that day.' All those things come together to develop a life, and that's where great songs come from."

The way he was raised, says Brice, "taught me if you were gonna do something, it was gonna take a lot of work, and the only way to get it done is to do it. Get in there and roll up your sleeves and get after it.

"This business is that way -- no matter how tough it gets, you stick with the job until you get done. No matter how hot it was out there in the tobacco patch, you couldn't quit; that was just something you couldn't do. You had to keep going until you got it done.

"I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse," he says with a smile. "But maybe I'm just hard headed enough to have to prove to somebody that, 'You know what? This is what I wanna do.'" He pauses. "And this is what I'm gonna do."