Dream Coming True For Mandy Barnett

Nashville music veteran Mandy Barnett, 22, may have appeared pretty gutsy earlier this year when she asked out of her Asylum Records contract, but she says her voluntary exit seemed preferable to the alternative.

“It’s better than getting dropped,” she notes with a brief laugh.

The highly gifted vocalist - who as a teenager wowed two seasons of audiences at the historic Ryman Auditorium in the musical drama “Always, Patsy Cline” - almost immediately was signed by Sire Records in Los Angeles, and her progress toward national acclaim appears to be continuing apace.

With Sire, she is fulfilling a dream she says she has had for a long time: to make a record with Cline’s producer, Owen Bradley.

“Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve always known who Owen Bradley was, because the people I listened to - like Brenda Lee, Patsy Cline, Webb Pierce and Conway (Twitty) and Loretta (Lynn) - he produced all those people,” she explains.

When Sire boss Seymour Stein - who had become aware of Barnett when she was involved in the making of a movie soundtrack - offered her a contract a month or two after her departure from Asylum, she asked Stein about the possibility of recording an album with Bradley. She says Stein not only thought it was a great idea, he even called Bradley himself.

So far, she and Bradley have recorded four tracks, she says. All four were slow ones “because we did our string sessions first.”

“I feel like this is one of the first times I’ve really been captured on tape singing the best I can,” Barnett says. “I guess it was just the combination of being in the studio with Owen and all these great players and the strings. It was really, really exciting.”