The Hit Men of Music Row to Air on GAC

What do you get when you take four guys with 38 #1 songs, over 150 million records sold, numerous awards and a long lasting friendship? You get The Hitmen of Music Row. Songwriters Tony Mullins, Bob DiPiero, Jeffrey Steele and Craig Wiseman have been writing hits and shaping the face of Country music for nearly 25 years. Now the four friends are taking their antics on the road and to viewers nationwide.

In the Fall of 2007, their new reality TV show, The Hitmen of Music Row, will air on GAC (Great American Country), chronicling the writing sessions, studio recording, writer nights and whatever trouble they can get themselves into.

From TonyMullinsSongs.com:

Kicking off the third CMA songwriters Series at Joe's Pub, Bob DiPiero said he and fellow panelists Tony Mullins, Jeffrey Steele and Craig Wiseman will be featured in a new GAC reality series slated for the fall [2007].

"So many shows have tried to depict what songwriters do and end up with two guys in a room scratching their heads," he said, noting that "the actual method of songwriting is pretty boring: You're just sitting there trying to invent stuff, and there's lots of silence."

So the guys have been out filming "everything leading up to sitting in that room." In New York it was "driving around in a bus and writing stuff while going to Strawberry Fields in Central Park, having lunch in an Indian restaurant and going to a magic store. It was like inmates running the asylum!"

The Joe's Pub show certainly was crazy, with the guys constantly cutting up—and the raucous crowd eating it up.

"It was like an energy field," said DiPiero (introduced by Wiseman as "the original Big and Rich").

But there was a moving moment when Steele spoke of the recent loss of his young son Alex prior to singing his Rascal Flatts' hit "What Hurts the Most."

"It was such a shattering event," said DiPiero. "The song is about losing somebody in a relationship, but as Jeff said, you don’t know how much impact a song has on somebody until it takes on a new meaning." Calling the foursome "a band of brothers," he added: "In one song we went from a frat party to something deep and meaningful, and that's all you can hope for—to crank out real emotion and have people respond. Hopefully that's what people will see in the [GAC] show."