Haddonfield NJ country musician back on track thanks to Rascal Flatts
Craig Whitaker’s love of music was there the whole time. It had never left him.
But a concert in Camden seven years ago proved a life-altering experience that helped the Haddonfield native reignite that passion.
“I went to see a Rascal Flatts show just for fun,” Whitaker recalled of the August 2015 concert. “I was a huge fan. I was sitting on the lawn. Some guy gave me these pit seats. I’m 50 or 25 feet from the stage. They come out and it’s a master class in live performance. The songs were incredible.”
Whitaker had been living in Burlington County, but moved back to his hometown in 2014 with his two boys in tow. And while he was happy in his role of being a father — his sons are now 8 and 12 — and working as a 3D visual effects artist, music was deep in his blood.
The country singer-songwriter recently released a single titled “Porch Light,” a product of writing sessions with Kevin Rooney, a Nashville-based producer and writer, who has worked with Rascal Flatts and many others.
“A big aha moment was the Garth Brooks concert in Central Park (in August of 1997),” Whitaker says. “It was like a million people and he’s singing these really heartfelt, meaningful songs. He had the big stage, the lights, the video and the pyro. It was incredible but the material was good. It was real songs about life, and love, real stuff. I’m like you can do both of these things.
“Fast forward all these years later with Rascal Flatts and I’m like these guys are doing what he was doing. I want to do this. It made me get off my (butt). I said I’m going to start writing again and making music again and it’s going to be with these guys. Everybody told me I was nuts. They were wrong.”
Persistence pays off for South Jersey singer-songwriter
After the show, Whitaker found the email of Rascal Flatts’ drummer Jim Riley and reached out to him. Riley didn’t email back, so he waited another few months and reached out again.
“He wrote me back a day later and was like, ‘This sounds cool, tell me all about it’. I write him back, never hear from him. I was like third time’s a charm. I was going to give it one more shot. I waited months and messaged him again.”
Riley wrote back immediately and Whitaker gave him the whole spiel again about some of his music and songs he was writing. This time, Riley asked him to share a song or two.
“I called my best friend Dave (DeLizza). He was like, ‘Hey, man this is great, but you don’t have any songs to send him.’ … I hurry up and write a handful of tunes. They ended up being the four that are on my EP. His debut EP, released in 2019, is titled 'Here and California.'
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Whitaker began working with Riley on one of those tunes.
"(Riley) puts together this incredible band. He gets like Taylor Swift’s bass player, Keith Urban’s piano player. He gets Travis Toy to play banjo … He puts this all-star band together to play all these songs. One song turns into two, which turns into four, which turns into me going down to Nashville and recording these songs. That was in 2019. “
There was talk about Whitaker opening up for Rascal Flatts, and doing some summer shows. Then, two months later the COVID-19 pandemic hit and “the whole world shuts down, Rascal Flatts breaks up and the whole thing goes into the toilet and disappears into the air.”
Once things began reopening, Riley emailed Whitaker asking if he wanted to take another run at working together.
“He said ‘I’d love to start working with you again,’‘’ Whitaker shared. “I said that’ll be great. He set up these things called writes. They’re like writing sessions and they’re three hours and you go and you write a song. It’s how the city of Nashville operates. I went down for a week for some writes. I did a write with Kevin Rooney, who is in the Rascal Flatts camp.
"Porch Light" was a product of one of those writing sessions with Rooney.
The two met, but instead of writing, Whitaker and Rooney, who was about to become a first-time dad, chatted for three hours about life and fatherhood.
Determined not to leave empty-handed, Whitaker returned to his hotel room and set to work.
"I wrote 'Porch Light' in like an hour and I went back to the studio the next day and I was like, ‘Hey man, I wrote this last night, what do you think?’ He said this is really cool. We collaborated for an hour or two, made a little demo, ended up recording it.”
‘I’m an 80s kid from New Jersey’
Whitaker's dad had a drafting table with an old wooden T-Square. When he was just 6 or 7, influenced by videos he saw on MTV, he’d pretend to play the T-square like an electric guitar and dance around the house to Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, Poison and other '80s hair bands. All seemed to have wild hair.
“I’m an 80s kid from New Jersey,” Whitaker said with a laugh.
He played soccer, baseball and swam at Haddonfield High School (Class of 1996) so it wasn’t until his sophomore or junior year he began to really link up with music. A buddy invited him over to hang out and pulled out an electric guitar and started playing it.
“It was like a scene from a movie,” said Whitaker, who taught himself to play guitar and drums. “I was like wait, what’s this? I picked up a guitar that next weekend and I never stopped. It just totally took over my life.”
After attending Penn State as a freshman and later graduating from Rowan University with a degree in communications, Whitaker was in a band, Quick Step John, for about 12 years. The band was assembled from Mars Music, a Cherry Hill music store where they all worked.
Whitaker had been writing songs and playing solo acoustic from the ages of about 18 to 21. He would play anywhere and everywhere.
“It’s really where I cut my teeth, learned how to perform,” he shared. “... I met a drummer who worked in the drum department, a piano player who worked in the keyboard department, a bass player who worked in the bass department. I got a couple of tunes."
A demo eventually made its way to a talent buyer for Clear Channel Entertainment, Whitaker said.
“We went from playing in my kitchen to the Electric Factory. We did the Y100 Festival, TLA (Theater of the Living Arts), The Tweeter Center in Camden. In 2003, this guy put us on as the opening act for Matchbox Twenty at the Spectrum. It kind of exploded over a couple of years.”
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By 2007, Whitaker had stopped being an active musician. Then in 2010 he became a dad for the first time and his music career was put on hold by choice. His son was born 10 weeks premature and they were in the hospital for weeks with him.
“Making breakfast every day, I’d walk him to school every day,” said Whitaker, who always wanted to be a dad. “Do his homework with him. I coached his sports team. There was nothing that was going to be more important than that.”
While his sons are his world, he said music came calling again, thanks to that concert in 2015.
An upcoming gig at The Feed Mill in Medford
Whitaker will perform on Sept. 17 at The Feed Mill in Medford as he helps King’s Road Brewing Company celebrate the anniversary of opening its second location. The first location is in Haddonfield.
"It’s going to be a good time. It’s also going to be the first time I’ve performed these songs with a full band. I’ve always done it with an acoustic guitar. Owners of King’s Road are from Haddonfield and the owner of Whole Hog is also from Haddonfield, Chris (Maynes). They’re just great people.”
Whittaker's new single “Porch Light” is on streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL and YouTube added it to country’s new crop playlist, he said.
“Streaming plays are doing great,” he added. “It feels really good to connect it. That’s really what it is. It’s about somebody listening to it, understanding and connecting with it. It means something to somebody to else.
“‘Porch Light’ is about wanting be around the people that mean the most to you. I love being home, I love being with my kids, I love being a dad …The hook of the song is, ‘You keep the porch light on for me’. The way it’s written, it’s about a man thinking about the woman that’s keeping the porch light on at home.
"I’m absolutely a small town, home kind of guy,'' he said. "There’s a song on my first EP called ‘Back Home’. It’s about moving back home, the comfort of being here. It’s a very different town than when I grew up, but it’s that familiarity of all the people you know. It’s like ‘Cheers’.”
Celeste E. Whittaker is a features reporter for the Courier Post, Daily Journal and Burlington County Times. The South Jersey native started at the CP in 1998 and has covered the Philadelphia 76ers, college and high school sports and has won numerous awards for her work. Reach her by email at cwhittaker@gannettnj.com. Follow her on Twitter at @cp_CWhittaker.
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This article originally appeared on Cherry Hill Courier-Post: Craig Whitaker to appear at Sea.Hear.Now festival in Asbury Park
