Pete Wasner

His recording credits go back to 1979, on records by Gene Parsons and Greg Harris, and in 1985 he played on Byron Berline and Sundance’s Fiddler’s Dream. From the late 1980s he worked on country records: Kathy Mattea’s Untasted Honey (1987), Vince Gill’s When I Call Your Name (1989), Pocket Full of Gold (1991) and I Still Believe in You (1992), Hal Ketchum’s Sure Love (1992) and Iris DeMent’s Infamous Angel (1992), on which he played piano. His bluegrass and acoustic work includes Alison Krauss’s I’ve Got That Old Feeling (1990), Tim O’Brien’s Odd Man In (1991), Keith Whitley: A Tribute Album (1994) and Earl Scruggs and Friends (2001).

As a songwriter he worked mostly with Gill. “Don’t Let Our Love Start Slippin’ Away,” the second single from I Still Believe in You, was released in October 1992 and reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart and on Canada’s RPM country chart; the same album has their “Say Hello.” “Whenever You Come Around,” on which Wasner also played keyboards, was the first single from When Love Finds You in April 1994 and reached No. 2; Willie Nelson recorded it in 2014 on Band of Brothers. With Charles John Quarto he wrote Hal Ketchum’s “Mama Knows the Highway,” a No. 8 country hit in 1993, and “Ghost Town” on the same album, and with Gary Burr he wrote “One Night a Day,” a No. 7 hit for Garth Brooks in 1994 from In Pieces.