Five years ago, Donny Van Slee came to Nashville with a chiropractic degree, a love for classic rock and no real expectation that music would become his full-time pursuit. Since then, he’s cut his teeth on Broadway, landed on The Voice with Reba McEntire, paid off roughly $150,000 in student loans and ultimately walked away from chiropractic to bet on himself.
Now, a year into that bet, he’s preparing to release Some Times Are Just Hard, a largely self-produced album that drops November 13 and represents a new chapter both personally and musically. We caught up with him about the unlikely road to Nashville, The Voice, teaching himself to produce and why he finally decided to go all-in on music.
RR: You grew up in Weeki Wachee, Florida. How did you first get into playing music?
Donny: I got my start playing music around that area, playing up and down the coast. Eventually, I went to chiropractic school in Daytona Beach, and I thought I was going to stop doing music.
Then there was this one night at an Applebee’s where my buddy and I were hanging out. Somehow, he got me to grab my guitar from the car, and I ended up playing “American Pie” for everybody. We got all of our stuff paid for, and there was a guy there who owned a bar. He hired me to play at his place.
I was already about a year into chiropractic school at that point. I thought I wasn’t going to do music anymore, and then that happened. It kind of reignited everything. Before long, I was playing three shows a week again.
RR: So how does a chiropractic student in Florida end up playing on Broadway in Nashville?
Donny: I was driving from Florida to Colorado to do my last quarter of chiropractic school. I passed through Nashville, got off the interstate and saw Broadway. I really had no idea what Nashville meant other than music, and it completely blew my mind.
When I got to Colorado, I emailed a bunch of places in Nashville, and Tootsie’s got back to me. They scheduled an audition for when I was driving back to Florida to graduate.
I thought I was going to play my guitar in a back room and sing somebody a song. I get there, the place is completely packed and there’s a band playing. The guy pulls me aside and goes, “So what are you gonna sing?” I said, “I don’t know.” He goes, “You better figure it out.”
Then he gets the guy off the stage and throws me up there. I played one song and that was it. He hired me. About a week later he called and said, “I need you here now. I’ll give you a place to stay. I’ll give you a band. I’ll give you everything you need.”
So I packed my stuff and moved to Nashville.
RR: At that point, you’re balancing Broadway with becoming a chiropractor. What were those first few years like?
Donny: It was crazy because I wasn’t even brought up on country. I’m from Florida, and I grew up on classic rock. Led Zeppelin is my favorite. The Who, Pink Floyd, Tom Petty, Boston, Foreigner, REO Speedwagon. That was my stuff.
So when I got to Nashville, I’m learning like 10 country songs a week while also studying for the last part of my chiropractic boards.
I ended up getting my license and working as an associate chiropractor while I played music. I had about $150,000 in student loans, and I wanted to get rid of that before I made any crazy decisions.
I found this detached garage on Facebook Marketplace, and I’ve been living there for about five years. I did my laundry at the laundromat. I cooked on an induction stovetop I bought off Amazon. I drove a piece-of-crap car. I lived so below my means.
Basically, I put my chiropractic money toward my loans and lived off the money I made playing music.
RR: Somewhere in the middle of all that, The Voice comes along. How did that happen?
Donny: I got this random email asking if I could send in some videos. I thought it was fake. I sent them in anyway, and they said, “Yeah, we like it. We’ll let you know.”
Six months go by, then they want to do an interview. More time goes by, then they fly me out. Eventually, I get on Reba’s team.
The coolest part about the whole thing was honestly the jam sessions with the other contestants. Everybody was so good and so different. Somebody would say, “Hey, so-and-so is having a jam in their room,” and everybody would go over there and play.
Reba put me up against Josh Sanders, who ended up coming in second, so he kicked my butt. I got out pretty soon after making her team, but I had such a good experience. I didn’t think I was going to win the thing. I was just happy to be there.
It gave me confidence, too. It was like, “Man, Reba believes in me. I think I should believe in myself, too.”
RR: You eventually paid off the loans and walked away from chiropractic. Was there a point where you knew you had to give music a real shot?
Donny: Once I paid the loans off, I quit my job. It’s actually been exactly a year today.
I’m 33. I’m single. I don’t really have anyone depending on me. I could call my old boss and say, “Hey, I want to work again,” and he’d probably say, “All right, you’re back.”
So it’s like, what do you do? Do I go back home, be with my family and be a chiropractor? Do I stay in chiropractic, save money and buy a house? Is that the responsible thing to do?
Maybe it’s irresponsible to quit your job at this age and just go for it, but at this point, it’s like, man, you only live once.
So that’s what I decided to do. I took this year and made an album.
RR: You also taught yourself to produce and ended up producing most of Some Times Are Just Hard. What made you want to take that on yourself?
Donny: I’ve put out around 40 songs and worked with probably six or seven producers, and they’re all great. But I got to this point where I was like, “Maybe I could figure out how to do this myself.”
So I posted up in the corner of a coffee shop for like two weeks and literally typed in how to use Logic.
Then I went on Facebook Marketplace, found a Focusrite and started figuring it out. I bought an eight-channel input so I could record drums. I’d get musicians together, record things and just start putting them together.
I’ve produced seven songs on this album myself. That’s why it’s taken me pretty much a whole year to do 10 or 12 songs. I’ve been learning how to produce while making the record.
But doing this made me realize that being a recording artist is something I want to do for the rest of my life. There are so many songs to write and so many different ways to make music. I’ve been listening to a lot of Watchhouse lately, and their music is so tasteful. Then you listen to somebody like Chris Stapleton and there’s so much soul. I want to be able to explore all of that.
RR: Why did Some Times Are Just Hard become the title of the album?
Donny: That song means the most to me.
I’m part of this Nashville roster of songwriters where companies will come in for team-building exercises and write a song with a Nashville songwriter. One day, they called me and said, “We don’t have a company today. We have this kid. He wants to write a song.”
I got in the room with him and asked, “What do you want to write about?” He said, “I have no idea.” So I asked him something he had learned about recently, and he said, “Hard times.”
He told me about falling off a horse at a rodeo in Texas, breaking his arm and waking up with a blue cast. So we started writing about that.
After we recorded it, his mom told me it was really cool that he was singing about this stuff because that wasn’t actually what he was going through. Then she told me what he was really dealing with, and I was like, “Oh my gosh.”
I asked his dad if I could get his number and finish the song with him. We ended up Zooming a couple more times and finished it together.
I sing about all different kinds of things on this album, but that song just means the most to me. It hits me the hardest, so I went with that as the title.
Now I’ve got the album coming, my first country festival coming up, and I’m five years into Nashville. They call it a 10-year town, so I’m basically throwing my hands up and saying, “All right, I’ll give it another five.”
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Some Times Are Just Hard will arrive on November 13 and is available for pre-order here. You can also catch Van Slee live at the St. Pete Country Fest on November 21.