In spring 1980, a makeshift group of students at what was then Nashville’s Belmont College performed a version of Boz Scaggs‘ driving “Breakdown Dead Ahead,” with the 19-year-old guitarist ripping through Steve Lukather‘s original solo like he did it in his sleep.
That 19-year-old was Dann Huff, who — before the decade was over — would become a significant Los Angeles session player, working on recordings by Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. He would also become the frontman for rock band Giant, but ultimately returned to his native Nashville, where he emerged as one of the most significant country producers of the last 25 years, playing a key role in the careers of Keith Urban, Rascal Flatts, Thomas Rhett and Kane Brown, to name just a few.
On May 30, Huff quietly released an independent guitar album, When Words Aren’t Enough, that returned him to his musical foundations. But the album —stripped entirely of any lyrical content — also provides an insightful guide into the skill set and core principles that vaulted him to his role in the country world, where he has been nominated 41 times for Country Music Association Awards, winning three musician of the year trophies and two as producer of the single of the year, Rhett’s “Die a Happy Man” and Urban’s “Blue Ain’t Your Color.”
“I heard this great statement the other day,” Huff says, looking back on the germination of Words. “In essence, the phrase was, ‘You’re trying to recognize your own soul through your art.’ And I just thought, ‘Oh, man.’ I was trying to recognize myself again, to see if I could recognize myself again.”
When Words Aren’t Enough reconnected Huff to the spirit in a string of instrumental (or mostly instrumental) albums that spun regularly on his turntable during his teen years. There was George Benson‘s Breezin’, received as a Christmas gift; projects by Nashville-based Barefoot Jerry and Georgia fusion band The Dixie Dregs; and guitar albums by Larry Carlton, Al DiMeola, Lee Ritenour and Jeff Beck, whose mid-’70s releases Blow by Blow and Wired were must-haves for many guitar wannabes in the era. Huff, of course, was the real deal, and he picked up a valuable lesson from Beck.
“What inspired me about him was that he wasn’t writing music or recording music that basically was an excuse to play a solo,” Huff explains. “It was predicated on melody. The melody was everything. It wasn’t an excuse to show off.”
Huff launched into Words while testing an amp at his home studio in early 2024. He grabbed some grooves he had created on his computer and began playing to them. Over the course of a couple of hours, he would end up with a fully formed song that he would label No. 1, No. 2, etc., until he had a full album’s worth of material. Initially, he planned to record them with a large cadre of session musicians he works with regularly, but drummer Jerry Roe and bassist Mark Hill connected with the material so deeply that they knocked out the core tracks in just a few days.
Huff renamed those files before their release, titling them with descriptors that fit the mood, such as “Colorado Creepin’,” “Indefatigable Strut,” “Giant Free Fall” or “Southern Synchronicity.”
“Who the hell knows what you’re ever really trying to say in music,” he says rhetorically. “Especially with instrumental music.”
That points to one of the key tenets in Huff’s productions that’s detectable in When Words Aren’t Enough. He’s a “music first” guy in a genre where lyrics often dominate. But because he picks up on the sound of a song before the story hits home, he’s frequently connecting beneath the surface, recognizing the implicit feelings underneath the piece’s verbal cues.
“That’s the beauty of working with Dann,” Ashley Cooke says. “He’s such a ‘feel’ guy.”
Some other basic Huff traits are also evident in his new project. Even when the songs become adventurous, he’s careful to establish the basic melodic structure in the beginning, giving the listener a home base even as the music stretches out. The musicians are always working together as a unit — even though it’s a guitar album, the instrument doesn’t hog the spotlight. Additionally, there’s always an element of surprise: an unexpected chord, a change in instrumental textures or even a whole new melodic section.
He is, as an instrumental soloist, the same guy who has overseen bundles of country hits and graced some old-school pop tracks.
“You can’t get away from yourself,” he says. “That’s the thing. I’m the same person in the derivations of all this stuff.”
When Words Aren’t Enough comes at a time when Huff, 64, is contemplating how he wants to spend the rest of his life. He intends to keep producing as long as there’s a market for his services, but returning to the spotlight is intriguing. At the urging of his musical peers, he expects to do some Nashville shows in the coming months, and he’s open to touring, too, if the interest is there.
Ultimately, he seems intent on digging into music that connects at the soul level in whatever format makes sense. The future is wide open since he doesn’t have much left to prove. But he does have a better understanding of what his 19-year-old self was intuiting from those Beck albums: His technique is only a tool to help convey something deeper, even if he lacks the words to explain it.
“I used to play 12 hours a day,” he recalls. “That was it for decades, you know. For the last quarter of a century, I play guitar, but only in brief moments. I still know how to ride the bike.”
