Some people enviably know right away what they want to to do for the rest of their lives. Bill Gates is famously credited with building his career without needing a college degree. Chris Cagle has a similar story; after an early start with music, he took the express route to a recording studio, which is where he made his mark on the country music scene.

Chris Cagle: Country Star on the Verge

"I tried to make music that was better without necessarily making it different because I love the music that I made in the past."

Some people enviably know right away what they want to to do for the rest of their lives. Bill Gates is famously credited with building his career without needing a college degree. Chris Cagle has a similar story; after an early start with music, he took the express route to a recording studio, which is where he made his mark on the country music scene.

Chris Cagle, Meet Country Music

Born Christopher Cagle in DeRidder, Louisiana on November 10, 1968, he spent much of his childhood and pre-music career life in Texas. While a high school student in Baytown, he learned to play the piano before leaving the ivory for a guitar later on. After high school, he briefly attended the University of Texas at Arlington before dropping out, realizing at 19 that music was his calling.

Nashville became his new home in 1994, and he worked odd jobs all around the area as he honed his songwriting skills. It was around that time that he met Country Music Hall of Fame inductee Harlan Howard, who helped sharpen Cagle's craft. He would go on to be the first publisher for Cagle's songs.

Fate came knocking when he met Donna Duarte at a restaurant where he was working, and she invited him to record a few demos. She got them to the desk of her boss - Scott Hendricks, then the head of Virgin Records Nashville - who then promptly signed Cagle on to the label. It was 2000, and Chris Cagle was on his way to country music stardom.

Chris Cagle: Country Music Man

His debut album Play It Loud came out later that year, and it did very well fueled by its singles My Love Goes On and On and Laredo. The shuttering of Virgin in 2001 and his subsequent transfer to Capitol Nashville did little to dampen sales. Capitol's reissue of the album with an added track, I Breathe In, I Breathe Out, pushed the album to gold status.

A self-titled album came as his sophomore effort in 2003, and it performed just as well. Singles Chicks Dig It and What a Beautiful Day were ranked in the top 5 country songs of the time by Billboard, and I'd Be Lying had solid numbers on the charts. Anywhere But Here from 2005 followed the footsteps of Cagle's previous albums, with Miss Me Baby scoring a #12 peak position on country music charts.

The single What Kinda Gone hit the airwaves the next year. It went on to become the lead single for Cagle's next album, My Life's Been a Country Song, which arrived on shelves in February 2008. By the next year, however, Cagle was no longer on the Capitol roster.

Did You Know That...

• ...Duarte's meeting with Cagle was truly a stroke of luck? He wasn't even aware that she worked for Hendricks when they met.
• ...medical conditions couldn't keep him from the scene for long? In 2004, after the release of Chris Cagle, multiple abnormalities - a polyp and a lesion, among others - were found on his vocal cords. After three months, however, he was back on his feet working on Anywhere But Here.

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