Phil Vassar opens season at Hemmens Cultural Center

The Hemmens Cultural Center kicks off the 2007-08 season as they welcome country singer and songwriter Phil Vassar back to the stage with two shows.

First, he will wow the audience at 8 p.m. Friday with his "man and a piano" solo show that sold out last season. Vassar will return with his full band on Saturday.

The performances come on the heels of Vassar's appearance in his native Virginia along with the Dave Matthews Band, John Mayer and Nas at "A Concert for Virginia Tech" on Sept. 6, an event designed to help the Virginia Tech community move forward after the April murders on the Blacksburg campus.

His new album, "Greatest Hits, Volume 1," is a career-spanning collection of 15 songs that paints a complete portrait of Vassa as an artist, singer, songwriter and entertainer.

Vassar moved to Nashville, Tenn., from his hometown of Lynchburg, Va. hoping to make a name for himself as a singer. But songwriting proved to be his calling card -- the key that opened doors and earned him the recognition of the industry and his peers in the latter half of the 1990s.

He got his moment in the spotlight a couple years later. Signed to Arista Nashville, he recorded the first of three albums, and for the first time country radio listeners and fans got to hear his voice deliver the lyrics and melodies he wrote.

On "Greatest Hits, Volume 1," Vassar reconnects with those songs that first made a name for him in Music City USA. Songs made famous by Tim McGraw, Alan Jackson, Jo Dee Messina and others. But for the first time on CD, you can hear them the way they were originally written and conceived.

Songs like "My Next Thirty Years" and "For a Little While" (originally recorded by Tim McGraw) are stories of a man who's looking ahead while also taking a moment to reflect on his life. In the first, he contemplates a marker in his life -- his 30th birthday -- and looks to a future filled with a little less reckless abandon than his youth. In the latter song, that youth is celebrated for the freedom and fun it embodied.

Tickets are on sale now at the Hemmens box office, 45 Symphony Way, Elgin. To order by phone, call (847) 931-5900 or order online at www.hemmens.org.