DaytonDailyNews.com

Little Texas may have disbanded in 1997, but it never really went away.

During the band's hiatus, Hamilton native and founding drummer Del Gray went to work as a staff writer for Charlie Daniels' publishing company, writing songs for Trace Adkins, Collin Raye, Gretchen Wilson and others.

"Fortunately, we all had some success," he said in a phone interview from Nashville. "And we kept in touch with each other."

In 2004 they saw a survey that rated Little Texas as one of the top 40 acts in country music, even though its previous album of new material was seven years old.

"We knew it was still there, and the name still had some weight to it," he said. "So we booked 90 shows to see what kind of reaction we would get."

And it was good — good enough that they recorded some shows to make a concert CD, "Live and Loud (The Very Best of Little Texas)," which was released in May as a precursor to next week's release of "The Missing Years."

"We knew that when we started getting back together again that we'd have some explaining to do," Gray said. "So I had the idea to write a song for people who wanted to know what we've been doing. We all stayed in the business, but we were in the background since 1997. I wanted to write a song about how we were just hanging out at the beach or whatever, but it quickly became a song about our hometowns.

"Hometowns are something people want to get out of," he said. "But the thing we get away from is often the very thing that ends up missing in our lives."

While the place references in the title track are fictional, the idea behind them are the places in Hamilton that he remembers from his growing up.

Gray moved to Nashville in 1986 with Fairfield native Brady Seals to pursue a career in music. During a two-week stint at the Massachusetts State Fair in a backing band for country singer Josh Logan, they met the other members of the band that would become Little Texas.

First performing as a show band called the Varsities, the group worked up material for Warner Bros. Records.

Eventually, the label released a single, "Some Guys Have All The Love" in 1991, which became Top 10, as did the follow-up, "First Time for Everything."

Seals left the band in 1994 to pursue a solo career, and the current lineup has Porter Howell taking over lead vocal duties for the absent Tim Rushlow, with Dwayne O'Brien and Duane Propes on guitar and bass, respectively.

Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.