GTCC lays down the beat
It's from Guilford Technical Community College. Yep, the students themselves wrote, recorded and are now distributing their first album.
Teacher Mark Dillon says it might not be such a surprise if you saw their classrooms.
'You wouldn't believe this is a community college. It's crazy how much facilities we have,' Dillon said. 'Our students recorded all the tracks and then mixed all the tracks.'
Ally Young is one of them. She began taking piano lessons when she was five and even considered majoring in musical performance when she went to college.
But life took her in other directions until she found the program at GTCC. Now at 32, she's part of the album with a song she wrote called 'Wolf Song.'
'This is something I have dealt with as an adult, and a lot of my female friends have dealt with … I got angry and decided to write a song about it,' Young said.
She believes women are often not believed when they say something happened to them. Young not only wrote and sang the song, but she also played keyboards for some of her classmates' songs.
Dillon says this is far from a vanity project.
'A lot of them will walk away with studio credits. A lot of them will walk away with recording engineering credits, which is valuable in the field. If you can walk into a studio and say, 'This is what I've done. I have credits. They're listed and everything. I'm available on Spotify and Amazon,' that carries weight out in the field,' Dillon said. 'Students who probably wouldn't work together under different circumstances are now clearly back there hanging out and doing their thing. They're literally back there plotting their next album.'
Hear some of the songs in this edition of The Buckley Report.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Drummergeddon 2025: Why We're Witnessing a Global Percussion Apocalypse
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