Shawn Camp, a country singer and songwriter, grew up on a farm near Perryville, Arkansas, where his father worked as an ironworker and his mother as a beautician. Their shared habit of singing and playing guitar sparked his early passion for music, prompting him to pick up the instrument himself at age five. He relocated to Nashville in January 1987 at twenty years old with the aim of establishing himself as a professional musician. His first role came as a fiddler with the Osborne Brothers, after which he joined the touring ensembles behind Jerry Reed, Alan Jackson, Suzy Bogguss, Shelby Lynne, and Trisha Yearwood. He stepped away from Yearwood’s band in 1991 to pursue a solo career. Reprise Records, a Warner Bros. imprint, signed him and issued his debut single, “Fallin’ Never Felt So Good,” in 1993; the track entered the country charts in July and reached the Top 40 by October. That same month the label put out his self-titled debut album, Shawn Camp, which remained on the country charts for several weeks. Follow-up single “Confessin’ My Love” also climbed into the country Top 40 in January 1994.
Reprise recorded a second album yet ultimately rejected the project and released Camp from his contract. He subsequently earned his living as a session musician, contributing to recordings by John Prine, Garth Brooks, Nanci Griffith, and Guy Clark, among many others, throughout the remainder of the decade. During those same years he co-wrote material that found its way to Diamond Rio, Tracy Byrd, Kenny Chesney, John Anderson, and Randy Travis. Among those songs, “Two Pina Coladas,” co-written for Garth Brooks’ Sevens album, ascended to number one on the country charts in May 1998, while “How Long Gone,” co-written for Brooks & Dunn, reached the same peak in September 1998. Camp independently released his second album, Lucky Silver Dollar, in July 2001. Subsequent projects included Live at the Station Inn in 2004, Fireball in 2006, and The Bluegrass Elvises, Vol. 1, recorded with Billy Burnette in 2007. In 2009, Warner Music Nashville President/CEO John Esposito heard Camp perform at a guitar pull during a music conference and was immediately impressed. Learning that the label still held the unreleased second album in its archives, Esposito arranged for its release in 2010 under the title 1994, timed to accompany a reissue of the 1993 Reprise debut.
