The great American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that there were no second acts in American lives – that, essentially, once you’ve failed at something, you don’t get another try.
Then again, maybe you just need to get away and do something else for a while before taking a second shot. That’s what happened, anyway, with Logan Mac, the Oklahoma-based singer-songwriter who’s been putting together a pretty dandy second act for himself over the past couple of years, ever since an ode to his late father called “Dance Under Stars” went viral on TikTok. Earlier this year, his first album, Til’ the Ground, racked up half a million streams within the first month of its release, and he’s not only got an impressive slate of American appearances lined up, but a British tour scheduled as well.
This all happened after a first act that found him making a run at Nashville more than a decade ago, only to return to his hometown of Purcell, frustrated and unsuccessful. As far as he was concerned, that was it for his dream of country-music stardom.
“There were probably about 10 years when I didn’t even pick up my guitar. And this is an awful way to put it,” he says, chuckling, “but you know when you tell all your friends that you’re going to lose weight, and you’re working out – and then you fall off the wagon and you don’t want to be around those friends any more? That’s kind of how music was for me.”
He’d hit Nashville right out of high school, supporting himself by doing plumbing work during the day and playing the clubs at night.
“Then,” he says, “I realized I was doing the same thing I’d been doing in Oklahoma, these little three-hour sets of cover songs. I was just doing it on one street instead of driving all over Oklahoma. I got to where I was really fed up with that process because, man, I wasn’t there [in Nashville] for what I thought I was going to be there for.”
Instead of writing his own material, he was singing songs by others. But then again, he wasn’t doing much writing on his own, and he seemed unable to connect with other, established writers. A lot of the reason for that, he believes, was his youth.
“I really didn’t have anything to write about,” he says. “I was still wet behind the ears, and I had no clue. What are you supposed to write about when you’re 18? Drinkin’ when you’re not old enough? Falling in love when you’ve never had a girlfriend?
“Honestly, at that age, I was just leaning on a shovel, waiting for a hole. I didn’t have the grit yet to start digging a hole and writing my own music.”
So, when a young woman he was interested in back home wrote him, suggesting she “might think about” dating him if he returned and “got a real job,” that was enough to propel him away from his Nashville dreams.
“Three days later,” he recalls, “I came back, got a job in the oilfield, and started working. The second I got that job, she was like, ‘Hey, you want to go out to dinner?’ Sixteen years later, we’ve got three babies and a house.
“I loved music, but I fell out of love with it and fell in love with my wife. And I wanted to be the dad, the superdad, So I just cold-turkey quit [music]. Really, I didn’t start picking it back up until COVID. We had a lot of alone time in the world then, and I realized that my kids thought it was really cool that Daddy could play the guitar; all of a sudden, it was the entertainment in our house. So I started making up songs for ‘em. I’d sit out on the back porch and make up these silly songs.
“Then I started buying guitars. And my wife was going, ‘Why are you buying guitars?’ I was like, ‘Well, you’ll see.’ He laughs. “I knew at that point.”
Still, the breakthrough wouldn’t come for a few more years. And it would involve his dad, a longtime fan of Logan’s music, who died young.
“About two weeks before he passed away, he told me, ‘I just think you should consider playing music again,’” Mac remembers. “That was one of our last conversations before his major stroke. And, after two years of getting over grief and all that stuff and blaming everything in the world for my dad dying at 59, I finally realized I could either sit and feel sorry for myself, or I could remember all the good things about him – and one of those was music, and his love for me playing music. So I found myself writing songs again.”
That included the one that first brought major attention to his songwriting and singing, “Dance Under Stars.”
“I wrote half that song sitting in the hospital, when I knew my dad was going to pass away,” he says. “I was on my [phone] notes, just sitting in the room with him, kind of writing here and there. And I let those lyrics go for two years. Finally, I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to play music again.’ I got in my phone, found that note, and finished the song that day.
“I played it for some friends at our lake house that night, about 30 people, and they were just bawlin’. Everybody there was like, ‘Oh my gosh. You don’t know what you’ve just done.’ So I had a good inkling that it didn’t suck.”
The next day, despite feeling like people might think he was “a goofball for being thirty-something years old and putting music on TikTok,” he set up an account and posted “Dance Under Stars.”
Even though he had to talk himself into putting the song out on social media, “I just felt like people needed to hear it, and I didn’t really know any other way for them to do that,” he explains. “The next day, we showed up at a softball game in Harrah, and people were pointing at us as we were walking in. We had no idea what was going on. So I opened up TikTok, and it had like 100,000 notifications. I think it went to 500,000 or 700,000 views overnight. Then I opened up my email – I don’t even know how they got my email – and every major label in Nashville had emailed me, wanting me to come down there. The week after that, I was on a plane to Nashville, going ‘What kind of a mid-life crisis is this?’” He laughs again.
The video for the song ended up with some two million views on TikTok, signaling that this second act in Logan Mac’s career is built around far more than a mid-life crisis. Even though he still runs his own construction business, his ever-accelerating touring and recording schedule indicates he could be one of those rare talents headed for the country-music stratosphere.
Still, it’s taken plenty of success to convince him that something special is going on. In fact, he says, after “Dance Under Stars” went viral and he knew he had a second chance, he wasn’t sure he wanted to go all in. He was, he told his wife, comfortable with what he was doing for a living.
“She said, ‘Well, how are you going to tell your daughters to chase their dreams if you’re not going to show them what it looks like?’” he recalls. “So it was clear at that point that I had to do it, to take the lead role in showing my daughters how not to be scared of the world, how to go out there and chase a dream. I felt for the first time in my life that God had me doing my purpose, that I had that chance. And not everybody gets that chance, to live out what they think their purpose is.
“So, you’ve just got to jump out with your parachute and hope,” he concludes. “If it doesn’t open, it doesn’t. You’ll figure that out halfway down.”
