Local mlitary vet's song being considered for a Grammy nomination

All right, an excerpt from the song by John Preston, a former Marine who spent years raising awareness about the struggles facing veterans. They risked their lives on the battlefield, and when they returned home, they faced more challenges, some even driven to suicide. Preston's song often focuses on faith, service, and sacrifice. Mr. Preston, Mr. John Preston joins us here in studio this morning. Martinez resident. Yes, sir. And you're a firefighter also. You helped with the Palisades fire. I mean, you've done quite a few things in your life, and now you've got this. Awesome song that you've just released. And how long have you been making music, by the way? Oh, we're well over 20 years of actual public work with music. And I think our first viral video happened in 2004. So it's been a really long time on this journey. And how did you get to this point where you made this particular song? Because now, this song, you're hopefully... Hopefully, you're trying to get some recognition for the song, and that could be possible here. Tell us about that. Yeah, and I always tell people never stop, and I've definitely teetered on that a whole lot over all these years. Thank We're in consideration for a Grammy. Yeah. Um. We find out on Monday. We find out on Monday. I'm sitting here sweating. Cutting and, you know. After chasing music for 20 years, that's got to feel really good. Yeah, it does. And to... Just hear that word. Dude, I'm a kid from a farm in Kentucky. you. This isn't something that people complain about how hard the music industry is, how hard it is to go in the studio and work. I'm like, I get to do that? How amazing is that? So the grind really hasn't been a grind for me, but yeah, I mean, it's the labor of love is what you would say it is. And this song specifically, I get back from the Palisades fire. We had a release. It was happening the day I'm on the way. What were you doing at the Palisades fire? I was fighting fire. Fighting the fire. I was fighting a lot of fire. Wow. The wildest 48 hours. That's a whole different story. Yeah, right. We've seen the video. Wildest 48 hours of my life was there. Thank you, Heather. Just that first beginning of that fire. I get back, we had this film for the documentary, all these things are going and it was like everything came crashing down. And the effort it takes just to put an album out is so much work and I wanted to do it one more time. We write fantasy, we put this song together that is about like jumping off the cliff one last time, you know, and not fearing anything else. Just like doing, just doing it. Making that leap of faith, making it happen, that's what you would say this is about, kind of? Yeah, I mean, people laugh at me all the time for my blind faith, right? I run forward, but I've found myself in rooms I'm probably not supposed to be in, you know? I mean, look, you're, I mean, at least even being considered for a Grammy, it's the consideration itself is miles ahead of anything that, you know, one could dream of. I believe it's less than 1% of all artists that ever released music, you know, get there. So the song makes sense, fantasy. Yeah, it does. And two amazing artists with me, Gunny H. Austin Carini, Austin also, Bay Area local, we've all kind of had that same journey, so it's really great. Great. With it specifically, it ended up falling into a Christian category. We thought we were going into best melodic rap. They listened to it. It goes into Christian contemporary. Now we've all just decided we're putting this in God's hands. It's yours. And so that's where we are now. I want to talk about how your personal experiences with grief really helped shape this song. Yeah. I mean, so for us and me specifically, I lost my brother to suicide in 2016. You guys have followed me through all of this, right? We had singles that made the top 200 in the world. We had the walks across the country in two different places here in California and on the East Coast. And we've really had an opportunity to move a lot of people together, right? And see communities actually stand up to help us because I put myself out there to break to pieces so I could get that help. Um, Moving through that grief has made me be able to keep moving through this industry and keep believing, you know, we're good enough to do this. We've always been good enough to do this. This is just amazing here. So after losing your brother, by the way, you walked 700 miles from Parris Island to Cincinnati carrying 50 pounds of his belongings. I mean, you know, that is just incredible, incredible for you to do that and bring attention to this matter. But I do want to get to this point here. Both military and first responder communities, they often struggle with talking openly about You've been in the Marines. You're now a firefighter. You've seen devastation fires, wildfires can bring here. What is the single most important message you would say to someone silently struggling today right now? Don't keep it quiet, right? There are so many different ways to get help, and there are so many options and avenues out there. You have to speak. I chose myself as a mouthpiece for all of us to go out and do some of the things I've done. And, and, and. Along the way, you always meet somebody that's speaking for the first time, and that's beautiful. Like, please go out and say, I'm not okay, because it's okay to not be okay. So let's get it out so that we can move towards a better and happier future. We have to wrap, but you have a documentary coming up. Real quick, tell us about that, that you're working on at this moment. You're developing it? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, we're in post-production. We brought in Zach Williams, Robin Williams' son. One is... Executive producing with us now on the documentary. It's going to be called Carry the Weight. It's based solely around that walk that happened on the East Coast, but obviously the long 20 years of film we've had running on us. A beautiful story of just a little brother that lost an older brother that wanted to make a difference. All right. John Preston, thank you so much for joining us. Good luck. We're going to be watching to see what happens on Monday. Got all our fingers crossed. It'd be nice to have a Grammy nominee in our own backyard right here. Thank you so much. for stopping by. The message you're putting out there, Terry, Yes, sir, absolutely. All right, we're going to be right back here on Mornings on 2 with a little bit of that song Fantasy from John Prine. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.