Kathy Mattea and her songwriter husband Jon Vezner owe their first meeting to a dead car battery.
“Kathy lived upstairs at Wrensong, the publisher I used to write at,” Vezner tells The Boot. “I’d see her in the hallway from time to time. One morning I overheard her battery was dead, so I jumped her — true story!”
A Grammy-winning songwriter, Vezner and his friend Don Henry penned the country star’s hit “Where’ve You Been,” which won the CMA’s Song of the Year in 1990, as well as a Grammys trophy for Best Country Performance. The song is a love story in itself, inspired by the timeless love of Vezner’s grandparents, even through loss of memory and illness.
Mattea and Vezner have been married for several decades — since Feb. 14, 1988 — and the singer has called her husband “the biggest gift of my life.”
“All marriages have their moments when things don’t run smoothly,” Vezner says, “but neither of us walks away when things get difficult. We challenge each other and learn from each other.”
This story was originally written by Deborah Evans-Price, and revised by Angela Stefano.