“My life is good. I can’t complain.” Says Cherryville, North Carolina ’s Preston Long. “I don’t have a big sob story; I don’t have one of those lives. I didn’t have a tragedy, nobody abused me, anything like that, and my parents didn’t walk out on me. We didn’t have everything, but it’s been a good life.”

Preston is finishing up a 10-track album that he is writing, singing, producing and playing and hopes to release his CD “Who Do You Say I Am?” in the summer of 2009.

His relationship with music began as a child, due in large part, to the fact that his grandfather was a professional gospel singer. As the son of Presbyterian minister Joel Long and his wife Susan, church was a big part of Preston and his brother Zach’s life.. “My grandfather, J.W. Stiles, was a Wesleyan minister; he’s passed on now. We would go and visit Christmas and holidays and we would sing. They still have a recording of me when I was five years old singing the old gospel song ‘Some Day.’ For about three Christmases after that, the family would put me up on a little stool right in the middle of the living room and have me sing. I liked the attention and I liked to sing. The people in my family definitely thought I did a good job. As a kid, I was thinking, ‘Do I really want to do this, is it cool?’ But, when I look back on it now, that was a part of my life, but it was really a dress rehearsal for my life now.”

“I’ve moved around a lot, being a preacher’s kid. I played sports in high school. I went to university of North Carolina Chapel Hill. I received a biology degree, I got married, and I have two wonderful boys. My wife’s name is Ashley; my sons are Alex and Dawson. I work for the health department in my county. Both my cars are from the 90’s. We don’t have a whole lot of extra money, but we make it work.”

“I was a schoolteacher for six years. I taught eighth grade math and science. I was the singing schoolteacher. The last thing I did at the school was get all my guys together and we put on a free concert in the gym, all the classes were in there. That was the neatest thing. There was a guy sitting in for me that was a bass player that didn’t normally play for me. All the kids knew me, when I came out of the locker room; there was just this huge roar from the kids. The guy looked at me and said, ‘Man, who are you dude?’ I said, ‘I was just the school teacher.’”

“About six years ago, I auditioned for Nashville Star in Charlotte at the urging of a friend. I went over there, made a few cuts and got down to the final ten. A girl from South Carolina beat me by two tenths of a point. Nobody knew who I was and nobody owed me anything. When you sing around your hometown, people know who you are and you think maybe because they know my family they are complimenting me or the way I sing, but when I went over there, those folks didn’t know me and they didn’t care. All they wanted to know was if I could sing. I finished as the top male vote getter. It was a good first experience for me. It gave me the confidence to do things out on my own. It gave me a little confidence to write my own music.”

“My grandfather died from throat cancer. It took the very thing that provided his livelihood and talent. It could have been anywhere, but it took that. My uncle wrote a song and that kind of spurred me on a little bit. You don’t have to be sitting in Nashville or Los Angeles to write a good song. Writing kind of came natural to me. Writing is really good therapy, it’s helped me through some really difficult times, things I didn’t understand why they were happening to me at that point. It’s been a really good tool. It is as important to me as the entertaining is. If someone wanted to pick me up and sign me to a label to sing, that’d be awesome, I’d love it. If someone just liked the song, my response is the same. Either the way it’s getting the message out there that I want to get across.”