'Once in a Lifetime' is nothing short of one of those rare "pop it in the CD player, roll down the windows and drive down the highway as fast as the speed limit will allow you" kind of album. In fact, in the words of Eddie Montgomery and Troy Gentry, "We’ve heard Len’s album and we’re glad he’s not a duo." The revived Sunbird Records debut release is edgy, honky-tonk, real life country music at it's best.

A lot of what Len's learned he acquired young. "I actually started playing music with Eddie Montgomery and John Michael Montgomery’s dad when I was 11. I had already been to talent contests and 4H and things like that, I guess I started when I was in the fourth grade. My first guitar was given to me when I was six or seven years old."

The essential lesson Len learned from Howard was eventually the key to what it would take for him to make a go of it in country music, all these years later. "Even though they were in country music, they were just people who'd get up every morning, the alarm goes off at 5:30 or 6:30 or whatever, and work by daylight and that sort of thing, they put their time in, and they come home and spend time with the family, mow the yard and whatever they do on weekends, maybe go fishing or doing something with the kids." 

It's a valued lesson that he's carried over to his song writing. "I think you have to keep it where the people realize, ‘Hey this guy’s lived life just like I have’. Some of the songs recorded today seem to sugarcoat everything, and life is not sugarcoated. I have great days and I have bad days, and I think everybody has those."  

Len started using the lessons Harold taught him in his early teens. "I wrote my first song when I was like twelve or something like that, maybe thirteen, of course it wasn’t very good" he chuckles. "I really got serious about writing in the late eighties, that’s when I really started buckling down and trying to like listen to other people’s music and writing with other guys and trying to learn from them, the craft of writing a song." 

You'll hear one of the finer results of his craftsmanship on this album, with a song he wrote for his wife, ‘Heaven Sent Me You’, which also found its way onto the third album of John Michael Montgomery, Harold’s son. " I wrote it with a good friend of mine. I had been playing with it for awhile, I wanted to write a song I could sing to my wife. We were living in Nashville at the time, we had been there for a year or two and she’d been really supportive of me. I wanted it to be a song that you could put it into anyone’s situation where there’s someone you feel strong about, whether its your husband, wife or kids, grandparents, their parents, their dog or cat. It really feels great that you can touch so many people that way."

Hard work, and good music has led this Kentucky native to an unlikely place. The top 10 of the newly established Texas Country Music Chart, with 'Breakin' What's Left of My Heart',  alongside of artists the likes of Charlie Robison, Justin Trevino and Rodney Crowell. "I love that. Really makes me feel great because a lot of my influences came out of Texas. My biggest influence of course is Willie Nelson.  I am real pleased with that. All my life growing up I was always told if you make it in Texas doing country music, you've got it made. So that’s cool."

Texas had better prepare another place on that chart, as Doolin gets ready to release another cut from his new CD later this summer, 'Time Flies'. "It’s an up-tempo song, it’s a beautiful love song, its about a guy that meets a girl, falls in love with her, he gets so caught up in her, forgets about everything he used to do, his buddies and things like that. He hasn’t seen them for awhile, its kind of cool when you think about it, when you’re in school you think ‘Oh man, we’re gonna be friends for life’ and then 10 years go past and you think 'I haven’t seen him in ten years!' It kind of reflects on those kind of things, the guy's happy where he’s at and what he’s doing, kind of where I’m at myself.