<\/p>\n
For the first time in over 20 years, Jacksonville-based southern rock band 38 Special released a new album. The aptly named \u201cMilestone\u201d celebrates the band\u2019s 50th anniversary. Singer and guitarist Don Barnes sat down with WOKV\u2019s Chase Bunker to reflect on his career, their bond with Lynyrd Skynyrd, and how it felt to get back to writing music.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were young boys with a dream,\u201d reflects Barnes on reaching the five-decade mark. \u201cWe would practice right down at Riverside Avenue. We tried to…you know, made all our mistakes in public. But we ended up with 20 million albums sold later, but as time went on, it was a struggle. I even told Donnie Van Zant back at 30 years, I said, \u2018man if I had known, I would be looking at your face 30 years from now (laughs),\u2019 I told him I said, \u2018if I shot you back when I wanted to, I would have been out of jail by now,\u2019\u201d jokes Barnes.<\/p>\n
When it came time to write music, it was like riding a bike for Barnes; he was able to pick it back up quickly. \u201cI had little bits and pieces of ideas. Some of them were half-written, three-quarters written, some of them basically just 15 seconds of a guitar figure, you know? But you use all your experience, you learn as you go through all those years, and use all of the little tricks you can pick up. Lyric writing was the hardest thing to learn over the period of years. I was always a guitar player. I always liked the big arrangements and band stuff, but I never really paid attention much to the lyrics. And so I had to learn that too; you have to learn everything. If you\u2019re going to make it in this business, you better learn every single thing about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
You can hear Barnes talk about his brotherhood with Lynyrd Skynyrd, his favorite shows, and tell his favorite story about Ozzy Osbourne in the full interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n 38 Special\u2019s album \u201cMilestone<\/a>\u201d is in stores now.<\/p>\n You can listen to more of Chase\u2019s interviews in the Chase Chats section<\/a> of WOKV.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u25b6 Listen to Jacksonville\u2019s Morning News Interviews<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n Read more local news from WOKV<\/a><\/p>\n Click here<\/a> to download our free news, weather and traffic app. And click here<\/a> to subscribe to our daily 3 Big Things newsletter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For the first time in over 20 years, Jacksonville-based southern rock band 38 Special released a new album. The aptly named \u201cMilestone\u201d celebrates the band\u2019s 50th anniversary. Singer and guitarist Don Barnes sat down with WOKV\u2019s Chase Bunker to reflect on his career, their bond with Lynyrd Skynyrd, and how it felt to get back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2131985,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[405632,313575,405631,405633,306982,405634],"class_list":["post-2131984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-38-special","tag-50th-anniversary","tag-don-barnes","tag-donnie-van-zant","tag-lynyrd-skynyrd","tag-milestone"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/38-Special-singer-Don-Barnes-talks-50-years-plus-new.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2131984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2131984"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2131984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2131986,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2131984\/revisions\/2131986"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2131985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2131984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2131984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2131984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}