Matt Kelley says: I bought an old 1964 Gibson B-25 acoustic guitar from a tall Tennessean named Bucky Baxter. I fell for the Bucky and his playing when I would go see all of these Bob Dylan shows over the second half of the 90s. Bucky played the mandolin, the pedal steel, the lap steel and guitar for Bob, and gave him this particular slightly country sound that became the only sound I wanted to hear. Eventually, I started a band to try to make a similar kind of racket– but that's not why you called. I bought the guitar in eBay's nascent days, and it arrived at my workplace, and I loved it.

And then something unexpected happened, which was that Bucky's people called and said, "Wait, you said you're a designer, right?" A week later I was sitting way too close to the fire behind a cabin deep in the holler outside Nashville TN, watching, and sometimes playing in, one of Bucky's pretty incredible picking parties. I was rubbing the smoke out of my eyes, but it wasn't going anywhere.
The guitar had a thread, and I pulled it. Next thing I knew, my (now) wife, who I'd been chasing for ten years, had called and asked me on a date, the guys I was goofing around in a basement with for a year had finally scored a gig and wrote our first song, and I was spending one heck of a lot of time in Nashville, meeting people I'd never imagined I'd meet, and crossing the country with a couple of them. And then I quit my job. That was just in the first couple weeks.

As it turns out, that guitar had some kind of magical dust on it, and I shook it around every now and then and I'd wake up in New York City with a bottle of wine between me and a Knight, or playing in the support band for my favorite singer on the planet – from Sydney, Australia, no less – at a local nightclub, or the phone rings, and it's John Prine, and even though it's his 60th birthday, he wants to chat about album artwork. One day I blink, and my two lovely kids are banging away on it like a drum. On and on it goes. It's been eight years, and we've got a story a week like that.

Is the guitar really lucky? Well, let's be serious: we work hard and we're true. But it opened my eyes, or rubbed smoke in them, and I never saw the same way again.