Late nights and long drives — alone.

School Resource Officer Trevor Burgess spent his early years in and out of college pursuing the difficult dream to produce and play a one-man show of country music.

Starting by singing in his church choir during elementary school, Burgess followed after his father and high school friend to take up the guitar.

“I didn’t start playing the guitar until I was in high school,” Burgess said. “I never wanted to learn guitar though, and I never had any interest in it. [Then] I found out I was OK at it and started to enjoy it. I had a buddy in high school that learned how to play the guitar — and actually, I learned from him.”

He said he got his inspiration to pursue a music career from being away from his family during his college years, and he decided to focus his music on them.

“Everybody writes sappy songs about women — I didn’t want to do that,” Burgess said. “Instead I wrote a lot about life on the road. A lot of it’s about not being able to be at home with my wife [and] about different towns that I got to visit.”

Only pursuing his dream for three years, Burgess said he was grateful for the experience but wouldn’t go back if he had the opportunity. At the young age of 22, when he first recorded “A Trucker’s Dream,” his first and only album, he was starting to realize finances would soon fall through.

“I tried to make a living at it for three years after college,” he said. “While I was in college, I found out that I could make a decent amount of money. I played about three to four nights a week and continued doing that after college. The writing was on the wall that I wasn’t going to make it financially continuing down that path.”

Burgess said his interests changed over the years — family and future deemed his music career unfeasible.

“This is a totally different job than that is, and it’s a conflict of interest as to what I’m doing right now,” he said. “I was young then, 22 when I graduated [and I] pursued it for three years. Looking back on it, honestly, it was cool that I tried it, but it was a waste of time. [That’s] three years that I could have been pursuing a job or that I could have been figuring out what I wanted to do with my life.”