Billy Burke on Singing Again on ‘Fire Country’: ‘If We Do This Once…’
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As Fire Country Season 1 showed, Vince Leone (Billy Burke) is more than a firefighter, husband, and father: He’s also a fantastic singer — and Burke is all for that happening again next season.
“We talked about it initially when we were doing that episode. The general thought was kind of like, well, if we do this once, kind of have to do it again down the road someplace, right?” he laughed when talking to TV Insider about the Season 1 finale. “So yeah, I would love for that to happen.”
In “Mama Bear,” Vince, alongside his brother Luke (Michael Trucco), performs “Burn,” an original song of Burke’s, at the bar. Singing “is pretty much what I spend all my spare time doing,” Burke said, and the writers and producers knew that. But when that episode was written, there wasn’t a song in mind for the scene. Its writer, David Gould, called him and said, “Here’s what we want to do and we don’t really know what the song is yet, but here’s the situation.”
It turned out to be serendipitous that Burke had written a song perfect for the situation a couple months earlier when they were filming the drama’s pilot, so he sent it to Gould.
“He passed it around to everybody, and I’m not lying when I say that I was completely shocked that the reaction was so positive all the way across the board, and they didn’t want to change a f**king thing about it,” Burke shared. “I thought they were going to be like, ‘OK, this is fine, but maybe we can change this first to something else.’ I mean, it is 100 percent how I wrote it from the get-go. So I was very pleased about that and very pleased that the show wanted to license one of my songs. Thirty years of writing songs, and that’s the first time one’s been licensed for any TV show or movie. So that was great for me.”
And here’s hoping we do get to hear him sing again in Season 2.
Fire Country, Season 2, TBA, CBS
