In a rare appearance, Billy Montana will ride into Aurora Saturday to take the covers off No. 1 hits he has written for other artists and show audience members what's inside.

As the heart behind such chart topping country hits as “Bring

On The Rain” by Jo Dee Messina, and “Suds In The Bucket” by Sara Evans, the blue-eyed composer

will reclaim those and other renditions as his own, with related stories and the artist's own voice - described by Janet Heslop,

who invited him to the Morgan Opera House, as “refreshingly eloquent.”

“It's wonderful getting the feel of a live audience,” said Mont-

ana, who resides in Nashville, but

has ties to the area. “They'll

hear my interpretations. And they'll also get the history as to what

was going on in the room, what the mindset was when we wrote the songs.”

Recently, the soft-spoken composer and his wife were in an audience of nearly 40,000 attending

the CMA Music Festival in Nashville, when Sara Evans stepped on

stage to perform “Suds In The Bucket.”

“It's amazing to me that these people now know what was happening as we wrote that song. It's an odd phenomenon - the translation of writing something then having 40,000 people get excited, be moved by it,” he said.

It is also a far cry from his original plan of being a farmer. After attending Cornell University in the mid '90s and working on a

vegetable farm for seven years,

the Albany native was contemplating buying an apple farm in Penn Yan.

Had he not received a Warner Brother's record contract, countless country music fans and artists such as Tim McGraw, Kenny Rogers and Willie Nelson, who have

recorded his songs, would never have enjoyed his deeply personal music.

Montana is currently putting

the finishing touches on a

follow-up to his 1995 release, “No Yesterday.”