On the eve of his first writing session with Gordon Kennedy, Ben Cooper was so anxious that his future wife asked him to listen to a song she thought would calm his nerves.

Cooper had reason to be nervous.

Kennedy had previously collaborated to successful effect with Garth Brooks, Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, Peter Frampton, Jewel and Kenny Loggins.

He had co-written a song that Cooper used to sing to himself on the way home from Blackhawk High School basketball practices: Clapton’s “Change the World.”

“To be honest, I was nervous out of my mind,” Cooper said in a phone interview. “I didn’t want to get there and have him say, ‘You know, we’re just not on the same page.’

“Co-writing is a lot like dating,” he said. “You spend much of your first date trying to get a second date.”

The therapeutic tune that Cooper’s girlfriend wanted him to hear was “It’s Going to Be Alright” by Sara Groves.

“I heard the lyrics ‘It’s going to be all right’ over and over and I started feeling better,” he said. “And then I started wondering if Gordon had ever worked with Sara. I Googled it and found out that Gordon Kennedy had written that song. At that point, I was not feeling any better.”

Three years later, Cooper’s collaborations with Kennedy have borne some amazing fruit.

“Mosaic,” a Ricky Lee Skaggs album that features eight Kennedy/Cooper compositions and six additional songs by Kennedy, is up for a Grammy award in the “Best Pop/Contemporary Gospel Album” category.

While Cooper is ostensibly a country music writer and Skaggs is ostensibly a country music musician, their creative union is more unlikely than it might seem on the surface.

Cooper said that he and Kennedy really didn’t have any particular singers in mind when they started writing songs together.

In fact, a country songwriter who writes in the hopes that a particular artist might be interested in a tailor-made song gets himself into trouble more often than not.

“A person could very well write a song that he thinks sounds like a Keith Urban song,” Cooper said, “and record a demo that sounds like Keith Urban sang it.

“But if Keith Urban decides not to sing it, then (the writer) is left with a song that either sounds like Keith Urban needs to sing it or nobody needs to sing it.”

Cooper said Kennedy’s compositional strategy is just to “create the best song we can on any given day.”

Eventually, a representative for Skaggs asked Kennedy whether he had any songs to offer for a new recording project.

Kennedy did, of course, but the veteran’s advice to newbies is, “ ‘If anyone asks if you have songs – whether you do or not – the answer is always yes,’ ” Cooper said.

Kennedy put together a sampler CD with three of the intensely personal and idiosyncratic songs he had written with Cooper and a lot of the more traditional bluegrass material that most people associate with Skaggs. The rep liked everything but those three songs, Cooper said.

“He wanted another CD without those three,” Cooper said. “It was sort of disappointing.”

Six months passed and then Kennedy received some startling news from the rep: Skaggs had somehow gotten his hands on the first CD and wanted more material in the same vein as those three songs.

The resulting record, also co-produced by Kennedy, is hard to describe and certainly unlike anything Skaggs has done or anything being played on country radio. Which isn’t to say the songs aren’t ingratiating.

“Mosaic” is explicitly Christian and evocative (in this columnist’s assessment) of the best folk-pop and soft rock of the ’70s.

“I think it was sort of our intention not to try to make it sound like it fit into anything,” Cooper said. “There are a lot of commercial rules we could have played by. We could have easily made this sound like a country record or a Christian record.

“But I think we just threw all the rules out the window,” he said.

Music journalist Ken Tucker, in his review of the album for NPR, evoked the Beatles.

“Something in the chemistry that occurs in mixing Gordon Kennedy’s melodies, the Christian imagery of the lyrics and the surging vocals results in music that is both vivid and thoughtful,” he wrote. “The pieces don’t just fit together on Mosaic – they lock into place with a firmness, an inevitability, that sounds as though chance or faith or fate had nothing to do with it. I prefer another, even simpler term: art.”

Cooper, who has toiled away as a songwriter in Music City for four years, said this experience with Skaggs has reinforced some of his core beliefs about his craft.

“The greatest lesson for me, from where I am in my career, is that it is more important to stay true to artistry than a price tag,” he said.

Cooper will attend the Grammy Awards ceremony with his wife on Feb. 13 and he said he is not discouraged that songwriters rarely get statues or much credit.

“I know this is an opportunity that not many people my age get,” he said. “I am 26 right now and I am going to want to enjoy this, because who knows if it’ll ever happen again?

“I have been doing this for four years, professionally, and I see how hard people work,” Cooper said. “There are people a lot older than me who have never had this chance so I don’t want to take it for granted.”

As for their Grammy fashion statement, Cooper and his wife are not ashamed to be going frugal.

“I am wearing a tux and dress shirt that I found at our East Nashville Goodwill for a total of $18,” he said.

“Unfortunately, I had to fork out $20 for a new tie to complete the ensemble. My wife found her elegant black dress at the mall with a price tag of $6.97.

“Overall, it looks like we’ll blend in pretty well for under $100,” Cooper said.

More advice from Cooper about stretching dollars and other of life’s challenges can be found at his website for aspiring songwriters: thesongbirdproject.blogspot.com.