The first time Jill Raymond saw David Pichette, the man who would be her husband, he was on stage with his country band, Emerson Drive. It was August 2006 and Emerson Drive was playing with Toby Keith in Mansfield, Mass.

Jill, who grew up in Wales and graduated from Oak Hill High School, was backstage with friends who owned a radio station sponsoring the concert.

Initially, she was not impressed with Pichette.

“I noticed him on stage, but honestly, I had no desire to meet a musician,” she said.

He more than noticed her.

As he tuned his fiddles he saw “this gorgeous girl” wearing shorts and a trucker hat. “I couldn’t hold myself from telling the other guys that I had seen a girl out there and needed her number badly,” Pichette said.

As he played on stage, “I gave it all I had to impress her,” he said, “extra fiddling, smiles, winks, trying to catch her stares.”

It didn’t work.

But a conversation later that day did.

They met at a backstage cookout and talked until he had to leave with his band, which was on tour. “I was attracted to how interesting and funny he was,” she said. “He had already lived so much and was so excited about life.”

He grew up in Ottawa, Canada, and joined Emerson Drive in 2003. As a musician, he’s toured the world: the North Pole, Afghanistan, Dubai, Croatia, Bosnia.

After meeting at the cookout, Jill and David didn’t see each other again for a month, but they kept in touch by phone.

Their first date was in Vancouver, British Columbia.

“It was amazing,” she said. They hiked in the Redwood Forest and took a ferry to Victoria Island where they watched the sunset. “We went out in the city, a storybook first date,” Jill said.

It was tough to maintain a relationship while David was on the road, and Jill’s mother wasn’t happy about her dating a musician, but they made it work, Jill said. Eventually she moved to live with David in Nashville, where she found a job as a speech therapist.

The idea of marriage became clear to him, he said, when he realized he wanted more than anything to form a family with her. On Christmas Eve at her mother’s home in Leeds, he proposed.

They married May 17 during a small, nontraditional wedding in the desert at the Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada. Their reception was at the Green Valley Ranch hotel. There was no country music band, just an elegant piano.

As she danced with her father at the wedding reception, David surprised her by walking out playing the violin. His gesture was moving, she said.

Despite her initial lack of interest in a musician, he has brought excitement to her life, she said. They spend considerable time apart, but they keep in constant contact through cell phone, text messaging and instant e-mail.

“I never realized how easy it would be to love and trust and respect someone until I met David,” she said. “It’s easy to be in this relationship because it’s so right.”

He credits his wife with bringing balance to his life. Before he met her he was happy with “no plans of forever.”

Now he and Jill are best friends who “simply, deeply love each other’s company, each other’s soul, and know that whatever life throws at us, we will overcome as a team,” he said.