State Champ Radio country power players
The War and Treaty will make you believe.
Whether playing to industry insiders at Clive Davis’ exclusive Grammy Awards preparty, attendees at the Country Music Association Awards or Newport Jazz festivalgoers, precedent suggests just about everyone in any given audience will be on their feet by the time the husband-and-wife act finish one of their explosive, emotive, genre-bending and deeply spiritual sets.
“The fans will walk up to us afterward and say, ‘I don’t know what I just experienced, but something happened to me while I was listening to you,’ ” says Tanya Trotter, the duo’s better half. Universal Music Group Nashville (UMGN) CEO Cindy Mabe became one of those fans the first time she saw The War and Treaty, in 2022. “I was filming them and crying all at the same time,” she remembers. “I went home just talking about this band.” That same day, Mabe signed the act to its first major-label deal. Since then, this year’s Country Power Players Groundbreaker has continued broadening the genre with riveting and endless exuberance — even if country radio has yet to catch on.
Both Michael, 42, and Tanya, 50, started singing in church before they hit double digits; Michael has a video of himself singing “If Anybody Asks You Who I Am” standing on the congregation’s organ bench at just 3 years old. Those early experiences translated into a lifelong love of music-making and performing for both, though their path to The War and Treaty was far from linear. Tanya (née Blount) had a modest solo career in the 1990s following a cameo in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit singing alongside Lauryn Hill, including one track that cracked the Billboard Hot 100 in 1994; Cleveland native Michael dabbled in rapping, influenced by the success of local heroes Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, before eventually enlisting in the Army in 2003. While serving two tours in Iraq, he composed songs for his fallen comrades, even winning a “Military Idol” contest.
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The couple met shortly after Michael had returned stateside — fittingly, at an arts festival where he was trying to launch a solo career. Tanya had long since stepped away from music and was working as a worship leader; the couple married and had a son, Legend (yes, named for John), in 2011. They didn’t realize the potency of their combined voices until several years later, though, while recording a demo of a song Michael had written for Tanya’s brother. A friend heard it and practically demanded they keep making music together.
Tonya and Michael Trotter photographed on April 15, 2024 at Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.
Robby Klein
That off-the-cuff duet in 2014 opened their eyes to a world of musical possibilities, but their path forward wasn’t easy or clear-cut. Michael still struggles with PTSD — at times so severely that he has said he contemplated suicide — and the couple also faced homelessness. Musically, they first found a home in Americana: In 2018, Thirty Tigers distributed their second album, Healing Tide, which featured a collaboration with Emmylou Harris, and they have won three Americana Music Awards. As the duo’s star kept rising, major country labels came calling, leading to the pair’s UMGN signing and subsequent major-label debut, 2023’s Lover’s Game, produced by Dave Cobb.
This past year, The War and Treaty were one of two country acts nominated in the Grammys’ best new artist category; the other was Jelly Roll, whom the Trotters consider a peer in making the genre more inclusive. “The space we occupied was really important,” Michael says. “The two artists representing the genre were not representative of that genre at all, if we’re being completely transparent. You got Jelly Roll, a tatted-face rapper who can sing a little bit, and Mike and Tanya, these Black, overweight, gospel-trained singers. Country music is actively trying to attack the narrative it has created, and I’m proud to be part of that change.”
Though they are self-described outliers on the still-too-homogeneous Music Row, the Trotters say their Nashville peers have strongly supported them. It started with Dierks Bentley — who invited them to join him onstage for their first country awards show performance in 2021 and included them on a live album shortly thereafter — and continued with Keith Urban, Miranda Lambert and Chris Stapleton, for whom the duo will open three dates in May. Zach Bryan asked the Trotters to sing with him on his self-titled album after hearing them at the 2023 Academy of Country Music Awards, converted just like all the rest. The resulting song, “Hey Driver,” reached No. 14 on the Hot 100 — The War and Treaty’s highest chart entry to date — and the act will open Bryan’s three-night Los Angeles arena run in June, inevitably earning even more new fans.
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Michael and Tanya are relentlessly positive, but they won’t ignore the obvious. “How about Mickey Guyton?” Michael says. “It all begins with her saying, ‘This is what country music looks like, too.’ ” With Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter shining a new spotlight on country music’s long history of racial exclusion, the duo readily acknowledges the work that remains to correct that past. (Beyoncé reached out to the Trotters after Cowboy Carter’s release but did not seek to collaborate with them.) “Have we experienced it?” Tanya asks. “Of course we have. Do we see it in the crowds? Of course we do.”
But they insist on pushing forward. “We’ve been sort of a healing balm, and I won’t allow anyone to take that away from Tanya and I,” Michael says. “We’ve been taken out on the road not to check a box, but literally because we’ve impacted some of the most powerful artists in our genre today.”
“My purpose is to really broaden what country music is and has always been,” UMGN’s Mabe says. “Finding them was like finding a needle in a haystack. They are an evolution of a format… Absolutely, we will eventually end up [bringing them to] country radio.”
That impact has been made because of the way Michael and Tanya translate their gospel bona fides into potent, generous and agnostic performances. “When you think of a gospel sound, you’re thinking of that sense of urgency — regardless of what my message is,” Michael says. “That sense that I need you to understand what I’m saying, that’s what we’re after. When somebody taps into that good truth, it just comes out with that roar and that fire.” There’s no scorched earth in the Trotters’ wake, though, just the one thing they’re interested in evangelizing: love.
This story will appear in the May 11, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Nate Smith is hunkered down in a Nashville studio working on his forthcoming second album — but the rising country-rocker can’t help but revisit his past. This is the same studio, he says, where he recordedhis independently released debut EP, 2020’s Reckless, which included his breakout hit, “Wildfire.” When the longing, twangy song went viral on TikTok, it helped Smith score management, publishing and record deals. But that almost never happened.
“I was able to record that because my sister’s husband loaned me $4,000 and we made a little investment deal,” recalls Smith over Zoom, eyes widening in lingering astonishment. “They took a huge risk… But they were able to make enough to put a down payment on their house from [my music].”
During his wildly successful past few years, Smith, 38, has hit numerous milestones: He released his self-titled debut album in April 2023, kicked off his biggest headlining tour yet at the start of 2024 and topped Billboard’s Country Airplay chart with “World on Fire” for 10 weeks in February, tying Morgan Wallen — for whom he’s currently opening stadiums — for the longest-leading No. 1 in the chart’s history. But despite all that, Smith is mostly just happy to “have a stable job” now. “I paid my car off yesterday. From music!” he exclaims. “I can pay my rent and I can buy Christmas presents. That, to me, is making it.”
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Smith learned to play guitar at 13 and became a worship leader at 16 in his hometown of Paradise, Calif., and as a young adult, he became a certified nursing assistant. But at 23, Smith moved to Nashville to fully pursue music. He scored a record deal with powerhouse Christian company Word Records and a publishing deal with Centricity Music, but without much success, so he moved back to Paradise in 2011.
He may have stayed, too, had it not been for the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. Smith and his family survived 2018’s Butte County Camp Fire, but he lost his home. “If I had stayed in that apartment another hour, I wouldn’t have lived,” he says. Two years later, Smith packed his car with his remaining belongings and headed out to Nashville for a second time — now with nothing left to lose.
Nate Smith
Emily Dorio
The Camp Fire prompted Smith to write “Wildfire,” about how a love interest can generate a less-destructive kind of heat. Smith’s managers, The Core Entertainment’s Kevin “Chief” Zaruk and Simon Tikhman, recall receiving the song early in the pandemic and soon after requesting a Zoom meeting with the unknown artist. “He had this bushy, wide-eyed personality of a guy who you know has been told ‘no’ every single step of the way and suddenly had a little momentum,” Tikhman says. “We just kind of fell in love with the guy and were flying to Nashville a week later to meet with him.” By summer 2020, The Core signed Smith to a management deal. A Sony/ATV publishing deal soon followed, as did a Sony Music Nashville record deal in 2021.
“If you look at an artist like Nate and his tough road to get where he is today, that’s the country story,” Tikhman continues. “They call Nashville the ‘10-year town…’ It has been a 20-year town for Nate.” Adds Zaruk: “The music business is so hard. To see that it can work and to see it happen to someone not in their 20s… He is an example of how hard work pays off.”
Today, Smith’s work ethic and his own strain of rock-infused country have helped him collect two Country Airplay No. 1s. An alt-rock disciple, he has injected edge into Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars,” revitalized Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” and often played Foo Fighters’ “My Hero,” which he calls his “ultimate favorite” song, during his live sets. Smith is also an EDM and pop fan; he recently met Marshmello and would love to collaborate. Sustained radio success, paired with growing mainstream interest in country music, has, Smith figures, provided him with “a lot of leverage.”
“We’re a little hillbilly genre over here, but [pop stars are] wanting to be a part of it, and Beyoncé coming in and some other folks… it’s exploding the genre,” he says. “They’re still trickling in; Post [Malone] hasn’t put his album out yet. There’s an opportunity right now… it’s definitely the time to go DM your favorite pop star.”
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Meanwhile, Smith and his management are working overtime to translate his current moment into a lasting career. “You can text Chief at 3 a.m., and he’s going to get back to you,” he says with a smile. “It’s kind of sickening, but we’re all like that.” He recently started a new protein-heavy diet and has given up drinking — for now. “The name of the game is don’t get sick and have endurance and be in shape,” Smith says. “This is an athletic thing, and I didn’t realize that… I love to party, but it’s just slowing me down.”
When Smith worries about losing momentum, his team reminds him where he was just a few years ago. “They always bring my perspective back,” he says, recalling Zaruk’s advice: “You were surviving before, working paycheck to paycheck and barely making ends meet. Now you’re living — we get to live.” Smith holds his freshly tattooed forearm to the camera, showing off some new ink that’s still healing: “Live. Don’t Exist.”
This story will appear in the May 11, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Linda Martell’s granddaughter Marquia Thompson is running late to launch her 82-year-old grandmother’s Zoom interview with Billboard — but for a good reason.
In late March, Beyoncé featured Martell on two spoken-word segments on Cowboy Carter. Shortly after, the star posted a photo of herself wearing an official Martell T-shirt from the pioneering country artist’s website — and today, Thompson needed to run by the post office to mail some of the nearly 600 orders she has received since. Martell’s merchandise sales aren’t all that have been soaring. Her catalog streams also ballooned from a little under 5,000 from March 22 to 24 to 61,000 from March 29 to 31, according to Luminate — an 1,100% surge immediately following the album’s March 29 release.
The attention is long overdue. In 1969, Martell became the first Black woman to play the Grand Ole Opry. At the time, she didn’t know she was making history, though she was very aware that there were no other “Black guys or Black girls there” onstage or off, she says. She also didn’t know that she would receive two standing ovations. “I was surprised,” she says with a laugh.
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Her breakthrough single, “Color Him Father,” peaked at No. 22 in September 1969 on the Hot Country Songs chart; it remained the highest-charting track on the tally by a Black woman for more than 50 years until Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ’Em” reached No. 1 in February. And yet, until Beyoncé helped shine a light on them, Martell’s accomplishments had largely faded into obscurity.
“When I was actively pursuing country music 14 years ago, I Googled ‘Black female country singers’ and Linda Martell’s name came up,” says Mickey Guyton, who wasn’t previously aware of Martell. “She is truly the reason why I had the courage to sing country music.”
Martell released only one album, 1970’s Color Me Country, but it was a beauty. Her voice was clear and resonant with plenty of twang reflecting her South Carolina roots on the Shelby Singleton-produced set of traditional-leaning tunes. In addition to “Color Him Father,” two other tracks charted in the top 60. In its review at the time, Billboard wrote, “Linda impresses as a female Charley Pride. She has a terrific style and a true feeling for a country lyric.”
Linda Martell with her granddaughter Marquia Thompson (left) and daughter Tikethia Thompson.
Gavin McIntyre
But by 1974, fed up with label clashes, a legal battle with her manager and the ongoing racism she endured, Martell left Nashville.
“Linda Martell has always resonated with me personally because her story is so many of our stories, which is why I named my show after her,” says artist Rissi Palmer, who hosts Apple Music’s influential Color Me Country Radio program. “She didn’t ask for all the politics — she just wanted to sing. Period. I admire her grace under pressure, focus to stay the course and the way she advocated for herself against a manager and record producer who were interested in gimmicks and not creating a lasting career for her.”
More than a half-century later, Martell, who lives with her daughter and son-in-law outside of Columbia, S.C., looks back on those days as bittersweet. Sitting in her favorite spot — a gray reclining lounger in the living room — and wrapped in a black and red blanket, she is quick to respond and even quicker to laugh and smile, despite some of the painful memories that clearly still sting. She relies on Thompson, who serves as her de facto manager, to fill in some details.
Though she started out performing pop and R&B, Martell grew up listening to country music and had a natural affinity for its cadences. Her sharecropper father sang country songs around their Leesville, S.C., house, and the country station came in loudest on the family radio, around which they would listen to Grand Ole Opry broadcasts on Saturday nights.
Her future manager heard Martell sing a handful of country songs when she performed at an Air Force base, and she moved to Nashville, where producer Singleton signed her. Singing songs with good stories appealed to her, and Martell cut Color Me Country in one day. “That was easy,” she says. “I was singing always already, so it didn’t bother me. I had fun. It was great.”
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During that period, there were moments both good and bad. But mainly, Martell recalls, she felt lonely. “Black artists didn’t sing that kind of song,” she says of country music. Though she says she didn’t have issues with any of her fellow artists, no other acts, white or Black, encouraged her, with the exception of multi-instrumentalist and Hee Haw host Roy Clark. “He’d make you feel at home,” she remembers of her appearance on the variety show. “He would sit beside me and talk. It felt very natural.”
It was worse on the often-hostile road. Her late brother, Lee, was in her band and provided company, but the heckling from some audiences was painful. “Most of the time, you really didn’t pay attention because if you do, oh, it hurt,” she says. “But we heard it. Me and my brother wouldn’t [respond]. He’d say, ‘Well, they’re ignorant.’ We came to work, and we knew what to do and what to say. That’s all.”
After her first manager sued her (over his commission) and Singleton and his label switched their focus to Jeannie C. Riley (who had a huge hit with “Harper Valley, PTA”) but tried to prevent Martell from recording elsewhere, she eventually got “tired of it” and left Nashville.
Martell revisited R&B music and lived in California, Florida and the Bronx, where she and her then-boyfriend owned a record store. In the 1990s, she returned to South Carolina, where she drove a school bus and then worked in a classroom until she retired in her 60s. She now enjoys spending time with her five children, 13 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.
As Beyoncé worked on Cowboy Carter, her team asked Thompson if Martell would be interested in appearing on it, then presented Martell with the script for her spoken interludes. Martell was already a big Beyoncé fan. “One thing my grandmother will notice is a young woman who can sing,” Thompson says. “I’m very, very glad” to be on the album, Martell says, adding that she appreciates the attention Beyoncé has brought to her music.
Linda Martell photographed on April 24, 2024 near Columbia, S.C.
Gavin McIntyre
But Martell had already been reflecting on her story before Beyoncé came calling. In 2020, Thompson began work on Bad Case of the Country Blues: The Linda Martell Story, a documentary about her grandmother featuring interviews with Palmer, songwriter-author Alice Randall and others. She plans to screen the nearly finished film locally this fall before a wider release. Thompson launched a GoFundMe to cover the final touches and hopefully release the doc independently in order to retain ownership.
Despite all the hardships and a career cut short through no fault of her own, Martell’s response is swift when asked whether she’s glad she made country music in the first place: She quickly nods yes. “It’s very nice,” she says. “I wouldn’t change nothing.”
This story will appear in the May 11, 2024, issue of Billboard.
When Lainey Wilson played Australia for the first time in March, she made sure to meet the country’s animal ambassadors: She held a koala; she pet a kangaroo. But it wasn’t all furry fun.
“I got crapped on by a bird twice,” Wilson says in her thick Louisiana drawl, shaking her head in bemused disbelief. “In the exact same spot. I heard it was good fortune, so I was like, ‘Go ahead. Do what you got to do, bird.’ ”
But if there’s anyone who doesn’t need luck, it’s Wilson. With a perseverance and grit that’s reflected in her music, the ascendant 31-year-old country star has made her own. After she moved to Nashville in 2011, Wilson endured a decade of disheartening struggles — including seven American Idol rejections. But over the past two-and-a-half years, she has broken records and reached new milestones at a staggering pace — all without compromising her traditional country sound.
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When “Save Me,” her urgent duet with Jelly Roll, reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart in December, only six weeks had passed since her solo hit, the coming-of-age tale “Watermelon Moonshine,” had summited the list — the shortest stint between No. 1s for a female artist in the chart’s 34-year history. “Watermelon Moonshine” appeared on Wilson’s most recent album, 2022’s Bell Bottom Country (Broken Bow Records/BMG), which took home both the Academy of Country Music (ACM) and Country Music Association Awards for album of the year, as well as the Grammy for best country album — only the ninth record ever to complete that trifecta. And at November’s CMA Awards, Wilson became the first woman to win entertainer of the year since Taylor Swift in 2011 and the first artist since Garth Brooks in 1991 to win best new artist one year and entertainer of the year the next.
At times, the rush has been overwhelming. “I do feel like the 10 years of nothing happening slightly prepared me, but I don’t think you can ever really fully prepare yourself for everything coming at once, and you’re just trying to hold on for dear life,” Wilson says.
“Sometimes when you’re moving that fast, maybe artistically you’re not ready. But she spent 10 years honing her craft,” says Jon Loba, BMG’s president of frontline recordings for North America, who signed Wilson in 2018. “The music was there, the personality was there, the performance was there. So in a sense, that happened overnight, but it has been a long build. It’s just the awards and the recognition have all come in an accelerated fashion.”
Georges Chakra suit, House of Emmanuele earrings.
Joelle Grace Taylor
One line in particular from Wilson’s acceptance speech for female artist of the year at the ACM Awards last May encapsulates her personal credo: “If you’re going to be a dreamer, you better be a doer.” And Wilson is nothing if not a doer. On this late-March morning, she has flown 14 hours on a commercial flight from Sydney to Los Angeles, landing at LAX at 7:30 a.m. and coming straight to Pasadena for this interview and its associated all-day photo shoot, even showering on location instead of first stopping at her hotel.
Getting a caffeine jolt from an iced brown sugar oatmeal shaken espresso from Starbucks, she sits on a bench in the lush backyard as birds chirp. Clad in a cozy, loose-fitting sweatsuit, Wilson pulls her knees up against her chest to shield against the slight morning chill. She’s not wearing any makeup, her long blonde hair sticking out from under a ball cap, her bare feet still sunburned from sitting in a Sydney park.
Wilson’s relaxed vibe contrasts markedly with the electric buzz she says she’s still feeling from the reception she received in Australia. “All I could think about was little 9-year-old Lainey just wanting to write music about my life and how in the world could somebody on the other end of the world relate to it,” she reflects. “It just goes to show you that we’re all a lot more alike than you think.”
Growing up in tiny Baskin, La. (population 200), 9 was a big age for Wilson. It was when she wrote her first song, “Lucky Me,” while at a sleepover with a friend; when she got her first horse; when she went to the Grand Ole Opry for the first time, where she saw Bill Anderson, Crystal Gayle, Phil Vassar and Little Jimmy Dickens. “My daddy actually still has the ticket stub,” she says. “He put it in the lockbox.” And it was when she first knew that one day she would perform on that stage. “My sister was asleep on the church pew like she could care less,” she says. “I remember eating popcorn and thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to do this.’ ”
She worked her way through high school as a Hannah Montana impersonator, learning how to entertain audiences at places like St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis and realizing she was “born” to perform in the process. Wilson, who calls herself a “fifth-generation’s farmer’s daughter,” combined that desire with the whatever-it-takes work ethic she inherited from her father. “It definitely has to do with coming from a farming community, getting up and planting those seeds and watching them grow,” she says of the diligence she applies to her career. “I really do view it as ‘I’m a song farmer.’ I just try to take care of what I have, and I take a lot of pride in what we’ve grown.”
By 2011, Wilson had moved to Nashville, where her career as a singer-songwriter started germinating. But with a traditional sound out of step with the pop-dominated country in vogue, she had to survive years of setbacks before reaping her first rewards. She hit a low point in 2014: On her third year living in a camper trailer, career stagnant, the man she was dating impregnated another woman, and Wilson’s producer, who was letting her live in his studio parking lot, died. “It was a lot of dark moments in my life,” she recalls, “and I just felt not worthy.”
(Years later, she would draw on that challenging time when she collaborated with Jelly Roll on “Save Me” and its desperate yearning-for-salvation theme. “I love Lainey’s ability to be vulnerable, and I wondered if that would translate on the song,” Jelly Roll says. “Lainey has such an authentic voice [that] I felt if she could connect with the song, then she could share these lyrics from a woman’s point of view.”)
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Still, even amid those struggles, there were bright spots, like when her pal Luke Combs cut a song they co-wrote for an EP he released before he got signed. (Wilson, who considers herself first and foremost a songwriter, has also co-written songs cut by Chrissy Metz, Flatland Cavalry and Thompson Square, among others.) While working on her songwriting, she also started developing a signature country-hippie look, with bell bottoms and a wide-brimmed hat, and her sound, which combined traditional country with a slight rock edge. Around 2017 — the year she inked her Sony Music Publishing deal and a year before she signed with Broken Bow — she began tagging her social media content with #bellbottomcountry. “I just felt like during that time people were having a hard time getting it — everything from the way that I dress to the way that I sound,” Wilson says. So she came up with her own clear explanation: “country with a flare.”
Half-jokingly, Wilson says she succeeded by outlasting the gatekeepers. “I think we just kind of shoved it down their throat enough to where they’re like, ‘All right, she ain’t going away,’ ” she says.
In an era when women still struggle to get airplay on terrestrial country radio, that has been no small feat. As her popularity has grown, Wilson has flexed different facets of her artistry — and scored radio hits — by both releasing solo songs and featuring on duets with male artists. After “Things a Man Oughta Know” became her first Country Airplay No. 1 in September 2021, she featured on Cole Swindell’s “Never Say Never,” which reached No. 1 in April 2022. The following April, her “Heart Like a Truck” peaked at No. 2, as did “wait in the truck,” her collaboration with HARDY the same month. She then returned to the top spot with “Watermelon Moonshine” and “Save Me” in October and December, respectively.
“Honestly, there was not a grand strategy of alternating singles with collabs,” Loba says. “Quite simply, it has been those acts reaching out to Lainey with great songs she connected with, and the timing has fortunately worked out well.”
As Wilson’s career gained momentum, Loba says that — in addition to making sure her music was where it needed to be — her team focused on stressing Wilson’s authenticity, which was on ample display in her charming, gracious Grammy acceptance speech earlier this year. “She’s not copying anyone else,” Loba says. “At the end of the day, everyone can see her heart and is cheering for her.”
Lainey Wilson photographed on March 26, 2024 at Paradise Pasadena in Pasadena, Calif. Kelsey Randall shirt and pants, Double D Ranch boots, Brit West necklace and cuff, Minnie Lane earrings and Tenee Estelle Trading Co & Modern Myth Jewelry rings.
Joelle Grace Taylor
Long-awaited success hasn’t diminished Wilson’s ambition — when asked if she wants to headline stadiums in five years, she answers three — but she is temporarily pulling back on the throttle just a little.
After spending only 15 nights in her own bed in 2022 and then playing 180 shows in 2023, she has trimmed her itinerary to a more manageable 80 concerts in 2024; following brief Australian and European runs earlier this year, she’ll mostly play North American festivals and headlining shows (other than opening for The Rolling Stones in Chicago on June 30) for the remainder of the year. “I feel like you can see the light at the end of the tunnel when you hear, ‘100 less,’ ” she says. But with new opportunities come fresh obligations.
“As this career grows, I feel like there’s a lot of other jobs that come along with it,” Wilson says. Her expanding list of brand partnerships includes Wrangler, American Greetings, Stanley, Tractor Supply and Coors — and she even appeared on the fifth and most recent season of Yellowstone in late 2022. (Wilson doesn’t know what her future on the show holds, but she would like to return if her schedule allows.) This summer, Wilson will open a three-story bar, Bell Bottoms Up, in Nashville’s entertainment district in partnership with TC Restaurant Group.
“She won’t say no, so we have to for her,” Loba says. “Since we signed her, she has not left a moment unscheduled. Every time I see her, the only question I [usually] have is ‘How are you?’ We both come from farm families. We’re not taught how to rest in farm families. From management to agency to label to publicist, I think we’re getting better at creating that space for her.”
“Last year was a hard year,” Wilson says. “It was the best year, and I don’t know if we’ll ever have a year like that again. But everybody was tired by the end of it — not just me, but my whole crew. Everything we’ve said we would do, we did it. And then bigger opportunities would come, and you can’t pass them up either.”
Roberto Cavalli shirt, pants and shoes, Charlie 1 Horse hat, Double D Ranch necklace.
Joelle Grace Taylor
And at a time when she could understandably be focused on her own material, she wants to leave space to work with other artists. With her appearance on “Wilted Rose” off The Black Crowes’ new Happiness Bastards, she became the first act to ever feature with the storied blues-rockers. The group’s Rich Robinson tells Billboard he and brother Chris reached out to Wilson because “her voice is so powerful. You can tell that she really feels what she is singing.”
Wilson says she would “love to collaborate with Victoria Monét,” especially after seeing her perform at Clive Davis’ pre-Grammy party in February. “She just turned it on,” Wilson continues. “At the Grammys, her [victory] speeches were from the heart. I was like, ‘I want to be her friend.’ ” And she hopes to work with new pal Lana Del Rey, though she hasn’t written for Del Rey’s country album that’s due later this year.
As the demands on her time increase, Wilson is leaning into time-honored practices to help her cope. In Australia, she started waking up an hour early to pray, journal and meditate. “I do sound a little hippie-dippy, but it works for me,” she says. “Just kind of starting my day with an attitude of gratitude.”
She vows to do the same when her WME-booked Country’s Cool Again tour starts May 31 in Nashville. “I have no choice because it has made me feel so good and grounded,” she says. When following that routine, “the shows have gone better. I feel more levelheaded. I got to treat myself like an athlete.”
Over the last two years, one word seems to keep coming up around Wilson.
“Whether I’m running into somebody and they’re saying, ‘Man, your life has been a whirlwind,’ or whether the word’s coming out of my mouth, or I open a book and see the word ‘whirlwind,’ it just seems to be surrounding me,” she says. “Whirlwinds cause turbulence that cause chaos. But at the end of the day, you figure out how to come back to the center.” Which is why it’s also the title of her third full-length Broken Bow album, out Aug. 23.
She describes Whirlwind as “the Western sister of Bell Bottom Country,” and lyrically more “introspective” than previous efforts: “I feel like it’s got a little bit more character [and] cinematic storytelling.” Wilson teamed again with producer Jay Joyce (who produced Bell Bottom Country and its predecessor, 2021’s Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin’), but in a sign of her increasing clout, her road band plays on Whirlwind instead of the cast of studio musicians who typically appear on country albums. “We’ve played close to 400 shows in the past two-and-a-half years. I knew they could do it,” Wilson explains. “I felt like that’s where the magic was going to come from this time.”
Dolce & Gabbana top, Norma Kamali pants, Charlie 1 Horse hat, Modern Myth hat band, Double D Ranch boots, Alexis Bittar bracelets, We Dream in Colour earrings, Minnie Lane, Modern Myth Jewelry, Boochier Jewelry and Established Jewlery rings.
Joelle Grace Taylor
Wilson co-wrote all the songs on the album. While her sound still leans traditional and her voice has an old-fashioned twang, her lyrics usually avoid country’s common nostalgic bent and have separated her music from some of her contemporaries’. Longing for the imaginary good old days — whether in life or her music — isn’t her focus.
“It’s important for me to be proud of where I come from and the way that I was raised, but not dwell on it too much — because who really cares? Let’s take that and move forward with it,” she says. “That’s just how I like to view life. You just got to keep trucking along.”
While she has nothing against a light-hearted ditty — and has written a few herself, including “Hold My Halo” and “Straight Up Sideways”— as a songwriter, Wilson prioritizes depth. “I think about the songs that made me fall in love with country music and made a difference in my life,” she says, citing Brooks’ “The Thunder Rolls,” Keith Whitley’s “When You Say Nothing at All,” Reba McEntire’s “Fancy” and Brad Paisley and Alison Krauss’ “Whiskey Lullaby.” “I just think, ‘I’ve got to do that.’ Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a beer-drinking song, but even with that, I think you can dive a little deeper and get people to think a little bit.”
Listeners relate to the authenticity of Wilson’s writing, says her musical hero, Dolly Parton. “Even though Lainey is breathtakingly beautiful to look at, her true beauty comes from deep down where songs are born and written,” Parton tells Billboard. “People feel her heart and soul in what she writes because she knows what they know, feels what they feel and has the gift to present it in words. God bless her. He has and he will.”
The night after her Grammy win in February, Wilson was enjoying a celebratory dinner in Los Angeles with her manager, Red Light’s Mandelyn Monchick; Loba; and Broken Bow executive vp JoJamie Hahr when Loba mentioned his 6-year-old nephew was being picked on at school.
“Lainey goes, ‘I hate bullies. I’m going to go to his school and do show and tell and sing some songs and say what an amazing little guy he is… I can make a difference,’ ” Loba recalls. “She has just won [best country album], and the night after, she’s sitting there concerned about my nephew.”
Wilson is a people-pleaser by nature. Say something she agrees with and she looks straight at you, nods and says emphatically, “100%.” The effect is powerful — and that natural empathy has helped her connect with both fans and fellow artists. “Lainey is someone you can get in the foxhole with and get raw and real,” Jelly Roll says. “She is also a very grounded person, so if I’m ever overwhelmed, I know I can call her.”
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Joelle Grace Taylor
Wilson attributes that down-to-earth sensibility to her upbringing, though she admits she has had to work to maintain it as her star has risen: “I have fought tooth and nail to make sure that I am doing the things that make me feel like me, [like] calling my family at home, checking to see how the farm’s going and see if Daddy has planted his crops, [checking in] on my nephews, hanging out with my boyfriend on the porch and those kinds of things.”
She went public with her relationship with former pro football player Devlin “Duck” Hodges at the 2023 ACM Awards, but otherwise vociferously protects the privacy of herself and those around her. In her personal life, too, Wilson has looked to Parton — who has spoken about the importance of keeping some things to yourself when you’re sharing so much else with the world — as a guide.
“I think that was probably [about] her husband,” Wilson says. “When it comes to mine and Duck’s relationship, there’s going to be some things that we can’t escape and people are going to say and do whatever, but me and him are on the same page about the less we put out there, the less that we’re going to have to deal with people making anything up and saying anything. We want to keep that as sacred as we possibly can between me and him, and so far, it has worked for us.”
Wilson, whose first Broken Bow album features a song called “WWDD” (short for “What Would Dolly Do”), got to spend some time with — and glean some useful advice from — her inspiration last year at Dollywood. “She dove right in,” Wilson says of Parton. “She was like, ‘You got a good manager?’ And I was like, ‘Yep.’ She said, ‘Well, is he an a–hole?’ ” Wilson pointed to Monchick and said, “ ‘She’s a big a–hole.’ And [Dolly] said, ‘That’s all I needed to hear. That’s what you need.’ ”
Kelsey Randall shirt and pants, Double D Ranch boots, Brit West necklace and cuff, Minnie Lane earrings and Tenee Estelle Trading Co & Modern Myth Jewelry rings.
Joelle Grace Taylor
Parton has faith in Wilson’s ability to navigate fame’s tricky waters. “In this business, as in any other, you have to sacrifice and compromise to get things done,” she says. “But I believe Lainey, like myself, will never sacrifice her principles and values for a dollar bill.”
Another icon, Brooks, has also encouraged Wilson. After winning CMA entertainer of the year, she anticipated naysayers who believed her ascent had happened too quickly and that even her own doubts would creep in, but Brooks helped silence that inner critic. “He said, ‘I feel like you’ve got the keys to country music and you’re going to be driving it for a while.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, Lord. I hope I don’t wreck this thing,’ ” she jokes. “But when somebody like him says that to you, it does make you feel like, ‘OK, yeah, that imposter syndrome can just go kick rocks.’ ”
With that mindset, it’s easy to believe Wilson can do anything — and to understand why, at the end of the day, she sees herself as a cowgirl: rough and ready, and hanging on to the rollicking ride she’s on. “Being a cowgirl is digging in. Getting up, dusting your jeans off and not being scared to get your hands dirty,” she says. “I’m from a long line of cowgirls.”
This story will appear in the May 11, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Billboard is bringing back its peer-voted Country Power Players’ Choice Award for 2024, asking music industry members from all sectors to honor the executive they believe had the most impact across the Country music genre in the past year. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Voting is […]
Billboard‘s 2023 Country Power Players were feted on Tuesday evening (June 6), during an awards ceremony held at Nashville’s Marathon Music Works. Billboard cover star Jelly Roll was honored with the Breakthrough Award, which was presented by his fellow singer-songwriter Ernest. HARDY honored newcomer Bailey Zimmerman with the Billboard country Rookie of the Year honor, […]
Billboard cover star Jelly Roll headlined Billboard’s inaugural ‘Live in Concert’ event on Tuesday evening (June 6) at Nashville’s Marathon Music Works, leading a show that offered an electrifying performance, emotional catharsis and an uplifting message all in one — or as Jelly Roll calls it, “real music for real people with real problems.” His […]
When Bailey Zimmerman takes the stage to perform his brooding, multiweek Country Airplay chart-topper “Rock and a Hard Place,” the memories of a particularly bad breakup come flooding back to him.
“There was a girl I really loved. I wanted to give her the world and bought her a ring, and then she did some really messed-up stuff,” Zimmerman says. “Every time I see people cry during ‘Rock and a Hard Place’ when I’m singing it live, it takes me back to that moment. I remember being in my truck, screaming the lyrics to [Morgan Wallen’s] ‘Sand in My Boots’ because I was so sad and hurt. The line in ‘Rock’ about ‘We’ve been swinging and missing’ just resonated with me.”
When it comes to his career, Zimmerman (who is signed to Warner Music Nashville/Elektra Music Group) has been doing plenty of swinging — and making lots of contact. Now he’s not just screaming the lyrics to Wallen’s song: He’s opening the superstar’s stadium tour this summer. Less than four months after notching his first No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart with “Fall in Love” in December, “Rock” reached the top spot, too. “Fall in Love” was still on its way to No. 1 when Zimmerman’s management team began seeding radio executives with the follow-up single.
“ ‘Rock’ checked all the boxes — great lyric, great melody, and it perfectly fits the direction Bailey is going,” says The CORE Entertainment co-founder/CEO Kevin “Chief” Zaruk, who co-manages Zimmerman with 10th Street Entertainment. “The feedback we received was that it would be an even bigger hit.”
The early stations that jumped on “Rock and a Hard Place” were prescient: The song (written by Heath Warren, Jacob Hackworth and Jet Harvey) achieved even more chart success than its predecessor, leading Country Airplay for six weeks. And in April, it became Zimmerman’s first top 10 on the all-genre Hot 100.
In less than three years, the 23-year-old native of Louisville, Ill., has gone from burgeoning TikTok star to bona fide hit-maker and, now, Billboard’s inaugural country Rookie of the Year. After high school, he began working on a natural-gas pipeline in West Virginia and gained a modest TikTok following for his videos of custom-lifted trucks. Singing was simply a hobby for Zimmerman until December 2020, when he uploaded a video of himself performing “Never Comin’ Home,” a song he had written with high school friend Gavin Lucas. The track went viral, and Zimmerman gave his union notice the following day.
“It was funny, because they were like, ‘You mean we should just take you off the schedule for a bit?’ And I was like, ‘No, I quit. I’m done,’ ” Zimmerman recalls. He continued writing songs and moved to Nashville to record, adding producer Austin Shawn to the core group of collaborators helping him craft his raw, unflinching brand of rock-tinged country. Zimmerman recorded in a spare bedroom in Shawn’s house, cutting his vocals in a small closet. “It’s the same room [where] I met Bailey for the first time, where we talked about lifted trucks and dirt bikes for about three hours straight,” Shawn says.
Bailey Zimmerman photographed on May 18, 2023 at The Underdog in Nashville.
Caitlin McNaney
Zimmerman signed his co-management deal in 2021 and announced his label deal the following year. Now he’s one of several artists who have recently ascended swiftly from social media virality to packing venues. (The Neal Agency books his shows.) He’s acutely aware that he sidestepped years of the grueling club shows that typically pave the way to country stardom — and that his learning curve is happening publicly. A few months ago, a clip of him singing off-key live went viral, leading him to post an endearing video in which he apologized for sounding “absolutely awful” before launching into a sturdy a cappella version of “Rock and a Hard Place” to prove he had simply experienced an off night.
“You can say, ‘You didn’t have to go through the 10 years in the bars to get where you are at.’ At the same time, [those artists] had plenty of time to deal with things like your mic not being on or your [in-ear monitors] going out — they could learn all that in clubs,” Zimmerman says. “I had to learn it in front of thousands of people.
“The first two years were rough,” he continues. “I got [vocal cord] nodules and had to not talk for almost three months. My voice was so weak, and I had to build it back slowly — I never went hoarse for a show, thank God, and I never needed surgery. But my voice is stronger now, and I’ve learned how to take care of it.”
Bailey Zimmerman photographed on May 18, 2023 at The Underdog in Nashville.
Caitlin McNaney
Not that Zimmerman has had much time to ponder his whirlwind success. Following its May 12 release, his major-label full-length debut, Religiously. The Album, entered the Top Country Albums chart at No. 3 and the Billboard 200 at No. 7.
“We’ve been working so hard, and to see the songs touching people like they have is amazing,” Zimmerman says. “And to be Rookie of the Year for Billboard is such a big deal. I can’t wait to call my mom — she’s going to freak.”
This story will appear in the June 3, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Ashley McBryde is sitting in a hotel room in Oxford, Miss., cracking up, thinking about the people who tried to tell her what to do. People like the staff at her first publisher, who laid out their version of Music Row Songwriting 101 to her early on.
“It was like, ‘Here’s who’s cutting records — so there can’t be any cursing, and it can’t be about drinking or staying the night with anyone,’ ” McBryde recalls. “What am I going to write about, corn dogs? That was really challenging, and the songs were terrible.”
The singer-songwriter can laugh about it now. Three critically acclaimed albums, six Grammy nominations and one win later, the 39-year-old Arkansas native has carved out a sweet spot between niche Americana and stadium-scale country-pop, where songwriting matters more than anything else.
But crafting that niche took McBryde years of pounding the Nashville pavement — so by the time she got the aforementioned unsatisfying publishing deal, she had honed her ability to work a crowd through endless bar gigs. “The music wasn’t as unusual as the way that she spoke,” Warner Music Nashville co-president Cris Lacy recalls of a 3rd & Lindsley showcase where McBryde performed in 2016. “There was a really clever wit and a different type of storytelling just in her banter.”
WMN held back, “just wanting to watch for a while,” in Lacy’s words, but manager John Peets signed on immediately after that show. “I’ll do this right now. This is amazing and doesn’t sound like anything else,” Peets remembers thinking. He told McBryde: “You never have to write a song that you hate ever again.”
McBryde’s differences from most prospective Nashville hit-makers drew Peets to her. “She was kind of on the front end of that regrounding in traditional country sounds that we’ve been seeing,” says Peets. “She wasn’t a 19-year-old blonde girl, either.”
Ashley McBryde photographed on May 3, 2023 at Skyway Studios in Nashville.
Diana King
With Peets’ help — putting her in rooms with veteran songwriters and encouraging her to write personal, honest songs — McBryde refined her writing to better match the sharp, between-songs banter that audiences had found so appealing. With her 2016 EP, Jalopies & Expensive Guitars, McBryde felt much closer to finding her voice. “Finally, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. This tastes like the meal I would prepare,’ ” she says. It included “Bible and a .44,” a vivid, heartfelt homage to her father that helped her break through after fellow Peets client Eric Church invited her to sing it onstage at one of his shows; Lacy signed her to WMN soon after.
Since then, this year’s Country Power Players Groundbreaker has found success without much help from country radio. After more than a decade in the business and seven years on the country charts, McBryde has notched only one No. 1 song on Billboard’s Country Airplay list: her 2021 duet with Carly Pearce, “Never Wanted To Be That Girl.”
“It does piss me off when someone walks out of their mother’s womb into headlining arenas and releasing songs that go No. 1 instantly, 1,000%,” McBryde says. “Because if I put that person who skipped all the steps in a single bar I played in North Little Rock that’s full of bikers and truckers, they couldn’t catch anyone’s attention.”
Radio’s failure to reflect McBryde’s rise speaks to its entrenched problem of gender inequity. “It’s not because female artists haven’t been consistently making great music,” she says. “It’s just that it’s easier to play songs on the radio that sell trucks. I guess it’s sort of pendulum-like, and I think things are starting to swing back in a more equal direction.”
In her songs, McBryde is never explicitly political — yet she also doesn’t shy from topics like religion and inclusivity. “I was raised in a really, really rigid, strict Church of Christ home,” she says. “I was really successfully trained to fear, and we know that hate comes along with fear.” She’ll skip “Shut Up Sheila,” a potent rebuke of an imagined Bible-thumping relative off 2020’s Never Will, at some tour stops (it uses the word “goddamn”), but the refrain of “Gospel Night at the Strip Club” — “Hallelujah, Jesus loves the drunkards and the whores and the queers” — will never be censored. “It felt really good to say,” McBryde says of the track from 2022’s Lindeville, which, like Never Will, was nominated for best country album at the Grammys.
McBryde long wondered if she would ever get to the heart of Music Row, and now that she has, she still sometimes questions if she belongs. “You can’t change the direction the machine is going unless you’re inside it,” McBryde says. “You can’t change any of the rules unless you understand how it is played.”
Now she’s just trying not to push herself as hard as she felt she had to in those early days. She’s still working through the effects of a serious 2021 horseback riding accident and fought so hard to resume touring that at one point she was pushed up to the side stage in a wheelchair, then wheeled back to bed after her set. “On one hand, I’m a woman of country music, damn it, and this is what the f–k we’re made of,” she says. “On the other hand, something groundbreaking was learning to just stop and take care of myself.
“That’s something that’s different for me than it has ever been: I’m not in a hurry anymore,” McBryde concludes. “We’re good. It’s going to happen.”
This story will appear in the June 3, 2023, issue of Billboard.
For 2023, Billboard has introduced the Country Power Players’ Choice Award, a peer-voted accolade chosen by Billboard Pro members to honor the executive they believe has made the most impact across the country music business over the past year. Across three rounds of voting, Billboard Pro members have chosen Seth England, partner and CEO of […]
