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Chris Young shared an official message to fans on Thursday (Feb. 1) after Nashville District Attorney Glenn Funk previously dismissed all charges against the singer following Young’s alleged altercation at Nashville bar Dawg House with Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents. The incident led to a subsequent arrest with three misdemeanor charges.
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All charges against the singer were dismissed on Monday after security footage of the incident showed that Young had reached out to one of the agents, who then shoved Young to the floor of the bar (Young later released photos on Instagram that showed bruises the singer allegedly got from being shoved to the ground).
In a video message Young shared via Instagram, he spoke directly to fans and supporters, saying, “Hey guys, so I just wanted to say something. You know, I’m still processing a lot through the false accusations and everything that went on in the past week. But I wanted to say first and foremost, thank you to everybody that had my back. It meant the world to me and I had so many friends and fans reach out and say ‘We got you, we don’t believe you did any of this.’ So it’s really nice to see the charges get dismissed. It’s not something I wish anybody has to go through ever. But, like I said, the bright spot was seeing just all the love and support.”
As a thank you to his fans, Young revealed that he plans to release a new song at midnight: “Double Down,” from his upcoming album Young Love & Saturday Nights. Written by Monty Criswell, Derek George and Tyler Reeve, “Double Down” is one of 18 songs on the album, which is due March 22 via Sony Music Nashville.
“We’re going to put out ‘Double Down’ at midnight and I really hope you guys enjoy this one. Crank it up, enjoy it – I appreciate you, I love you, and thank you,” Young said.
Young previously addressed online trolls with a social media post that contained a clip of some security video footage of the incident. “For all the trolls saying ‘Don’t touch a cop,’ I didn’t touch him,” read text on the clip. He also captioned the video by addressing the online trolls directly, writing, “Stop coming at me.”
Young’s current single, the album’s title track, currently resides at No. 34 on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart.
Maren Morris and Ryan Hurd finalized their divorce on Thursday (Feb. 1), with a judge signing off on the agreement four months after the initial filing, according to court documents obtained by People. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news According to a settlement reached last month, Morris, 33, […]
Luke Combs and Tracy Chapman will team up to perform “Fast Car” during Sunday’s (Feb. 4) Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, Billboard confirms. Variety was first to report the news.
In 1988, Chapman’s version of “Fast Car” reached the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, but also became an enduring pop classic over the ensuing decades. Last year, Combs reached No. 2 on the same chart with his version of “Fast Car,” which also spent four weeks atop the Hot Country Songs chart.
In July, Chapman offered to Billboard a reaction to Combs’ success with a version of “Fast Car,” saying, “I never expected to find myself on the country charts, but I’m honored to be there. I’m happy for Luke and his success and grateful that new fans have found and embraced ‘Fast Car.’”
Chapman performed “Fast Car” as the closing performance during the Grammys telecast more than three decades ago, on Feb. 22, 1989. That evening, Chapman garnered three Grammy wins: best new artist, best female pop vocal performance for “Fast Car” and best contemporary recording for her eponymous debut project.
This year, Combs is nominated for best country solo performance for his version of Chapman’s “Fast Car.” He was previously announced as a performer on this year’s Grammys telecast, as part of the second group of performances revealed for this year’s show, though at the time, the Recording Academy had not mentioned the possibility of a collaboration performance. However, a live collaboration of the song has seemed like an inevitability, since Combs’ version of the song soared in popularity over the summer.
During the CMA Awards in November, “Fast Car” earned both single and song of the year, with the song of the year win making Chapman the first Black songwriter to take home that CMA accolade.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t join you all tonight,” Chapman said via a statement that was read from the stage during the CMA Awards. “It’s truly an honor for my song to be newly recognized after 35 years of its debut. Thank you to the CMAs and a special thanks to Luke and all of the fans of ‘Fast Car.’”
In recent weeks, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Doug Stone, John Michael Montgomery, Ray Stevens and Lee Greenwood have all publicly announced plans to wrap the road portion of their careers. They’re hardly alone.
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The Oak Ridge Boys started their farewell tour this past fall, though tenor Joe Bonsall, suffering from a neuromuscular disorder, was forced to hang it up at the end of December. Dolly Parton recently revealed that she had decided not to return to the road since she wrapped her last tour in 2016. Additionally, country/rock band The Ozark Mountain Daredevils and the Eagles, whose current lineup includes country artist Vince Gill, are also concluding their regular concert routines. (Gill will continue to work as a solo act.)
Retirement is a well-earned rite of passage for most people in later life, though there are plenty of musicians — Willie Nelson and the late Tony Bennett and B.B. King are good examples — who maintain a road life until their bodies give out. They find it difficult to stop, spurred by fan adoration, good paychecks and/or the simple joy of performing.
But this new wave of retirees is generally finding it easier to hang it up after experiencing an extended home life during the pandemic. Once their tours were canceled in 2020, most country artists found themselves anchored for 12 to 24 months. Artists in their prime couldn’t wait to get back out, but those on the back end of their careers began to recognize that if they ended their road-warrior phase, it wasn’t necessarily the end of the road.
“We got a dose of our real life,” Nitty Gritty Dirt Band co-founder Jeff Hanna says.
The benefits include the kinds of everyday events that can’t be experienced from 1,000 miles away: dinner with a spouse, attending a daughter’s graduation or playing with the grandkids in the backyard. Making music for a living is attractive — none of the retirees wish they’d dug ditches or balanced books instead — but it involves sacrifices, and they discovered the opportunity exists to stop and smell the roses at home.
“We’ve got enough to retire on, so why not enjoy the rest of my life with my family?” asks Stone, whose 13-year marriage has produced a 7-year-old daughter. “We love going to Disney. I want to go see the redwoods and stuff like that.”
That yearning to explore the world is part of the attraction for young musicians, and in the early years, America’s topographic diversity can help keep a touring job interesting. But heavy concert schedules don’t usually allow much time to play tourist. Stone remembers one trip in upstate New York when the bus came within a 10-minute drive of scenic Niagara Falls. They had to bypass it stay on time, and he has never been back.
“I didn’t get to see America,” he says. “I got to see the back seat of a bus.”
The current wave of road retirements is actually a sign that some of Nashville’s structural changes have worked. Many of country’s previous legends — Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers or 1960s/1970s-era George Jones — faced financial problems after spending lavishly during their peak commercial years. Since then, business management companies have sprouted, helping modern acts plan their financial futures. Where many of their predecessors were required to tour until they couldn’t stop, modern acts have options.
“Most of them over the decades have gotten smarter in terms of managing their finances,” says Action Entertain Collective booking agent Travis James, who represents Montgomery and several other ’90s-associated acts. “Are there exceptions to that? Sure. There’s always going to be people that piss their money away with divorce or drugs or whatever the case may be. That’s in accounting and that’s in the NFL — it’s in everything. But by and large, the artists that were viable enough to have long careers and a show full of hits, even if they didn’t do it right the first half of their career, they figured out how to do it right the second half.”
Not that everyone is thrilled about hanging it up. During the COVID-19 break in the concert schedule, The Oaks missed the stage, missed seeing their fans and longed to make music again.
“That’s all we do in our lives,” bass singer Richard Sterban says. “We go out and entertain people and help people with our music. And we were not able to do that, so we didn’t necessarily like that feeling.”
Still, long rides on a sedentary tour bus and the repetitive motion involved in making music take a toll. Greenwood has titanium knees after several surgeries and had back surgery in 2020. Hanna blew an Achilles tendon in 2019 and now walks for exercise instead of running. And he has experienced some issues with his left hand — “which is kind of the money hand on the guitar,” Hanna says. “I have to play a little differently now.”
The body sort of makes retirement inevitable for most — “Like [Jimmie] Fadden says, ‘Do the math,’ ” Hanna quips — but modern artists’ money management makes it easier to take that step.
Greenwood, Stevens and Stone all plan to conclude their regular concert schedules in 2024, while Montgomery expects to wrap in 2025. The Oaks and Nitty Gritty Dirt Band could go on for years, in some cases picking the venues based on sentiment rather than income.
“We would prefer to go back to familiar places, to go back to people that we know,” Sterban says. “Basically, we want to perform in front of people that have helped make us who we are today.”
But the demand goes up once promoters and fans realize the artist’s shows are coming to an end, which also increases the price for many bookings. That’s the good news for the agents, though farewell tours are bittersweet for them, as they lose valuable clients.
“When they tell me they can cut back, that doesn’t help my financial bottom line,” James says. “I can’t sit here and tell you that I’m necessarily happy about it, but I sure am proud that I was part of the solution in helping them fulfill their goals professionally.”
If they retire early enough, the artists may be preserving themselves, too. Extended travel is physically challenging at any age. They’ll very likely miss the stage, but maybe not the wear and tear required to get there.
“I want to be on the planet,” Stone says, “not in it.”
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In 2020, bluegrass group Sister Sadie made history by becoming the first all-female group to win the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA)’s coveted top honor: entertainer of the year. That same year, the group earned vocal group of the year, while Sister Sadie member Deanie Richardson became the second woman in 30 years to win the IBMA’s fiddle player of the year. The group originally formed in December 2012, with a lineup that included Gena Britt, Deanie Richardson, Dale Ann Bradley, Tina Adair and Beth Lawrence.
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But over the past four years, Sister Sadie has weathered changes both external and internal — from pandemic shutdowns to the exits of group members, including Adair and Bradley. The group’s two remaining founders, Deanie Richardson and Gena Britt, have forged ahead with Sister Sadie — and in the process, are welcoming a new generation to the group’s mission of putting talented women bluegrass players in the spotlight.
Fiddle player Richardson has spent years touring with artists including Patty Loveless and Bob Seger, while banjoist/vocalist Britt’s resume has included time as part groups including New Vintage and The Daughters of Bluegrass. Rounding out Sister Sadie are the newest members Jaelee Roberts (guitar/vocals), Dani Flowers (guitar/vocals) and the group’s youngest member, 19-year-old Maddie Dalton (bass/vocals). Roberts joined in 2020, followed by Flowers in 2022 and in 2023, Dalton.
“Personnel changes are always hard because everything changes—the energy, the sound,” Richardson tells Billboard via Zoom. “With personnel changes, it’s like, ‘Do we call it or do we try to reinvent this thing?’ We decided to keep going forward.”
The relational ties with some of the newer members run deep, particularly with Roberts. “I grew up playing in a band [New Tradition] with Jaelee’s dad when I was a teenager,” Richardson says, “and [Gena] grew up playing in a band [Petticoat Junction] with Jaelee’s mom when she was a teenager, and now we are in a band with Jaelee.”
The group’s latest album, No Fear, which came out Jan. 26, marks the group’s first full-fledged project with their new label Mountain Home, where they signed in 2022.
“With all the personnel changes happening, we just felt it was time for a change,” Richardson says of leaving former label Pinecastle Records and joining Mountain Home. “Gena and I went to Mountain Home and just thought it would be a good spot to land. We started making calls, chatting with labels and seeing what family feels right to work with, and this felt right.”
For some of the newer members, crafting the album came with career milestones and unique challenges.
“The funny part is they all went into the studio and recorded, and I had my college finals, so I couldn’t make it for the first round, but in the second round of session I went in and just loved getting to hear all of this music come to life,” Roberts said, while Dalton called the sessions “a whirlwind of an experience and so fun,” noting that making the album marked her first time playing bass in a professional studio setting, just two weeks after joining Sister Sadie.
The album’s 13 tracks span straightforward bluegrass to folk, traditional country and more, anchored by each of the group’s members’ individual musical proclivities.
“It’s a reflection of all of us, because our individual personalities come out in the record,” Britt said. “We just love songs and songwriters. When we are making a record, we start a Dropbox and everyone starts throwing songs we love into that Dropbox and we start picking things out. There’s some electric guitar on this album, some piano and drums and a B-3 organ—some things that are way outside of the Sister Sadie box, but I love where it’s heading.”
Some of those favorited compositions are pulled from the country genre, including Cam’s 2017 single “Diane,’ which flips the script on Dolly Parton’s classic “Jolene.”
“I played in the band at the Opry and I was on one night and Cam walked out and I was playing mandolin. She did that song and I was floored. I thought, ‘It sounds like an old ‘70s pop song.’ I sent it to the girls and they loved it as much as I did. The song wasn’t a huge hit, but we loved it and it has been a crowd favorite.”
Two other songs, “Willow” and “Ode to the Ozarks,” were co-written by country singer-songwriter and Grammy winner Ashley McBryde, who also lends her vocals to “Ode to the Ozarks.”
“Ashley is one of my best friends,” Flowers says, recalling that the two met in a songwriting session, and that McBryde was a contributor to “Something to Lose,” featured on 2018 album Sister Sadie II, “We love her and she’s always been such a great supporter and came to my first show with Sister Sadie at [Nashville music venue] Station Inn and sang with us on the Opry. She’s a big part of Sister Sadie—she’s Sister Ashley.”
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“When I saw Sister Sadie live for the first time, I was like, ‘Okay, now I’m obsessed,’” McBryde told Billboard via a statement. “I found out through Dani Flowers (we’ve been friends for over a decade), that they were thinking about cutting ‘Willow,’ a song I had written quite a few years ago. Then I found out they were also gonna cut ‘Ode to the Ozarks,’ and I was so tickled. Deanie called and asked if I would come and sing on ‘Ode to the Ozarks,’ and I was blown away. I love the whole record and I’m still obsessed with Sister Sadie.”
“If We Ain’t Drinkin’ Then We’re Fighting” is an older song, written by Richardson and former Sister Sadie member Adair.
“I was in a marriage that just kind of went south and was not in a good place,” Richardson says. “The only thing we really looked forward to every day was like, ‘What are we drinking tonight? What cocktail are we making?’ and I said to Tina one day, ‘It’s just no fun over here. If we’re not drinking, we’re fighting. And she was like, ‘Oh my god, let’s write that.’ So it was a quick write, and there was some comedic tinge to it. The feel is more Reno and Smiley, just real swingy old-school bluegrass.”
Dalton takes the lead on “Mississippi River Long,” a song Flowers co-wrote when she was 19.
“Maddie joined as we were finishing up the record,” Flowers says. “We knew she was a great bass player, but I didn’t realize how great of a singer she is until we heard her at a festival and knew she needed to sing on this record. I’m so happy this song has new life.”
The group’s accolades are a testament to the skill and determination of its members, especially in a male-dominated genre. Richardson says the group’s all-female lineup hasn’t been a deterrent.
“I am a gay woman in bluegrass music, and I have never ever had an issue,” Richardson says. “I don’t feel like us being women has really hindered us. The only thing I’ve ever noticed is they’re only going to book one female band at a festival. That’s the only really negative downside I’ve ever seen. We’ve got a great career. For me and us, I don’t feel like it’s ever been an issue. I know it has been for lots of people, but we just try to stay positive and give it hell and see what happens.”
Even while earning top awards from the IBMAs, Sister Sadie didn’t have a booking agent or manager and was booking shows and facilitating its own business operations. That’s changed, as they’ve now signed with Madison House for booking, and began working with manager Chris Segal. The Sister Sadie members say they are dedicated to forging ahead, even as they balance roles as musicians with other responsibilities including jobs (Richardson works at a bank and Britt at a glasses retailer), school and family.
“We do as much as we can and we also have jobs and kids,” Richardson said. “We started this thing as a pet project. We were like, ‘Let’s get these amazing women together and play when we can.’ Then that developed into tour dates and records and IBMA Awards, but it was organic and we never really went in 100% on this. So we had this conversation of ‘What if we got managers and agents and the right combo of amazing, talented, strong-ass women and really went at this 100%? What would happen? So that’s where we’re headed.”
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Zach Bryan has dropped more details about a project with actor Matthew McConaughey, which Bryan had previously teased on social media. On Tuesday (Jan. 30), the “I Remember Everything” singer revealed that McConaughey is set to appear in the upcoming music video for his song “Nine Ball,” which was included on his 2023 EP Boys […]
In the span of a few short years, reigning CMA entertainer of the year Lainey Wilson has lit up television screens as part of the hit television series Yellowstone, on awards show stages, and in her own music videos. But on Super Bowl Sunday (Feb. 11), Wilson will get one of her biggest television spotlights yet, thanks to a cameo in the upcoming Coors Light Super Bowl ad, which will feature the return of the Coors Light Chill Train, and Billboard has an exclusive behind-the-scenes photo above.
“I think my family’s going to freak out when they see me on a commercial during the Super Bowl,” Wilson tells Billboard. “It was such a dream to be in my first big game day and just help reintroduce the Coors Light iconic Chill Train to bring a little bit of that chill that everybody needs. We need that chill out from time to time.”
Wilson is highlighted in the ad, in a scene that features the singer-songwriter in the middle of a photo shoot when the Coors Light Chill Train whizzes by, leaving Wilson in the frost.
“I was doing a photo shoot with my old trusty guitar and a horse that Coors Light hooked me up with,” says Wilson, who filmed her cameo at Los Angeles’ Paramount Studio. “We had some really cool frosted makeup effects and we got to do a lot of fake snow in my hair and eyelashes and stuff. I got to do something that I’ve never done and got to be creative in different kind of ways, which is always fun for me.”
Wilson’s cameo in the Coors Light Super Bowl ad is part of a larger, multi-year partnership between the musician and Coors Light, which will also serve as the official partner for her 2024 Country’s Cool Again tour, which launches May 31 at Nashville’s Ascend Amphitheater.
Wilson will get to see the Kansas City Chiefs take on the San Francisco 49ers in person this year when she attends the game in Las Vegas.
“I’m excited to see me some [Super Bowl Halftime Show performer] Usher, and I’m excited for the game, too,” she said. “This is my second year to ever go to the Super Bowl, and any time you get invited to go to the Super Bowl, you go. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I’m getting to go with some of my friends and other artists. It’s going to be a party.”
Speaking of parties, Wilson also dished on some of her favorite Super Bowl party snacks.
“I’m from Louisiana, so we’re going to keep it spicy and then cool it down with a bit of Coors Light. I love jalapeño poppers, the jalapeños with the cream cheese and wrapped in bacon. I could eat my weight in those, and then some good chips and salsa, some queso — anything with a little kick in it.”
As for which team Wilson might be rooting for during the Super Bowl, she quips, “Oh Lord have mercy. I’m going to be wearing red either way, right? I will say I did get to meet [Chiefs players] Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes. They came to a show of mine last summer and they’re really great people. So, if I had to root for somebody, it might be them.”
Not only will fans see Wilson in the new Super Bowl ad, they can be part of it, too. The new Coors Light Super Bowl spot will also harness the power of CGI, allowing 100 “passengers” to “book” a seat on the Coors Light Chill Train — including seats next to Wilson. Coors Light will release an extended “slo-mo” version of the ad online on game day so that viewers can see all 100 passengers on board as the Coors Light Chill Train rolls by. Coors Light will open up new batches of seats for booking daily at 1 p.m. ET through Friday, Feb. 2, at coorslightchilltrain.com. Once a “passenger” confirms a seat, they can upload a photo of themselves, which will be dropped into the advertisement through CGI. Passengers who secure a seat will also receive an official contract, $500 in talent fees for being in the spot and limited-edition commemorative swag.
Prior to launching her Country’s Cool Again tour, Wilson will head to Australia and Europe for a run of shows. She has also been in the studio working on new music, saying, “I feel like I’m always writing for the next record, and I’m so excited about the stuff we are working on now.”
Given the success of not only her solo hits, but her collabs with artists including Jelly Roll (their Grammy-nominated track “Save Me”) and HARDY (the multiple CMA Award-winning “Wait in the Truck”), Wilson says she’s hopeful her next project will feature some collabs, too.
“I’m excited to have some collaborations of my own, hopefully,” Wilson says. “Fingers crossed, we can get it all worked out, but the more the merrier. I’m all about collaborating.”
Though all charges against singer-songwriter Chris Young were recently dropped a following his arrest after an alleged incident that took place at Nashville bar Dawg House on Jan. 22 between Young and Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents, it seems some online trolls are still coming after Young.
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The singer has posted a video on TikTok, with a message for those who have continued suggesting that Young was in the wrong.
He shared a clip of the security footage of the incident on social media, and wrote alongside the video: “For all the trolls saying ‘Don’t touch a cop,’ I didn’t touch him.” He also captioned the video, “Stop coming at me.”
Billboard has reached out to Young’s team for comment.
The arrest affidavit, which WSMV and The Tennessean obtained, noted that Young had been at Nashville bar Tin Roof on Jan. 22, when the TNABC agents were doing compliance checks on various bars in the area. The affidavit stated that the agents checked Young’s ID and that he questioned and videotaped them before following them to Dawg House. According to the affidavit filing, Young then “struck” one of the agents on the shoulder as they were leaving. Young was charged with three misdemeanors that have since been dropped: resisting arrest, assaulting an officer and disorderly conduct.
However, security footage from the incident appeared to show that Young had not behaved aggressively toward the agents. Instead, he seemed to reach out to get an agent’s attention, and then was pushed to the floor by an ABC officer. The musician got up, put his hands up and began backing away from the agents, as one stepped forward to begin speaking with Young.
That security footage was part of the reviewed evidence that led to Nashville District Attorney Glenn Funk dropping all charges against the singer on Jan. 26, stating, “Regarding the Chris Young incident, after a review of all the evidence in this case, the Office of the District Attorney has determined that these charges will be dismissed.”
After the charges were dropped, Young’s attorney Bill Ramsey said in a statement, “Mr. Young and I are gratified with the DA’s decision clearing him of the charges and any wrongdoing.”
Young will release his ninth studio album, Young Love & Saturday Nights, via Sony Music Nashville, on March 22. Young has earned 11 No. 1 Billboard Country Airplay hits since his debut in 2006, including “I’m Comin’ Over,” “Voices” and “At the End of a Bar.”
The history of the rodeo is closely intertwined with country music, to the point that it has played a role in a fair amount of the genre’s hits.
George Strait’s “Amarillo by Morning,” Moe Bandy’s “Bandy the Rodeo Clown,” Suzy Bogguss’ “Someday Soon,” Dan Seals’ “Everything That Glitters (Is Not Gold)” and Garth Brooks’ “Rodeo” and “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)” embraced the sport’s lifestyle for their storylines. And the rodeo provided a useful metaphor in Leon Everette’s “Midnight Rodeo,” Jake Owen’s “Eight Second Ride” and Vern Gosdin’s “This Ain’t My First Rodeo.”
Gosdin’s title, which was built on a familiar adage, gets reversed in Restless Road’s new single, “Last Rodeo,” applying images from the arena to a broken relationship.
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“I’ve always heard people talk about, you know, ‘This isn’t my first rodeo,’ ” says group member Colton Pack, “but I’ve never heard anybody do the flip and the play on words of saying, ‘It’s not my last rodeo.’ ”
That changed when Pack spotted some form of the “last rodeo” phrase in public, most likely on a T-shirt, and he logged it into his phone as a potential hook. He unpacked it on April 3, 2023, when the band had a co-writing session with Trannie Anderson (“Heart Like a Truck,” “Wildflowers and Wild Horses”) at the home studio of songwriter-producer Lindsay Rimes (“World on Fire,” “Love You Back”) in West Nashville. The appointment was a challenge. Anderson had a last-minute lunch with Lainey Wilson to celebrate “Heart Like a Truck,” and to accommodate it, they started at 9 a.m.
“In our world, that might as well be frickin’ 4 a.m.,” Restless Road’s Zach Beeken notes.
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They felt pressure, given that they had a tight three hours to make something happen, but Pack’s “this ain’t my last rodeo” suggestion gave them something strong to work with out of the gate. The phrase applied to someone rebounding after getting dumped, and it fit the perseverance the band needed to keep pushing forward after its formation in 2013 on NBC’s The X Factor.
“I’m not a cowboy at all,” says tenor Garrett Nichols. “I didn’t grow up around riding bulls or riding broncos, but every time we would spit out a lyric, I could definitely see into it. I related to the past heartbreak stuff, I related to ‘Back in the saddle, back on the road’ [or] ‘I might be bruised, but I ain’t broke.’ I just thought about all the different times that we’ve tried to do this and that, and it didn’t work out, and we just kept going.”
They dove into the chorus first, bookending the stanza with the hook at the front and the back. They filled it with an anthemic melody designed to showcase their harmonies, with Nichols on the high end and Beeken in the lower register.
“One of our biggest challenges, being a trio and doing what we do, is finding a key for the song that works for everybody’s voice,” Beeken says. “We’ll find the key we can push Garrett to, to where it’s like, ‘This is as high as it can go, I can’t go any higher,’ trying to find the range for him because the chorus is the part of the song you want to soar and smack the hardest.”
Once they had a good overview of the chorus, they were better able to start solving pieces of the puzzle in other sections, too. “We kind of worked on different sections,” says Anderson. “I remember getting the chorus structure kind of figured out and filling in most of the lines, but then singing the verse for a while. I remember popcorning a little bit.”
They loaded the text with rodeo and cowboy allegory, though the words fit so easily that the references aren’t always obvious.
“It needed rodeo language, but not so much that it took the raw emotion out of it,” Anderson says. “And there was a lot of raw emotion in the room writing the song because of what they’ve been through as a band, but also, Zach had just gone through a breakup and was able to write through that [experience], too. Finding the balance of raw emotion and playing on the metaphor was a pretty natural thing.”
Once the verses became clearer, they popcorned back to the chorus to tie up some of the loose ends, but a mistake actually improved it. That section originally began on the downbeat of a measure, but they sang the hook this time as a pickup to the next line, and it changed how the rest of the chorus unfolded.
“This drops harder in the chorus, [with] the music cutting out and then hitting the chorus [hard],” Rimes says. “We had some of the lyric in there, but we had to add stuff in, in the middle of the chorus. We kind of had a bit more space because it was starting earlier than before.”
Rimes filled that space with an obvious audience-participation part, threading an easy-to-remember “ride, ride, ride” lyric, ideally designed for pumping fists in the air on an arena floor.
They wrote it quickly enough that Anderson made her lunch with Wilson, and Rimes continued working with Restless Road on a demo. Beeken sang the first verse; Pack took the second, one octave higher; and the full force of the harmonies raised the impact even more on the chorus.
The band joked about adding a neighing horse to the intro, and Rimes quickly inserted that sound from his plug-in collection. When the group prodded further about having a horse galloping off in the closing moments, Rimes pulled up that effect, too. They never expected to keep those sounds, though they provide another means of separating “Last Rodeo” from the pack.
“We just thought that was hysterical when we made the demo,” recalls Rimes. “But it stayed in there, and then we got used to it. It’s actually pretty cool.”
The band had a 3 p.m. appointment with the label, and when the group left the studio, Rimes finished the demo and sent it in the middle of the meeting. As a result, RCA approved it for the next session within hours of being written.
They recorded the final version at Nashville’s Soundstage, mixing in new parts from studio players with some of the remnants from Rimes’ demo, including arena-level drums. Restless Road likewise bolstered its original demo vocals with additional takes, filling out the chorus harmonies by doubling all three guys’ voices. Beeken also slipped in a unison part one octave below the melody, thickening the whole sound.
Nichols, in addition to singing high harmonies, contributed a signature whistle — with shades of ’60s Sergio Leone western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. “I don’t know why, but I’m just really good at whistling,” Nichols says. “We did it a couple times, put some reverb on it and then just slapped it in.”
RCA Nashville released “Last Rodeo” to country radio via PlayMPE on Dec. 11 with an official add date of Jan. 29. Its message, filtered through an image of a cowboy getting back in the saddle after being thrown, is fairly universal; resilience is a highly admired quality, for Restless Road and for everyone else.
“The chorus can apply to anything in life,” Pack says, “whether that be a relationship, whether that be somebody standing in the way of a dream, whether that be telling yourself, ‘You know what? I can bounce back.’ ”
Reba McEntire has a new comedy series in the works, and the yet-untitled series just got a pilot order from NBC in collaboration with Universal Television, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news The multi-hyphenate entertainer and businesswoman — who is also gearing […]