Country
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Miranda Lambert has always been in her songwriting era. From her very first charted song on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, “Me and Charlie Talking,” which Lambert co-wrote with her father Rick Lambert and fellow songwriter Heather Little, the Lindale, Tex. native has consistently chased her own vision for her music — resisting the influence […]
“I Remember Everything” hitmaker Zach Bryan is set to help launch the second year of the Bud Light Backyard Tour, headlining The Bud Light Backyard Tour Presents Zach Bryan during Super Bowl LVIII weekend, on Friday, Feb. 9, 2024, at the 3,000-capacity The Chelsea at The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. The show will take place two days prior to Super Bowl LVIII at the city’s Allegiant Stadium.
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Leon Bridges, known for songs including “Coming Home” and “July,” will open the show.
Bryan, who grew up in a military family and served in the U.S. Navy for eight years, noted the event’s integration with the nonprofit Folds of Honor, which aids families of fallen and disabled service members and first responders.
”I’ve been drinking Bud Light since I was old enough to drink, and partnering with them now after all the songs I’ve written while swigging them is full circle for me,” Bryan said in statement. “When Bud Light asked if I would be involved, I didn’t hesitate after I learned the immense amount of support going into Folds of Honor, fallen service members, first responders’ families and loved ones. It is a privilege and honor to provide help in any way to veterans and all the people who make this country as great as it can possibly be.”
Since releasing his breakthrough top 10 Billboard Hot 100 song “Something in the Orange,” Bryan has skyrocketed into a stadium-headlining artist. This year, he earned his first Hot 100 No. 1 with the Kacey Musgraves duet “I Remember Everything” (which also spent seven weeks atop the Hot Country Songs chart), while his self-titled album vaulted to the top of the all-genre Billboard 200 albums chart.
“Anheuser-Busch and our brands have brought unparalleled experiences to football fans and to country music lovers for decades. We could not be more excited to partner with Zach Bryan and to showcase his all-star talent during Super Bowl LVIII weekend,” said Brendan Whitworth, CEO, Anheuser-Busch. “All of us at Anheuser-Busch are thrilled to work alongside Zach to bring positive experiences to country music fans and to local communities nationwide.“
“Bud Light has always been at the center of great music moments, we couldn’t be more excited to return to our country music roots by teaming up with Zach Bryan, who is one of the most compelling artists in country music right now,” said Todd Allen, VP of Marketing for Bud Light. “Bryan is known for connecting with and bringing fans together, and we can’t wait to put on a great show for fans ahead of the Super Bowl.”
Tickets to The Bud Light Backyard Tour Presents Zach Bryan will be on sale beginning Thursday (Nov. 16) at 3 p.m. ET, with tickets selling for $20. Future dates on the tour have yet to be announced, and the tour is separate from Bryan’s own Quittin’ Time Tour, which launches in March.
The 2024 Bud Light Backyard Tour builds upon previous events including Bud Light Super Bowl Music Fest, Bud Light Dive Bar Tour and the Bud Light Seltzer Sessions. Earlier this year, artists including Midland and OneRepublic were announced as part of the Bud Light Backyard Tour summer concert series. The slate of country and country-adjacent shows follow the recent controversy and backlash that ensued against Bud Light and its parent company Anheuser-Busch, after the company teamed with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney, who posted a video on social media featuring a customized can of Bud Light that Mulvaney received from the company.
Artists including Kid Rock and Travis Tritt spoke out against the brand, while Bryan offered his thoughts on the controversy and spoke out against Tritt, saying via X (formerly Twitter), “I just think insulting transgender people is completely wrong because we live in a country where can all just be who we want to be,” and later adding in comments that he has “family transitioning” and “blood to defend here.”
In late 1996, when John Denver and his band visited a Nashville studio to re-record signature hits like “Sunshine On My Shoulders” and “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” he was not exactly compatible with RCA Records, the label that helped the soft-spoken singer-songwriter sell 33 million albums over his career.
Two years earlier, in his autobiography, he’d called RCA “an organization of pure opportunists” and declared it “not only lacked interest in promoting my albums, they were no longer interested in releasing them.”
So he pulled a Taylor Swift — when 7-year-old Taylor probably had no idea what a master recording even was.
With regulars such as bassist Alan Deremo and the late guitarist Pete Huttlinger, Denver created new masters for the old songs, to be owned exclusively by his indie label, Windstar Records. He was considering releasing the tracks when he died at 53 in a plane crash in late 1997. After that, Windstar put them out as a limited-edition European album, but they never came out officially in the United States — until Friday (Nov. 17), when his estate releases The Last Recordings.
“It’s always a good time to release what we have,” says Amy Abrams, who co-manages Denver’s estate with Brian Schwartz of 7S Management in Denver. “John would have been 80 this year. We recently passed 25 years since he passed away. We want to make sure fans have access to those recordings.”
Abrams says Denver’s estate, which includes his children Zak Deutschendorf, Anna Kate Hutter and Jesse Belle Denver, has a “fine working relationship” these days with RCA and its parent company, Sony, which has put out box sets such as 2011’s 25-disc The RCA Albums Collection. (A Sony representative declined to comment, as did Denver’s children.)
But in 1996, the activist and singer-songwriter was angry with RCA, which, in Take Me Home: An Autobiography, he had accused of turning down his Perhaps Love album and pushing him to record an “ersatz” country album called Some Days Are Diamonds instead. He was relishing his time as an independent artist. “The mood was laid back,” recalls Chris Nole, who played piano and keyboards on the re-recording session. “It was always relaxed, because we didn’t have a record label or manager breathing down our necks. It was just making John happy.”
The 1996 sessions took less than a week to record, and “let me tell you, they went fast.” Nole adds: “John was not an overdub king, punching one word five or six times. We would get them in one or two takes.” Deremo says Denver’s band had worked out the new arrangements in concert over the previous few years, and basically played them live in the Nashville studio: “If there was any conversation about how to approach the songs, it was just that we would execute them the way we were playing them live at the time.”
The most striking thing about The Last Recordings is Denver’s voice — deeper and a touch more gravely than the one on his ’70s hits. “He lost a lot of the boyish quality that his voice had early on,” Deremo says. “It ripened into a really full, beautiful-sounding instrument.”
Denver returned to the studio in 1997 to make his final RCA album, All Aboard!, a collection of train-song covers that came out shortly before his death in October. The songs on The Last Recordings have since trickled out over the years, titled A Celebration of Life, among other things. “His motivation was likely to have creative control,” Abrams says. “He wanted to give his fans ‘John’s Version,’ with more lived experience and musical development behind it.”
Dylan Gossett has turned “Coal” into a diamond this year.
The 24-year-old Texan earned a streaming hit with the self-written song, which reached the top 5 on Spotify’s all-genre Viral 50 chart and has amassed 3.5 million on-demand official U.S. streams, according to Luminate. “Coal” currently stands at No. 35 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart.
Initially self-released, “Coal” is now the cornerstone of Gossett’s new EP, No Better Time (released Oct. 27), while the singer is newly signed to Big Loud Texas/Mercury Records in collaboration with Range Media Partners. Big Loud Texas was recently launched as a venture between Miranda Lambert, Jon Randall and Big Loud Records.
“Tyler [Arnold] and Jake [Levensohn] from Mercury flew down to Texas to meet with me, and we instantly clicked,” says Gossett of his signing. “After meeting with Jon, Miranda and Seth [England] from Big Loud, it was a dream scenario to be able to combine forces and do this all together as a team.”
Gossett wrote “Coal” nearly two years ago and, at the time, had no plans to make music professionally. His biggest goal was playing for family gatherings at his grandfather’s lake house.
“Whenever holidays like Thanksgiving or Easter come around, my brother, parents, cousins, we all sit around a campfire and pass guitars around,” Gossett says. “Mainly, me, my brother and my cousin would play songs we wrote, but everyone would sing.”
Earlier this year, Gossett began posting songs on TikTok, including covers of The Lumineers’ “Ophelia” and Flatland Cavalry’s “A Life Where We Work Out.” In June, he released the original song “To Be Free,” which earned 519,000 on-demand official U.S. streams, according to Luminate. But “Coal,” released in July, proved to be his breakthrough, bolstering his Spotify count to more than 4 million monthly listeners.
“‘Coal’ is just a meaningful song I wrote about a tougher time,” Gossett says. “I felt like I was in a bit of a rut with my career and had some family things going on. Writing that song helped me to mentally just get through it and I think that’s why it’s so relatable to people as well — everybody goes through these types of things every day. When I saw the response to the video I put online of ‘Coal,’ I told my wife, Julia, ‘I have to record this song right now.’ I had a mic that Julia got me for Christmas and a little audio box, and recorded ‘Coal’ on my laptop, just sitting in my bedroom.”
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The song anchors No Better Time, a homespun project that Gossett fully wrote, recorded, produced and mixed on his laptop in the bedroom of the couple’s home just outside of Austin. The project debuted at No. 7 on Billboard’s Heatseekers Albums Chart.
“I played all the instruments, except for [the] fiddle parts. I had a good friend come in and play those — I can’t play fiddle,” he says with a laugh. “The cover art is a photo my friend Billy took of me recording. It fully encompasses a homemade project. It’s inspiring that you can have a really cool sounding record, literally just from your bedroom with a hundred bucks of equipment.”
Every song on No Better Time is threaded through with Gossett’s poetic lyrics. “What does it take to feel alive?/ Do you need the lows to love the highs?” he asks on “Flip a Coin.” He muses that “Sweat on your skin is better than regret on your heart” in the encouraging “No Better Time” and paints a story of a gunslinger’s last moments in “Lone Ole Cowboy” with the lyric, “I hear the bullets fly as I make my final stand/ I’m a man with a gun shaking in my hand.”
He describes “Lone Ole Cowboy” as reminiscent of “Colter Wall kind of stuff. I always joke that I’m not a cowboy, but I like writing songs about them. And the song is all in major chords, so it’s one of the happier murder ballads out there,” he adds with a chuckle, noting that he and his brother had to get resourceful to get the steel guitar sound on the song. “We didn’t have a steel guitar, so my brother put his guitar on his lap and played it with like an Xbox controller or a remote.”
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Gossett’s first musical influences were formed around the fifth grade, when he was inspired by such Ed Sheeran songs as “The A Team” and “Give Me Love.”
“I could just picture the song in my head when he sang it,” Gossett recalls. “I got a guitar for my birthday and just started learning to play. When I heard his ‘+’ album, it just sounded so different from what I was hearing on the radio every day. That just changed my whole world of music.”
Gossett studied at Texas A&M University and, in 2021, he began interning in event operations and logistics for Formula 1 Circuit of the Americas racetrack in Austin. He stationed his parents’ RV just outside the track for three months while he sometimes worked 20-hour shifts. He was offered a job a few months later.
“When F1 comes to town, it’s the craziest couple of weeks of your life if you are a worker there. But it helped me in knowing how to deal with high-intensity situations. The adversity you are used to in the event world, it helps when you are on the road and you just have to adapt to changing situations.”
Gossett was working at the racetrack when calls from labels began pouring in after the success of “Coal.”
“It was hectic for a while—it felt like all the labels were calling,” he recalls. “I told my boss, ‘I need to take PTO for a week and figure things out.’” He officially quit his job at the racetrack in September to focus on music.
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“They asked me to sing the national anthem there a few weeks ago. I was up in the tower singing and I could literally see where my RV used to be,” he adds of his Oct. 22 performance at the F1 Finale in Austin.
Gossett has been steadily piling up concert appearances touring Wyatt Flores and Brent Cobb with more shows to come this year with Luke Grimes and Kolby Cooper. He’s slated to make his first festival appearance at SXSW next year, and will open shows for Midland.
Following No Better Time’s stripped-down style, Gossett predicts a full-band album release in 2024.
“No Better Time shows who I am right now as a songwriter and artist. It’s all just homemade and that’s so important to me. I have a lot of songs I want to build out in a bigger way, but I can’t bring the full drum kit into my bedroom,” he says with a laugh. “This project is more stripped back and I don’t think I’ll ever lose that sound, but I definitely want more songs with a bigger bang to them.”
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The moment that set Parmalee apart from its competition early into its career is also one that the band wished had never happened.
On Sept. 21, 2010, two robbers held up the group on its bus in the early morning following a show in Rock Hill, S.C. Drummer Scott Thomas shot and killed one of the assailants, but he was also hit by three bullets and went into a coma that lasted two weeks. For many acts, it would have literally been the end of the road. But Parmalee rallied together like a band of brothers — appropriate since Scott and lead singer Matt Thomas are indeed siblings and bassist Barry Knox is a cousin — and the group returned to its touring routine barely three months later, beginning with a New Year’s Eve show in Greenville, N.C.
After signing with Stoney Creek in 2011, the band released its debut single, the banging party song “Musta Had a Good Time.” But instead of playing off the tragedy to raise its profile, Parmalee — which includes guitarist Josh McSwain — did its best to avoid the topic. The guys wanted to be known first and foremost for their music, and the post-show shootout was tough to discuss.
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“We kind of steered away from it,” Scott says. “If somebody asked us, we would talk about it, but we didn’t make it a point. [It was] probably just [our] healing process.”
While the band had some hits with a sound that evolved into mainstream country-rock, Parmalee found its commercial groove in 2020 after teaming with Blanco Brown on the lighter pop tune “Just the Way.” It became the group’s second No. 1 single, which the act followed with the Country Airplay chart-topping wedding song “Take My Name” and the hypnotically sweet No. 3 single “Girl in Mine.” But when Matt went into a writing session on June 6, 2022, the goal was to morph their sound once more — leaning into the timbre of his voice.
“He can sing so high, and he can sing these crazy melodies, and we’ve never gotten to fully show that,” says producer David Fanning (Thompson Square, Avery Anna), who also manages the band and serves as a frequent co-writer. “That day, to me, was one of the beginning times of ‘Hey, let’s start showing what you can do. Let’s start shining a light on that.’ ”
Teaming with songwriters Abram Dean and Andy Sheridan, Fanning and Matt took that goal to an anthemic level, aiming for a song that could work as a film’s end theme à la “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing” in Armageddon.
“We wanted a grand melody, we wanted a grand idea, we wanted classic-sounding chord changes,” Matt recalls. “Something big and universal was really the thinking.”
The chord changes fit that movie-theme ideal. A simple, descending pattern (A-minor-7, G, F) delivered a rock texture — a dark sound that, coupled with a hopeful story, had epic potential.
“It is full of tension,” says Matt, “but it’s a positive message.”
The opening verse promises delivers two promises: “You’re never gonna be alone” and “I’ll never be far away” — both pledges that seem particularly large coming from a band of traveling musicians whose life requires them to be away from home. Delivered over a pulsing piano that harkens to 1980s Chicago, the song ultimately lands at a heavier-sounding chorus that contemplates the couple in question as action heroes battling the world. In that stanza, the singer’s feelings become clear as he takes his last breath, announcing, “I’m gonna love you.” It was only when that melody arrived that the “Gonna Love You” title emerged.
The four writers worked diligently to craft a universal text of unending commitment, but while the sentiment was significant, evaluating their progress was difficult. The typical country song references specific, visual images — furniture, in Nashville songwriter parlance — but a song like “Gonna Love You” employs more ethereal, less defined, aesthetics.
“Writing a song that lives in the emotional world, personally, I feel like it’s harder, especially if you second-guess yourself,” Fanning says. “But also, I think it’s a chance for you to just say what you want. Hopefully, people realize, ‘Hey, they’re coming from a real spot, and we feel that way, too.’”
At the end of the day, it needed a bridge, but the writers weren’t sure where it needed to go. So they let it sit, and Matt and Fanning worked at it for months, periodically texting each other ideas for that last section or working through it in the lounge on the bus. Eventually, they used that bridge to refocus on long-term commitment, contemplating “our last day” and “the last words off of my lips.”
The demo pointed quite obviously to where the song needed to go, and the recorded version — cut at Nashville’s Soundstage — blended the Chicago vibe with other compelling elements: 3 Doors Down-like power-ballad guitar chords, old-school-pop electric piano, breezy finger snaps and hard-country steel guitar.
“We came from all that stuff,” says Matt. “That’s the music and the style that really impacts me as a writer and singer, and us as a band.”
As they lived with the song, Fanning and the Thomas brothers all separately began associating the epic nature of the production with Parmalee’s dramatic backstory. They had never embraced it publicly, but pairing the shooting with the emotional message in “Gonna Love You” — hanging together under duress, the threat that Scott could breathe his final breath at any moment — would easily explain the depth of the band’s bond.
On Oct. 3, Stoney Creek released “Gonna Love You” to country radio via PlayMPE. One week later, on Oct. 10, Parmalee filmed the video with the blood and violence from the robbery limited to short, crucial moments, while a replay of the workman-like club show and the traumatic hospital scenes propel the narrative. The video challenged the band internally as the musicians relived their precarious past. They processed some of the grief and fear that had lingered for 13 years, and they anticipate that recounting of their most tenuous evening will help fans better understand the band. It might also help some of those fans process their own pain. Just don’t expect Parmalee to make that incident central to its public marketing beyond this particular video.
“We’re always going to be uncomfortable talking about it,” Scott says. “I don’t think that’ll ever change, but [the video] worked out great.”
That video is expected to arrive Nov. 25. Meanwhile, “Gonna Love You” debuted at No. 60 on the Country Airplay chart dated Nov. 18, beginning a run that Parmalee hopes will vault it back to the top rungs of the list.
“It’s easy for me to sing, and every time I hear the song, I’m in the mood,” says Matt. “This is a special song.”
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After a blockbuster year for country music, the members of Lady A — Charles Kelley, Hillary Scott and Dave Haywood — are ready to break down why they think the genre is having such a moment. In a new interview with Billboard News, the country trio explains that the mixing of genres through streaming consumption […]
Sixteen-year-old Ruby Leigh punched her ticket out of part two of the knockout rounds on The Voice on Monday night (Nov. 13) thanks to a perfect song choice by her coach Reba McEntire. The country legend suggested the 1996 breakthrough LeAnn Rimes cover of Bill Mack’s “Blue” for her charge and the Missouri native crushed […]
A little more than three months ago, Christopher Anthony Lunsford, aka Oliver Anthony Music, was still working his day job in outside sales. In a little under three months from now, he’ll kick off his 40-date Out of the Woods world tour in Stockholm.
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It’s heady stuff for Lunsford, who’s never traveled much beyond the southeastern United States and is awaiting the arrival of his first passport. The tour, which begins on Feb. 1, comes on the heels of the breathtakingly rapid success of his raw, blue-collar anthem, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which bowed at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in mid-August, a little more than 10 days after radiowv posted the video on YouTube of the six-foot-six, red-headed Virginian playing the song in his woodsy backyard.
“The last 90 days have been a little crazy,” Lunsford, a 31-year-old father of three, declares in a major understatement, during his first non-podcast/TV interview. Calling from the DMV in, believe it or not, Richmond, Lunsford comes across as smart and forthcoming. Even though he’s had to quickly navigate fame and the music industry, he’s already media-savvy enough to know what not to say — including declining to name the prominent producer he is in discussions with to helm his first full album, coming early next year, since the deal isn’t yet done.
Lunsford, who is self-managed and has no plans to sign with a label, seems extraordinarily grounded for someone who transformed into a household name almost overnight, even becoming such a cultural touchstone that his song was referenced during the first Republican presidential debate. Despite the far right’s initial embrace of his music and the left’s early rejection of it, he has declared that “I sit pretty dead center down the aisle on politics, and always have.”
Booked by UTA, his tour will weave through Norway, the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Ireland before the U.S. portion begins with two shows at country music’s mother church, Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, and then heads into amphitheaters and arenas, including Jupiter, Florida’s Abacoa Amphitheater and the Greensboro (N.C.) Coliseum. Venue capacities average around 1,900 seats in Europe and 7,000 seats in the U.S. For the vast majority of the shows, tickets will range between $25-$45, excluding Ticketmaster fees. Fans can register for first access to tickets in select North American markets at his website, and tickets go on sale to the general public on Friday (Nov. 17) at 10 a.m. local time.
Tackling the ceaseless struggles of hourly-wage workers, who are taxed “to no end” to pay for, among other things, “the obese milkin’ welfare,” while politicians keep getting richer, the controversial “Rich Men North of Richmond” has been viewed more than 93 million times on YouTube and received more than 111 million streams on Spotify. The song is up for Top Selling Song at the 2023 Billboard Music Awards on Sunday (Nov. 19), while Lunsford is also up for Top Song Sales Artist, competing with the likes of Miley Cyrus, Jason Aldean, Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How are you doing?
The last 90 days have been a little crazy. It’s funny because the music side of it has been very calming and enjoyable. It’s all the stuff behind the scenes that’s unreasonably chaotic. My life is actually a lot simpler in some ways, because I’m not working a job and juggling 10 other things with the music. But when you become a full-time musician, you’re essentially a business owner and an entrepreneur and a lot of other things, too. And those are things I’m not quite used to yet.
How long had you been in outdoor sales?
Pretty much the last decade. I dropped out of high school, had a GED, I was doing factory work and then I had a bad head injury in that factory. I was unable to work for a period of time, and then I moved into sales. I’ve spent the last 10 years having real, authentic conversations with hardworking Americans who are very transparent about the way they feel about things. It has, in a sense, given me the ability to maybe create music that’s so relatable to those type of people. Being on job sites and talking with so many people, I realized how similar everyone is as far as our personal struggles and our personal ambitions. We’re all dealing with a lot of setbacks and frustrations. … I hated the sales side of things. I just went out and did my thing every day. I’m not so much a big crowd person, but I do appreciate people individually.
You may say you’re not a big crowd person, but you’re about to perform before some big crowds come February, and you’ve already played some shows that drew thousands of people.
My first paid gig ever was 12,000 people [on Aug. 13] at Johnson Morris Farm [in Barco, N.C.], where Jamey Johnson showed up. That was my first time on the stage [other than] some open mics.
Many of your songs are topical. How do you educate yourself about issues?
It’s a mix of things. If there’s any kind of books, I probably was consuming Audible versions of them while I was in the truck driving around. In the last five years, I’ve listened to quite a bit of podcasts and YouTube videos. We’re a commodity to big companies, and all these companies spend all their time trying to manipulate their systems to be as addictive as possible, so when you get on Facebook, you’re gonna fall into this trance where you’re gonna scroll for like two hours. I’ve done it before myself. I’ve just tried to do everything I can do to not fall into that bubble, and instead try to spend my time educating myself.
Your first big interview was on Joe Rogan’s Spotify podcast. Are you a fan? Is that why you went on the show?
I guess I’d say I’m a Joe Rogan fan. I don’t watch every podcast episode. If I’m a fan of anything of Joe Rogan, it’s his style. He runs his whole podcast not around what’s culturally relevant, or what’s going to get the most views. He only talks to people he’s genuinely interested in. When you meet him in person, you’re seeing the guy that you watch online, there is no smoke and mirrors, versus a late-night TV guy. So that’s why I wanted to choose him first. I don’t agree with everything he has to say, of course. Nobody agrees with everything everybody says, but I like his style.
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Your first full album is coming next year. What can you reveal about it?
I don’t know if I can say who I’m recording with or not, but he’s one of the best in the business. In my opinion, it’s probably going to blow away everything else I’ve done so far, because everything has been recorded with just the internal microphone off of an about broken-in-half Android phone with a cracked screen. Even the radiowv videos used very basic equipment, so I had never had anything recorded with studio-quality equipment. So even just the vocal quality should absolutely knock people’s socks off, compared to what they’re used to hearing.
I want everything to still be authentic, and I want it to be me playing the music and not like a whole group of people involved. Everything now is just so carefully refined and edited and so we won’t have any of that. If anything, some of the songs are going to be recorded on older equipment from the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s.
That ties into the concept of your name, Oliver Anthony Music, right?
I adopted the name because I didn’t want my real name associated with the music, because I’ve got a lot of songs about a lot of things that I wouldn’t necessarily want an employer to hear. In the very infancy stages of things, like a couple years ago, it was right after my grandpa passed away. He was the only other one in the family that’s 6’6” and redhead, and he’s like my second dad in a lot of ways. So, it’s an honor to him. But then the reason I stick Music on the end of the name is because it really is supposed to be a representation of music that would have existed in his era when he was alive, living up in the mountains. They had dirt floors, they were scrounging to survive, they didn’t have electricity. I’m trying to represent that type of music [and] maintain the simplicity that would have just been necessary at that time. It’s not going to sound like something that’s going to be on country radio, by any means.
Are you going to record in Nashville?
We’re actually going to be in a studio in Georgia. I’m never going to be in Nashville sitting with people co-writing, ever. Most anything I put out is going to be something I write just by myself and if I do co-write something with somebody, it’s going to be with another artist and we’re going to be singing the song together. I don’t ever want to sit in some writing circle somewhere and have somebody in khaki pants and a collared shirt figuring out what my words are from my song. There’s a million other people that can go do that. I’m not one of those guys.
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Is Jamey Johnson going to be on the album?
I don’t know if he will be or not. He just came to one of the shows. … I’ve had just so many artists reach out, kind of trying to — I don’t know if “protect” is the right word — but just kind of mentor me early on, because I kind of got into this so quick, they didn’t want me making wrong choices. He was just trying to be supportive, and come and introduce himself, and be somebody I can lean on for guidance.
John Rich also reached out and offered to work with you.
John Rich and I talked a little bit early on. I haven’t done anything with John Rich, we’ve just had a few casual phone conversations. See, this is kind of one of those gray areas where I don’t know if somebody wants me to mention their name or not in an interview, but I guess if I can make a statement about it at all, I would just say that there are a lot of really good people, not just in country music, that have been very supportive. We did the Blue Ridge Rock Festival and Louder Than Life, there were a lot of those rock bands that I met, they were super supportive and awesome. I’ve gotten to sing onstage with Shinedown and Papa Roach, and all those guys are just incredibly supportive. I’ve made contact with 20 or 30 different artists. A lot of them will reach out through Instagram.
You’ve said you believe that divine intervention has put you in this position. In the last few months, have you gotten any clarity on why this happened to you, and what God wants from you?
I mean, there’s no question that I don’t deserve any bit of any of this, so there’s no other explanation to be made of what happened the way it happened. There’s a gazillion, billion, trillion other people out there that are posting music that in my mind is better than mine. I’d had a decent online following before “Richmond” was ever written. I’d already started to have A&R people reach out from songs like “Doggonit” and “Ain’t Gotta Dollar.” I’d known for probably six months before “Rich Men North of Richmond” was even written or recorded that I’d probably end up full-time in music, but I would have never guessed it would have happened like this.
I think if there’s a message at all that needs to be spread, it’s probably that we just desperately need to connect on a personal level with each other. As a society, I think we rely too much on communicating with each other through the internet. The difference between talking in person and a text message is totally different — things get misunderstood and misrepresented, and when that’s done on such a large scale, like social media, and then there are things like bots and trolls, and probably the government influencing things and what gets said and what doesn’t get said, people form way too many opinions based off of internet-related content. Everyone’s looking at the top to fix a lot of what’s broken at the bottom, but we have to start at the bottom. It doesn’t matter who’s elected president, a lot of our problems are on the ground level.
You have been fearless when it comes to speaking truth to power, such as posting a video after the first Republican presidential debate declaring that those candidates are the very ones you’re singing about and distancing yourself from.
I don’t have anything against conservatives. I think there’s a big difference in today’s time between a conservative and a Republican. If you look at what conservative values are, by definition, I would say none of those candidates, maybe one of them, represents anything close to what a conservative is. When I knock those people, then the immediate attack that came back after me was like, “Oh, he’s against conservatives.” But most conservatives I know, at least in Virginia, would never vote for anybody that was up on that stage.
It’s funny, if I got any backlash at all from that statement, it was people misquoting me, trying to make it seem like I was against conservatives or somehow for, like, Joe Biden. What I’m against is corporate-owned politicians. The whole idea of us having a government and electing representatives is so they can represent us, because we obviously can’t all go to D.C. at one time and have our voice heard. And what’s happened is like, 90% of those quote-unquote “representatives” no longer represent us. They’re all bought out by whatever big corporation and they’re given stocks and given benefits, and they’re all filthy rich, and they do what they say, not what we say. It’s not a right or left issue. It’s more of a class versus corporate issue.
[Lunsford momentarily stops the interview, because a fan recognizes him at the DMV.]
You just got recognized. How are you adjusting to fame?
It’s been cool. I mean, everybody’s been super polite out in public and even at the shows everybody’s been very respectful. Everybody’s been just overwhelmingly well-behaved about everything.
There was a photo of you with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife, Cheryl Hines, on social media. Are you going to endorse him for president?
No, I was very clear, even when I talked to Bobby, that I don’t want any affiliation with him politically. Whether he becomes president or not, he’s very involved in this idea of a healing center, which is basically a way of combining regenerative agriculture and mental health together. We met specifically to talk about that project, because I’m looking to implement something very similar at my property. We were very clear upfront that there wasn’t any sort of political affiliation there with him. He’s been very respectful about that.
That’s kind of my long term ambition: getting people back in nature and teaching people how to grow their own food and raise animals and do all that stuff. We’ve become very disconnected from each other [and] we’ve also become very disconnected from nature. Everything’s fake and phony and plastic now, so getting away from that would really benefit, especially, our youth.
Yeah, as far as a candidate goes, I’m not really interested. I probably won’t vote for anybody. As a joke, I’ve made some Oliver Anthony 2024 signs, and I actually drive down the road and see quite a lot of them, which is pretty cool. But I’m not even old enough to run for president.
How do you even wrap your head around some of this? A year ago, you would not have been saying, “I said to Bobby,” referring to RFK Jr.
I’ve gotten open invitations from everybody, even the former president and all, and I’ve been careful about how I want to handle those because, I mean, if I wanted to go meet with Trump, no one should be upset about that. He was the president of the United States. Just historically, we’ve always respected anyone who was. People do just blow everything out of proportion.
You are the first person to debut at No. 1 on the Hot 100 chart without ever appearing on any other Billboard chart. Did that mean anything to you?
I think the most special thing about it being on the chart at all is that it made it to the chart without some big, corporate schmucky schmuck somewhere pumping a bunch of money into making it get there. It actually got to the top of the Billboard because people genuinely wanted to listen to it and support it. I think if people realized how much money record labels pumped into getting songs to become popular in the first place, they probably would never want to listen to the songs to start with. To just be a couple of dummies out in the woods with a laptop and a microphone and a guitar and [the song] ended getting there completely organically, that’s really saying something in and of itself. That’s what I proudest of.
There’s a lot of exciting things to come, but the most important part of all of it is just gonna be the opportunity to travel the world and connect with a lot of people. If there’s any mission statement out of any of this or any purpose, going back to your question before about what I’ve been called to do, I really hope if I accomplish anything out of my career in music, it’s just to give the voiceless a voice.
Out of the Woods tour dates
February 1 – Stockholm, SE – Cirkus
February 2 – Oslo, NO – Sentrum Scene
February 5 – Utrecht, NL – TivoliVredenburg
February 7 – Glasgow, UK – Barrowlands
February 8 – Manchester, UK – Albert Hall
February 10 – London, UK – O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire
February 12 – Belfast, UK – Ulster Hall
February 13 – Dublin, IE – Vicar St.
February 21 – Nashville, TN – Ryman Auditorium
February 22 – Nashville, TN – Ryman Auditorium
February 29 – Plant City, FL – The Florida Strawberry Festival (on sale Dec 7 8AM ET)
March 2 – Jupiter, FL – Abacoa Amphitheater
March 3 – Estero, FL – Hertz Arena
March 8 – Alexandria, LA – Rapides Parish Coliseum
March 9 – Brandon, MS – The Brandon Amphitheater
March 16 – Queensland, AUS – CMC Rocks QLD 2024 (on sale now)
April 4 – Ft. Worth, TX – Billy Bob’s Texas
April 5 – Round Rock, TX – Round Rock Amp
April 6 – Lubbock, TX – Cook’s Garage
April 12 – Tupelo, MS – Cadence Bank Arena
April 13 – Jonesboro, AR – First National Bank Arena
April 19 – Albany, GA – Albany Civic Center
April 20 – Savannah, GA – Bulls, Bands & Barrels
April 26 – Greensboro, NC – Greensboro Coliseum Complex
April 27 – Duluth, GA – Gas South Arena
May 3 – Huntington, WV – Mountain Health Arena
May 4 – Beaver Dam, KY – Beaver Dam Amphitheater
May 10 – Corbin, KY – The Corbin Arena
May 11 – Pikeville, KY – Appalachian Wireless Arena
May 17 – Doswell, VA – Atlantic Union Bank at the SERVPRO Pavilion
June 14 – Marion, IL – MTN Dew Park
June 15 – Camdenton, MO – Ozarks Amphitheater
June 16 – Council Bluffs, IA – Westfair Amphitheater
June 22 – Canandaigua, NY – CMAC
June 28 – Pittsburgh, PA – Stage AE Outdoors
July 19 – Cullman, AL – Rock The South (on sale now)
August 16 – Lewisburg, WV – State Fair of West Virginia
August 21 – Put-In-Bay, OH – Bash on the Bay (on sale now)
August 23 – Indianapolis, IN – Everwise Amphitheater at White River State Park
August 24 – Saginaw, MI – Dow Event Center
September 1 – Palmer, AK – Alaska State Fair
September 13 – Allegan, MI – Allegan County Fair
In February 1989, the New Jersey-born, Texas-raised guitar picker, singer and harmonica ace Clint Black released his debut single, “A Better Man.” By mid-June, the song had become his first No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, ushering in the release of his debut album Killin’ Time.
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Black’s debut single established him as part of what would be called country music’s heralded “Class of ’89,” a group of artists who each had their first major hits that year–the cowboy-hatted triumvirate of Black, Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson, but also Travis Tritt and Mary Chapin Carpenter. This group led the way in an era that would usher country music into an unprecedented era of sales and influence.
In addition to “A Better Man,” Killin’ Time spurred Hot Country Songs chart leaders “Nobody’s Home” and “Walkin’ Away” and the title track, as well as a top 5 hit “Nothing’s News.” The album ultimately attained triple platinum status, while Black earned Billboard’s country song of the year in both 1989 (with “A Better Man”) and 1990 (“Nobody’s Home”). “A Better Man” garnered a Grammy nomination for best country song and Killin’ Time, for best country vocal performance, male.
In 2024, Black’s Killin’ Time – The 35th Anniversary World Tour will honor the album’s more than three decades of influence in shaping country music’s sonic landscape. Initiating with two already sold-out shows at Nashville’s vaunted Ryman Auditorium on Feb. 16 and 17 (and having just added a third and final night at the Ryman on Feb. 18) Black’s tour will feature the Grammy winner playing his debut album live from start to finish, heightened by some of his more than a dozen Hot Country Songs No. 1s, such as “When My Ship Comes In,” “A Good Run of Bad Luck,” and “Nothin’ But the Taillights.”
“We’ve played some songs that we haven’t played in 35 years during some shows recently,” Billboard tells Billboard. “We’ll play some songs at soundcheck and put in stuff like ‘Winding Down’ and ‘Straight From the Factory.’ Two of the guys in my band played on that album, so it’s fun to go back and remember it. Sometimes we had to think, ‘Who played that part?’ and things drift over time, they migrate. We’ve pulled some back to their origins. I think I’m singing these songs better now than I did, but pretty much it’s going to be like the record.”
Earlier this year, Black was honored with the Academy of Country Music Awards’ ACM Poet’s Award, an accolade that recognizes a songwriter or artist-writer’s significant writing contributions to country music. Even on his debut album, Black was already constructing his case as an artist whose vocal and instrumental capabilities were paralleled by his songwriting caliber. Black has written or co-written nearly all of his hit songs, with several of them, including his Grammy-nominated collaboration with Wynonna, “A Bad Goodbye,” and his duet with his wife Lisa Hartman Black, “When I Said I Do,” being solo writes.
“I set out to do that,” Black says. “I grew up reading liner notes and I wanted to know who was writing something I loved. I wasn’t trying to make any kind of statement, but I thought I could do it. And I saw an interview with Reba where she said she listened to about a thousand songs every time she wanted to make an album of 10 songs. That was terrifying to me. I thought, ‘Man, that’s a hard job. I’d rather do this other hard job and not have to go looking for songs.’ And I knew if I was successful in writing my own songs, I was going to need a lot of songs, if I was putting out an album every 18 months or so. I started writing a lot of songs, so that every time I had to make an album, I had at least 30 songs written that I wanted to record.”
One such solo write on the record, “Nothing’s News,” was born of that desire to prove his talent as a song crafter to his father. Black recalls his father “believed in me as a singer, but as a songwriter? Not so much. He told me I hadn’t done enough living to write real country songs, really, so I ran home and wrote ‘Nothing’s News’ to prove him wrong.”
Beginning with the songs that proliferate Killin’ Time, Black also forged what would become a decades-long association with fellow musician-writer Hayden Nicholas, whose contributions to Black’s music have been essential, from guitar work to co-writing hits including “No Time to Kill,” “Like the Rain,” “When My Ship Comes In” and “Summer’s Comin’.” Killin’ Time’s title track was born of a discussion with Nicholas.
“We were on our way to a gig and talking about how long it was taking the first single to come out,” he recalls. “He said, ‘The big wheel’s turning slowly,’ and I said, ‘Well I hope it starts turning soon, because this killing time is killing me.’ And we looked at each other and knew we had a song.”
Black recalls recording Killin’ Time in Houston, though he and Nicholas later traveled to Nashville to record overdubs—a trip that led to one of Black’s fondest “Nashville stories” from that early era.
“I was in Nashville for an extended time for the first time ever, and one of my producers, James Stroud, had loaned me his car. It was a Porsche,” Black recalls. “One day, he told me, ‘If you get me a gold record for this album, I’ll give you that car.’ He ended up having to sell the Porsche and then he bought himself a newer Porsche after that. The album was double platinum by then, and word got out that he had promised me a Porsche. So he did, in front of ASCAP, we have a photo of him handing me the keys and standing in front of that car. We would go on to give that car back and forth over the years — he has it now,” Black recalls.
Like many artists who launched in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, Black has felt the impact of the resurgent popularity of ‘90s country sounds. He points to the genre-spanning web of influences among the era’s artists, producers and label execs as a key factor.
“I think that the fidelity of music in Nashville all really rose to state of the art,” Black says. “You had all these budding engineers and rising producers and artists who loved all the country stuff, but were also influenced by the great classic rock, blues and jazz. For me, it was Bob Seger, and all that great James Taylor and Jimmy Buffett music. You had all these people coming up in country music that had this huge wealth of great standards to rise to. As the lyricists and melodies came into their own, and the A&R and the record companies, all of it combined. It was a perfect storm on every front in country music that made it as good or better than anything else out there.”
In tandem with the tour, Black will release a vinyl reissue of Killin’ Time in partnership with Sony Music and Vinyl Me Please. The special reissue will be on 180g Brown Galaxy vinyl with new lacquers cut by AIR Mastering’s Barry Grint and will ship in May 2024.
See below for the initial slate of tour dates for the tour.
Feb. 16, 2024 – Nashville, TN – Ryman Auditorium
Feb. 17, 2024 – Nashville, TN – Ryman Auditorium
Feb. 18, 2024 – Nashville, TN – Ryman Auditorium
Feb. 23, 2024 – Durant, OK – Choctaw Casino
Feb. 24, 2024 – San Antonio, TX – San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo
Feb. 29, 2024 – Roanoke, VA – Berglund Performing Arts Center
March 1, 2024 – Roanoke Rapids, NC – Weldon Mills Theater
March 2, 2024 – Cherokee, NC – Harrah’s Cherokee Event Center
March 23, 2024 – Lancaster, PA – American Music Theatre
March 24, 2024 – Nashville, IN – Brown County Performing Arts Center
April 6, 2024 – Carlton, MN – Black Bear Casino Resort
April 21, 2024 – Georgetown, TX – Two Step Inn Fest
April 26, 2024 – Chandler, AZ – Wild Horse Pass Hotel & Casino
April 28, 2024 – Indio, CA – Stagecoach
June 13, 2024 – Abbotsford, BC – Abbotsford Arena
June 14, 2024 – Penticton, BC – South Okanagan Arena
June 15, 2024 – Prince George, BC – CN Arena
June 16, 2024 – Dawson Creek, BC – Ovintiv Arena
June 19, 2024 – Lethbridge, AB – ENMAX Arena
June 21, 2024 – Edmonton, AB – Winspear Centre
June 22, 2024 – Strathmore, AB – Strathmore Stampede
June 25, 2024 – Saskatoon, SK – SaskTel Arena
June 27, 2024 – Moose Jaw, SK – Moose Jaw Arena
July 11, 2024 – New Salem, ND – ND Country Fe
Small towns have long played an outsized role in American songwriting, often serving as waypoint between past and present, a place that that some characters leave, others yearn to return and many are left behind.
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For country singer Jason Aldean, the intricate details of life in a small town — from beer runs at the local Amoco station to the smell of White Rain hairspray at a Friday football game — have led to some of the genres most commercially successful songs in the past two decade. Songs such as “Night Train” — a love story about a man who stays connected to his hometown through sound of passing freight trains, or “Amarillo Sky,” which honors a humble farmer whose connection to his family is threatened by drought.
When it comes to documenting life in the “Fly Over States,” Aldean is an unrivaled talent and an obvious choice to headline the inaugural Rock the Country festival series, a traveling country music series spread out across seven small American towns in the Southeast U.S. Produced by Alabama-based producer Shane Quick of LiveCo — creator of the long-running Rock the South country festival in Cullman, Alabama — and Nathan Baugh, president, 46 Entertainment, the festival will also feature headliner Kid Rock on all seven stops and special guests such as Miranda Lambert, Hank Williams Jr., Lynyrd Skynyrd, Koe Wetzel, Brantley Gilbert, Travis Tritt and many more who will appear at different stops on the Rock the Country tour.
Aldean will be joined on the tour by co-headliner Kid Rock. Quick insists the tour is not political, but it’s booking of one of former president Donald Trump’s biggest boosters, and its timing months before the election injects an unavoidable dose amount of political energy into the tour that will be impossible to ignore.
Through Rock the Country, which launches at the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center in Gonzalez, La., on April 5 and 6, Aldean has a rare opportunity to speak to the serious challenges rural America faces over the next few years. First, as the controversy surrounding Aldean’s 2023 song “Try That in a Small Town” demonstrates, it can be difficult for rural America to express itself collectively to the country’s urban populations, and it can also be difficult for some living in major population centers to listen and not be patronizing in their response.
Could the controversy have been avoided had Aldean’s song been a little lighter on the rhetoric? Maybe, but once the conversation becomes a word-for-word litigation over intent and historical context, it becomes difficult to find middle ground.
And yet finding commonality is probably the most effective way to deal with major challenges facing rural communities, like the closure of more than 600 rural hospitals in the near future, according to a recent study by the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. Rural communities have also been much harder hit by major economic downturns, leading to higher and longer rates of joblessness and unemployment during recessions.
Whatever direction Aldean decides to, Rock the Country is a rare opportunity for the artist to lift up rural America, and a rare chance for his fans and fans of country music to travel to small towns and celebrate together.
Dates and locations for Rock the Country are listed below. To learn more and buy tickets, visit rockthecountry.com.
Gonzalez, La. – April 5 & 6 at Lamar-Dixon Expo Center
Ashland, Ky. – April 19 & 20 at Boyd County Fairgrounds
Rome, Ga. – May 10 & 11 at Kingston Downs
Ocala, Fla – June 7 & 8 at Majestic Oaks Ocala
Mobile, Ala. – June 21 & 22 at The Grounds
Poplar Bluff, M. – June 28 & 29 at Brick’s Offroad Parks
Anderson, S.C. – July 26 & 27 at Anderson Sports and Entertainment Center