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Lainey Wilson, who currently has a three-week No. 1 Billboard Country Airplay hit with “Watermelon Moonshine,” has revealed her headlining trek for 2024. Wilson’s Country’s Cool Again Tour will launch in Nashville on May 31 at Ascend Amphitheater. Joining her for the 35-plus shows are openers Zach Top, “Don’t Come Lookin’” singer-songwriter Jackson Dean and […]
“The enthusiastic acceptance of the new Hot 100 pop singles chart as the standard of the industry since its inception three months ago has made it possible for The Billboard to complete its plans to streamline its record research operation,” a story announced in the Oct. 20, 1958, issue of Billboard (to be formal, then The Billboard).
“Record dealers, disk jockeys and music machine operators have made it abundantly clear that their prime need in the pop singles area is the freshest possible data about breakout singles as well as established best-sellers,” the story continued. “This singles information is completely provided by The Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.”
After the Billboard Hot 100 began with the Aug. 4, 1958, listing, two new genre charts arrived: Hot C&W Sides and Hot R&B Sides, ranking 30 titles apiece. Today, they thrive as Hot Country Songs and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, each 50 positions deep and incorporating the same streaming-, airplay- and sales-based methodology as the Hot 100.
Billboard had presented various rankings for the two genres previously, with R&B first measured by the Harlem Hit Parade, starting in the Oct. 24, 1942, issue. Country popularity was first reflected by the Most Played Juke Box Folk Records listing, beginning on Jan. 8, 1944.
The makeover in 1958, as noted that issue, marked “a new and expanded form of service,” with Hot C&W Sides and Hot R&B Sides the first all-encompassing song rankings for each genre. “Hot C&W Sides provides the fastest and most accurate coverage available on country music records, with the emphasis on ‘traditional’ rather than pop-style disks,” Billboard noted that issue. “The other new chart, Hot R&B Sides, performs the same service for the rhythm and blues field.”
The first track atop Hot C&W Sides? Ray Price’s “City Lights,” which reigned for 13 weeks. Multiple covers have been recorded, with Mickey Gilley’s likewise a No. 1 in 1975. Price amassed over 100 entries on Billboard’s country singles charts in 1952-89, including six Hot Country Songs leaders among 33 top 10s.
Bobby Day’s “Rock-in’ Robin” flew in atop the inaugural Hot R&B Sides chart, leading for three weeks. It, too, became a hit in a new form, as Michael Jackson’s version reached No. 2 in 1972. Like Price, Day was born in Texas; “Rock-in’ Robin,” however, stands as Day’s only charted R&B single.
Sixty-five years on, Luke Combs’ “Fast Car” leads the latest Hot Country Songs chart (dated Oct. 21, 2023). “Flashing signs invite a broken heart to lose itself in the glow of city lights,” a lonesome Price sang in his hit; sings Combs, “Won’t have to drive too far, just across the border and into the city …”
Meanwhile, Drake’s “First Person Shooter,” featuring J. Cole, launches as Drake’s record-extending 30th No. 1 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. On the Hot 100, it’s Drake’s 13th leader, tying him with Jackson for the most among solo males.
Dolly Parton is just a month away from releasing her highly anticipated first rock album, fittingly titled Rockstar, on Nov. 17, and fans are particularly excited to hear her collaboration with goddaughter and fellow superstar Miley Cyrus.
The duo are teaming up for a fresh rendition of Cyrus’ 2013 Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper “Wrecking Ball,” and in a clip shared exclusively with Billboard on Friday (Oct. 20), the country icon revealed why she wanted to include the track on her album.
“To involve Miley in my rock ‘n’ roll album, I thought, well, I have to do ‘Wrecking Ball,’ because I love Miley and I love the song,” Parton shares in the video. “So I said, ‘Will you come and do this for me?’ And she said, ‘Of course,’ but it actually came from the fact that we had done the song on NBC for her New Year’s show that she does every year from Miami.”
Parton continued: “We got such a response from how we did ‘Wrecking Ball,’ and combined my song ‘I Will Always Love You’ with that one. Since everybody loved it, and we loved it, I thought, why don’t I just do that combination and have her sing on my rock album? So I love my Miley and I love that song and I’m very proud of it. My version, and hers, and ours.”
Following its release on Aug. 25, 2013, “Wrecking Ball” became Cyrus’ first No. 1 single on the Hot 100 and spent three weeks atop the chart.
Beyond “Wrecking Ball,” Parton’s Rockstar album will feature a number of superstar collaborations with the likes of Sting, Stevie Nicks, Peter Frampton, Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, Chris Stapleton, Lizzo, Elton John, P!nk, Brandi Carlile, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and more. Check out the full track list here.
Watch Parton talk the inspiration behind putting “Wrecking Ball” on Rockstar below.
Former Billboard cover star Jelly Roll has become one of country music’s biggest breakthrough success stories over the past year, notching hits on Billboard charts in multiple genres. His 2021 song “Dead Man Walking” topped the Mainstream Rock chart. He followed with “Son of a Sinner,” which topped the Country Airplay chart and “Need a […]
Luke Grimes may be known for his role as the confident Kayce Dutton on the popular television series Yellowstone, but the actor was equally enamored with music while growing up in Ohio, as he listened to the Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings records his Pentecostal preacher father played at home.
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Still, Grimes says the prospect of releasing his own proper album was “terrifying” at first.
“There’s some imposter syndrome there. Sometimes it feels like I stepped into somebody else’s job for a minute,” he told Billboard backstage at Tennessee’s Pilgrimage Festival, where he performed alongside Ashley McBryde, The War and Treaty and Zach Bryan. Grimes took courage to step into the music world from singer-songwriter, and fellow Yellowstone actor, Lainey Wilson.
“It was inspiring to watch Lainey step into those [acting] shoes,” he said. “As much as I was afraid that people would naturally be like, ‘What is this guy doing here?’ I realized that no one on our set was like, ‘What is she doing here?’ Everyone was like, ‘She’s awesome and we’re glad she wants to do this.’ That took some of the fear away for me.”
Grimes’ foray into country music begins with his eight-song EP Pain Pills or Pews, out Friday (Oct. 20) on Mercury Nashville/Range Music. His deal with Mercury Nashville came by way of his manager, Range Media’s Matt Graham.
“Matt was a fan of what I do on the show [Yellowstone] and he heard that I play music and asked me to send him some stuff,” Grimes recalled. “I started sending him a few work tapes of things I had worked on, but we talked about music for two years before I did anything.”
Earlier this year, Grimes’ debut single, “No Horse to Ride” (which he wrote with Tony Lane and Jonathan Singleton) was featured in the mid-season finale of Yellowstone. The song peaked at No. 7 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart in January and has earned 22.3 million official on-demand U.S. streams, according to Luminate data.
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His grainy vocal and the stripped-down production proved an early signal that Grimes’ brand of country music has more in common with the gruff, singer-songwriter fare of his influences than with the highly-polished, pop-infused country that has proliferated playlists and airwaves over the past decade. Grimes’ playlists are filled with music from Americana stalwarts Bryan, Steven Wilson, Jr. and Colter Wall.
“When I heard The Highwaymen on records my dad would play, they seemed like tough guys, but when you heard their music, it could be really vulnerable and I liked that,” Grimes said. “I love all kinds of music, but when I tried to write my own songs, it always came out folky and Americana. I love the whole process of songwriting, just a bunch of people in a room bouncing ideas off one another.”
Grimes is a co-writer on six of the project’s compositions, working with a slate of top-shelf Nashville writers and artist-writers including Lane, Singleton, Jessi Alexander, Randy Montana and Josh Thompson.
Grimes worked with producer Dave Cobb (known for his work with Chris Stapleton, Sturgill Simpson, and Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit) to craft the rugged-yet-revealing sounds that permeate Pain Pills or Pews. To gauge Cobb’s interest in the project, Grimes sent Cobb a work tape with “No Horse to Ride,” “Oh Ohio,” and “Playing on the Tracks.”
“For him, it was like, ‘I just need to hear the songs.’ He wasn’t going to do it unless there were [good] songs. Most of the demos were just me and the other writers and acoustic guitars, recorded in the writing room on an iPhone,” Grimes said. “That’s how Dave likes to work — It’s a thing in Nashville to make the work tape sound like a huge production. For Dave, it’s like, ‘Well that painting’s already painted.’ He wants a sparse canvas so he can add colors and do his own thing. It’s like taking a masterclass, just watching how he works. He always wants what is best for the message of the song and for the singer.”
“Oh Ohio,” written with Alexander and Jon Randall, pays homage to Grimes’s home state, while grieving the deterioration that has come with time, as the lyrics recall “before they parked the trains on the tracks and the parking lots grew weeds.”
“One of my favorite Ryan Adams songs was [2000’s] ‘[Oh My] Sweet Carolina,’ where he’s singing about his lifestyle, traveling all over the place and just dreaming of being home,” Grimes said. “I wanted to take a swing at a song like that, but with a twist, where it’s not all completely positive messages, but you still love the place. For a long time, I would go home to Ohio and it would feel like home still — but about 10 years after leaving, I went back and realized, ‘Oh, this is not home anymore.’ It was a really crazy feeling.”
Foy Vance, who is signed to Ed Sheeran’s Gingerbread Man label, joins Grimes for “Hold On,” which Vance wrote with fellow singer-songwriter IIsey Juber.
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“Foy and Ilsey wrote that for a female [to sing], and Ilsey sang the demo, but I thought it would also be cool if a man sang it. It’s a very vulnerable message. I think those feelings of being afraid to fall head over heels for somebody are universal, but you don’t often hear men opening up that way. I played it for Dave and he loved it. And then we got Foy to sing on it with me.”
Grimes wrote the defiantly free-wheeling “Ain’t Dead Yet” with Aaron Raitiere. After sifting through notebook pages of ideas, they began discussing their shared musical inspirations, including Nirvana’s classic MTV Unplugged in New York album.
“We thought, ‘What if we wrote a Nirvana-sounding song? What if Kurt Cobain was a redneck from Kentucky, and had lived to be 70 years old and wrote a song for his wife? What would that sound like?’” Grimes noted.
Grimes’ love of music stems from years of playing drums, and later picking up guitar. When Grimes was 12, his parents’ church needed a drummer, so Grimes learned the instrument out of necessity. He played drums in various high school bands but was simultaneously drawn to acting.
“I would walk out of the theatre after seeing a movie and think, ‘I could do that,’” Grimes recalled. “I wasn’t able to do anything about it in Ohio — I could have done school plays, but that’s very different from films. Music came as another creative outlet at a time when I couldn’t do acting, but I fell in love with that, too.”
Grimes made his way to New York and then Los Angeles to pursue acting, which has included his role on Yellowstone, and roles in 2012’s Taken 2 and 2014’s American Sniper, as well as 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey and its two successors. But along the way, Grimes continued dabbling in music. Grimes was previously part of alt-country band Mitchell’s Folly, which released an album in 2008.
“I honestly don’t see them that differently,” Grimes says of making music and acting in films. “It’s a similar process, whether you are coming up with a song idea or bringing a character to life. The really good artists do kind of create a persona that’s bigger than life, like Hank Williams Jr. People want to see that when they come to a show, and there’s different levels of that, clearly. I’m still trying to figure out what that is for me and where that lies.”
Coming up, Grimes will follow the EP with a full album, and will make his second performance at California country music festival Stagecoach in 2024.
“Right now, I just want to get more comfortable performing,” he said. “There’s definitely some nervous feelings before getting onstage, and then halfway through, it gets really fun. I’m waiting for that halfway through feeling to start in the beginning.”
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“God Bless the U.S.A.” singer-songwriter Lee Greenwood has chimed in on Maren Morris’ recent revelation to The Los Angeles Times that she is leaving the country music industry behind, and is responding to Morris’ recent comments regarding patriotism in country music.
During a recent New York Times Popcast interview, Morris discussed songs that have recently topped the Billboard Hot 100, including Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” and Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” noting that the country music genre is “so steeped in, weirdly, like patriotism or quasi-patriotism, lots of like, overt hypermasculinity, Whiteness — that’s just like how it’s been from the jump.” Morris added, “After the [Donald] Trump years, people’s biases were on full display. It just revealed who people really were and that they were proud to be misogynistic and racist and homophobic and transphobic. All these things were being celebrated, and it was weirdly dovetailing with this hyper-masculine branch of country music.”
She also told the Los Angeles Times that she feels “very, very distanced” from the genre.
In an opinion piece for Fox News, Greenwood took issue with Morris’ comments, writing, “To suggest that country music is ‘too patriotic’ is to not understand country music at all. It’s in our very name: country music. Our music is written for love of our country, our heart for America.”
He continued, “Because country music is so closely tied to the heartbeat of America, it also happens to reflect what’s happening across the country at the very moment. As a result, it’s not that politics has infiltrated country music, it’s quite the opposite — music ends up reflecting the very conversations happening across the country today … Political trends will change with the winds, but the core of country music remains: love of country, love of freedom, love of America. There’s nothing wrong with that, and that’s not going to change any time soon.”
Greenwood stated that he felt it would be “wiser” for Morris to stay in country music, “where she could continue the conversation and present her interpretation of what it means to be American today.” He also wrote that that stating that country music artists — or the country music genre as a whole — should be canceled because of disagreements with a song’s lyrics “is a slippery slope to censorship, free expression, and is out of line with the values of hard work, freedom, and grit that have made country music so great to this day.”
Billboard has reached out to Morris’ rep for comment on Greenwood’s opinion piece.
Morris has been a strong and outspoken supporter of the LGBTQ+ community. Earlier this year, she performed as part of the Love Rising benefit concert in Nashville, which was held to protest Tennessee legislation that would negatively impact trans youths. Morris also appeared on a cover of Billboard‘s 2023 Pride Issue alongside drag luminaries Eureka O’Hara, Landon Cider, Sasha Colby and Symone.
Jonas Group Entertainment (JGE) and the company’s founder Kevin Jonas Sr. have launched the Nashville-based Red Van Records, under the leadership of CEO Phil Guerini.
The label’s first signing is Nashville singer-songwriter Levi Hummon, who’ll release his first song under the label on Oct. 27, with a new version of his Walker Hayes collaboration “Paying For It.” Dan Pearson‘s Lakeside Entertainment Group will provide label services for Red Van Records.
JGE was founded in 2005 while Jonas was managing his sons, the sibling music group Jonas Brothers. The namesake for Red Van Records is the red van that the Jonas family originally toured the country in. “I can’t begin to guess how many hours and miles we logged driving the guys around the country in that van, but it represents the commitment you make to be in the music industry,” said Jonas Sr. in a statement. “We were always building and in motion and that’s the philosophy of Red Van Records.”
“With the values and ideals that are the foundation of Red Van Records, Levi is the perfect artist to launch our label,” Guerini said in a statement. “He is so well respected in the music community as a complete artist, and he has been tireless in his pursuit of music and taking it to the fans on the road. It’s the unrelenting pace and ‘firsts’ of the early days that may seem small at the time, but like the red van, they are the start of something truly special.”
“So excited to be working with Kevin, Phil, and honored to be Red Van Records first signing,” Hummon added. “I’m so grateful to them for dreaming big with me and I couldn’t imagine my music in better hands. Family is everything to me and they have made feel like part of their family since day one. This next chapter is going to be a wild ride.”
Jonas Group Entertainment’s artist roster includes Bailee Madison, Darby, Franklin Jonas, Harper Grace, Levi Hummon, LIVVIA, Mallary Hope, Mandy Harvey, Tayler Buono and The Band Light. Meanwhile, Jonas Group Publishing’s roster includes Franklin Jones and Terri Jo Box.
Hummon, the son of songwriter Marcus Hummon, previously issued his debut self-titled EP in 2016 through Big Machine Label Group, followed by 2018’s Patient via Iconic Records.
More than three months after the video for Jason Aldean‘s “Try That in a Small Town” was pulled from CMT and labeled by some detractors as being pro-gun, pro-violence and akin to a “modern lynching song,” the country star spoke to Audacy’s Coop’s Rockin’ Country Saturday Night show about the controversy surrounding the song.
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“If you’ve got common sense, you can look at the video and see, I’m not sayin’ anything that’s not true,” said Aldean about the video for the song that features lyrics challenging those who would “carjack an old lady at a red light,” “cuss out a cop” or “pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store.” The visual found Aldean performing the song in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, TN, the site of the 1927 lynching and hanging of 18-year-old Henry Choate over allegations that he sexually assaulted a white girl, as well as the spot of a 1946 race riot in which two Black men were killed.
“In the video I’m showin’ you what happened — I didn’t do it, I didn’t create it — it just happened, and I saw it, and I’m not cool with it,” Aldean said of the clip, which features images of an American flag burning, protesters clashing with police, looters breaking a display case and thieves robbing a convenience store; the video was later seemingly edited to remove images of a Black Lives Matter protest following the backlash.
Aldean has continued to say he’s confused about why the song — which in the new interview he again noted was released in May — became contentious months later, noting that he thought a line about a handgun was going to be the thing that critics pounced on. “The biggest issue, I think, people had when we released the song was that it mentioned ‘having a gun that my grandfather gave me,’” he said of the song whose chorus warns, “Well, try that in a small town/ See how far you make it down the road/ Around here, we take care of our own/ You cross that line, it won’t take long/ For you to find out, I recommend you don’t/ Try that in a small town.”
“I mentioned a gun, that’s a no, no right now and I just remember thinking, ‘Man, you guys haven’t even seen the video yet,’” he added. Aldean has repeatedly denied that the song, and video, are pro-violence, telling Coop that, “between mainstream media and social media, things kind of take on a life of their own. They start making the song and the video into something that it’s not. It’s fine, we just live in a world that does that right now, and I’m not gonna go out and explain myself every time somebody gives their own opinion of what my song or video means.”
Shortly after the song’s release, CNN spoke to Tennessee State Rep. Justin Jones — who earlier this year was expelled, then re-instated to the House after leading a gun control protest on the House floor following a school mass shooting in which three children and three adults were killed — who condemned what he called a “heinous vile racist song that is really about harkening back to days past.”
Jones said he thought it was “no accident” that the video was filmed at the Courthouse, dubbing the track as an attempt to normalize “racist, violence, vigilantism and white nationalism,” while “glorifying” a vision of the South that he said the state is trying to move forward from.”
“Try That” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the last week of July, then fell to No. 21 a week later, marking one of the biggest drops from the top in the chart’s history.
Aldean said country music is “blue-collar music, it’s for the every man out there, and that was always my thing — it’s like, I feel like this.” Conservative media outlets including Fox News have been focusing on what they have said is a drastic uptick in violent crime during the Biden administration and, without getting specific, Aldean seemed to co-sign that view, saying, “I got eyes, I can see what’s goin’ on. I feel like I’ve got common sense and I can see that right is right and wrong is wrong.”
The New York Times reported this week that murders in the U.S. dropped just over 6% in 2022 compared to 2021, with preliminary figures from the F.B.I. indicating that the decline has accelerated this year; the F.B.I. also said that violent crime was down slightly in 2022 over 2021.
Aldean — who in the past has courted controversy by wearing a t-shirt featuring a confederate flag and dressing in blackface as Lil Wayne for Halloween — has repeatedly denied that the song had any ill intent.
In the Coop interview, he said he doesn’t care “which side of the political fence you want to stand on,” and that he stepped up because he felt like nobody — especially in the music and entertainment industry — was saying anything about the “wrong” things he was observing. “It’s very uncommon for someone to say something for fear of losing a job or losing some money… losing friends or whatever,” he said. “It just kind of reaches a breaking point to where you’re like ‘somebody needs to say something, and if nobody’s gonna do it, then I’ll be the guy.’”
Listen to the interview (“Try That in a Small Town” talk begins around 6:30 mark) below.
Blake Shelton‘s Back to the Honky Tonk Tour will return in 2024, when it launches in Feb. 22 at the GIANT Center in Hershey, Penn.
The 17-show trek will include stops in the United States and Canada, including shows at Moody Center in Austin, Texas; Little Caesars Arena in Detroit; and three shows in Canada, slated for Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; Edmonton, Alberta; and Calgary, Alberta, before wrapping March 29 in Wichita, Kan.
Joining Shelton on the 17-show trek in the United States and Canada are Dustin Lynch and Emily Ann Roberts. Lynch recently issued his latest album, Killed the Cowboy, and his current radio single, “Stars Like Confetti,” is currently in the top 10 on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart. Roberts, known for her time competing on NBC’s The Voice, recently released the album Can’t Hide Country, which includes not only her song “Walkin’ Shoes,” but “Still Searching,” a collaboration with Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs.
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The tour’s first run began earlier this year, and featured Carly Pearce and Jackson Dean as openers.
Tickets for all markets, with the exception of Glendale, Ariz., will be available through an exclusive fan presale launching Tuesday, Oct. 24, at 10 a.m. local time and running through Thursday, Oct. 26, at 10 p.m. local time. General onsale will begin Friday, Oct. 27, at 10 a.m. local time. Tickets for Glendale will be available via an exclusive fan presale beginning Tuesday, Oct. 31, at 10 a.m. local time through Thursday, Nov. 2, at 10 p.m. local time. The general onsale for Glendale will start on Friday, Nov. 3, at 10 a.m. local time.
See the full lineup of dates for Shelton’s Back to the Honky Tonk Tour, presented by Kubota, below:
Feb. 22: Hershey, PA @ GIANT Center
Feb. 23: Detroit, MI @ Little Caesars Arena
Feb. 24: Milwaukee, WI @ Fiserv Forum
Feb. 29: Lafayette, LA @ CAJUNDOME
March 1: Austin, TX @ Moody Center
March 2: Bossier City, LA @ Brookshire Grocery Arena
March 7: Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, CAN @ SaskTel Centre
March 8: Edmonton, Alberta, CAN @ Rogers Place
March 9: Calgary, Alberta, CAN @ Scotiabank Saddledome
March 14: Spokane, WA @ Spokane Arena
March 15: Tacoma, WA @ Tacoma Dome
March 16: Portland, OR @ Moda Center
March 21: Fresno, CA @ Save Mart Center
March 22: Palm Springs, CA @ Acrisure Arena
March 23: Glendale, AZ @ Desert Diamond Arena
March 27: Moline, IL @ Vibrant Arena at The MARK
March 29: Wichita, KS @ INTRUST Bank Arena
When the digital age began, one of the attractions was the promise of an easier life — information more readily available, machines doing math problems, the possibility of shorter work weeks and lives of leisure.
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Instead, of course, the world is simply more complicated. Employers expect higher output, easy information creates distraction, and the combination of multiple phone numbers, email addresses and social media accounts means a constant barrage of spam and misinformation. It’s easy to understand why a big chunk of the population would prefer to turn back the clock in one or more aspects of life. And that’s a sentiment at the heart of Tyler Hubbard’s newest single, “Back Then Right Now.”
“I think there’s an undertone of a life lived less complicated, more simple,” he says. “And I do think the music, you know, it’s not over-thought. It’s just smooth and easy, and easy to listen to and, hopefully, kind of takes you there sonically.”
The day went fairly smoothly when Hubbard wrote the song in April with David Garcia (“Meant To Be,” “Ghost Story”), Jessie Jo Dillon (“Memory Lane,” “Break Up in the End”) and Geoff Warburton (“But I Got a Beer in My Hand,” “Best Thing Since Backroads”) at Garcia’s studio. Warburton arrived about a half-hour early to work on musical ideas, and they landed on one built mostly around two simple chords.“His guitar collection, they’re some of my favorites to play, but he handed me a new one that was in a strange tuning,” remembers Warburton. “I was excited because that’ll make me play something that’s not difficult, and then he was playing something on the Telecaster, I think. It just lined up perfectly with what I was playing.”
Once the whole group was assembled, they picked that musical foundation over a couple of others, then fished for a lyrical theme or story that would match the tone. Dillon brought up “Back Then Right Now,” a title she had logged in her phone after a trip to East Tennessee, where her uncle was frustrated by his new-model truck.
“He was like, ‘I could use a little back then right now,’ ” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s such a great song title.’ And so I wrote it down, and that day we wrote it, that was the first title anyone said.”They tackled the chorus first, planting the title in the first line and at the end, and giving it a compact, rolling melody in between.
“A lot of times if you get too rangy — if the hills are too big and the valleys are too low — sometimes it’s harder to sing or harder to remember,” notes Hubbard.
Once they got the chorus started, they began periodically hopping to the verses. Hubbard turned the title’s “back then” to a recurring “back when,” setting up pieces of the past that have changed: photos are for posting, a Walmart has replaced a fishing spot, and the stick shift has all but disappeared.
“Some of that ‘back then,’ we could probably stand to learn something from that,” Garcia says. “Turns out that if you slow down a little bit, you might enjoy this gift we have of life a little bit more.”
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Accordingly, they balanced out some of the surface nostalgia with points of deeper meaning. One of the places where they struggled with that was the chorus’ setup line. Hubbard eventually pulled out “makin’ life count,” a sort of stealth reminder to live in the moment.
“Dave is really good at music stuff, lyrics as well, but he’s a really good leader of ‘You know, that might not feel right,’” notes Warburton. “He was saying a couple of times, ‘That line’s not right, that line’s not right, still not right.’ And then we just kept throwing out lines. I think Tyler had that line, and that really sort of tied it in a bow for us.”
Well, almost. They decided it needed a bridge, though staying with the song’s simple theme, they kept the same chord progression and made the section short, reemphasizing how life was lived in the moment in more innocent times.
“We were more interested in the melody doing something than we were in giving more information,” Dillon recalls. “We kind of felt like we had said what we wanted to say already, and so it kind of became about wanting to change the mood a little bit melodically.”
Garcia finished the demo overnight, keeping that smooth foundation, and Hubbard used it to introduce “Back Then Right Now” to his co-producer, Jordan M. Schmidt (Mitchell Tenpenny, Ingrid Andress). The demo was strong enough that when they tracked it at Sound Stage, they played it once for the musicians and let them decide what enhancements might work.
“They did a great job — you gain a couple of new things that were really cool that weren’t there before versus just settling with where it was,” says Garcia. “When we heard the final, I was stoked, man. It just sounded so good.”
One key upgrade came in the verses. Jonny Fung inserted pulsing eighth notes on electric guitar, creating extra motion and tying into the “back then” title by approximating a sound familiar on such ’80s throwback titles as The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” Mike + The Mechanics’ “All I Need Is a Miracle” or Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere.” Schmidt stacked at least two — maybe more — threads of that part to get a chunky sound.
“We probably threw about 50 guitars on there,” Schmidt exaggerates. “I don’t really know, but it’s never just one.”
Garcia’s demo had used a 16-second intro — long by 2023 standards — and the final version kept that format, but slipped the title in over the top to introduce the hook up front. That was also a step toward ’80s sensibilities, when Exile’s “I Can’t Get Close Enough,” Don Williams’ “Lord, I Hope This Day Is Good” and Ronnie Milsap’s “Stranger in My House” all employed intros that exceeded 20 seconds.
“Sometimes I feel like the intro can really help set the mood,” says Schmidt. “Why does every song’s vocal need to start at six seconds and the chorus needs to hit by 36 seconds? That’s when it kind of gets a little too mathematical. I understand there’s a game to play. But at the end of the day, a great song is a great song. You know, ‘Stairway to Heaven’ [with a two-minute intro] was a hit. Maybe you’ve heard of ‘Hotel California’ [with a one-minute-plus intro]?”
Drummer Nir Z made the short bridge even more meaningful, dropping into a halftime feel for a couple of bars before returning to the original rhythm, as if the song was stuck in the past for a bit before kicking itself back into the now. Fung played a guitar solo, though Schmidt had second thoughts and asked him to try something else later; Fung overdubbed a Dobro solo at home. Hubbard made a minor change in the lyric, too, revising a reference to “asphalt” in the opening line to “blacktop,” creating an internal rhyme with “back” and “black.”
Hubbard had several contenders for his next single, but EMI Nashville ultimately went with “Back Then Right Now,” shipping it to radio on Sept. 7 via PlayMPE. It ranks at No. 38 after five weeks on the Country Airplay chart dated Oct. 21.
“At the end of the day, this feels unique right now for the format, but also familiar and nostalgic,” Hubbard reasons. “It’s sort of like a good second cousin to ‘Dancin’ in the Country.’ I just felt like it was a good follow-up to that.”