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Nashville songwriter and musician Abe Stoklasa, known for writing songs for Tim McGraw, Charlie Worsham, Chris Lane and trio Lady A, has died at age 38, Billboard has confirmed. He passed away on Nov. 17 of undisclosed causes.
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The Princeton, Missouri, native found his passion for music early, playing in his father’s band by the age of six.
“I have always been a musician,” Stoklasa previously told The Shotgun Seat of his musically formative years. “My dad had a little ransom style show in the midwest — we did like 70 shows a year — so from two years old I was singing on the stage. At like six years old my dad threw me in the band as the keyboard player, sink or swim. So that’s how I learned to play music.”
He grew up immersed in the music his father loved — music from 1950s through 1970s — soaking in the influence of Elvis, Merle Haggard, The Beatles and James Taylor.
Stoklasa’s family moved to Tennessee when he was a teen, and he soon enrolled at Nashville’s Belmont University. After graduation, he joined David Nail’s road band as a steel guitar player. He briefly spent time pursuing a graduate degree at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music in Coral Gables, Florida — though soon, his passion for doing music, not just studying it, drew him back on the road. He joined Billy Currington’s band for three years, including a stint opening for Kenny Chesney’s 2011 Goin’ Coastal stadium tour.
In 2013, Stoklasa decided to leave the road to focus on songwriting. His writing talents would catch the ears of Nashville mainstays such as Mike Reid (a writer on Ronnie Milsap’s “Stranger in My House”) and Mark D. Sanders (Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance,” Reba McEntire’s “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter”).
Stoklasa was a writer on Chris Lane’s 2016 No. 1 Country Airplay hit “Fix” and crafted songs recorded by Tim McGraw (“Portland, Maine”), David Nail (“Lie With Me”), Billy Currington (“Give It To Me Straight”), Charlie Worsham (“Call You Up,” “The Beginning of Things”), Scotty McCreery (“Here and Ready”), Blake Shelton (“A Girl”) and Lady A (“Ocean”).
Stoklasa told Music Row in 2016, “For a long time, ‘Beginning of Things’ was my favorite song that I was very proud of. I wrote it with Donovan Woods and Charlie Worsham just cut it. It’s so songwriter-y, in that there are two or three levels and meanings to the lyrics that you will not get on one or two listens, which is a fun puzzle to put together. The whole story is made up with some influences in real life, but it was just an exercise in a certain way to be Shakespearean in a way. But I would feel confident handing that to Paul Simon, and I wouldn’t do that with any of my other songs.”
At the time, Stoklasa also expressed his gratitude for artists including Currington, Nail and Kelley working with him, saying, “Billy Currington, he was the first person to care about my songwriting. David Nail is a good friend, we don’t even have to talk about music. We both experienced a lot of firsts together on a tour bus. Charles Kelley has always been like a brother to me. He’s an amazing writer. We’ve written songs other people have cut… and he likes to cut my songs!”
Stoklasa contributed heavily to Lady A member Charles Kelley’s 2016 solo album, The Driver, including “Leaving Nashville,” “Your Love,” “Dancing Around It” and the Grammy-nominated title track, which also featured vocals from Dierks Bentley and Eric Paslay.
“Abe was otherworldly,” Kelley said in a tribute posted on his Instagram page. “I always knew his mind moved at a pace I could never comprehend. He was confidence and self doubt all wrapped in one. He frustrated me and inspired me all at the same time. He was a true enigma in every sense of the word, but aren’t the most talented musicians and artists that way? He was a musician’s musician and carried one of the most authentic voices in this town. I’ll never listen to the songs we shared together the same or forget the moments we had onstage and on the late night bus rides. Nashville will never see another Abe Stoklasa. I’ll miss you my soft spoken friend.”
Nail said of Stoklasa in an Instagram post, “He was beyond unique, and beyond talented. He was a true genius. That word gets tossed around a lot these days, but he was the definition! In the early years of me touring, many of you will remember we had a steel guitar player. That was Abe. He could make it sound like anything you needed. He was brilliant. We weren’t meant to be on the road together, and once he left The Well Ravens, we got closer than ever before. I was so proud when he got off the road for good, to focus on songwriting, something that he was a natural at. He immediately became a hit in the songwriting community. His voice? Oh, he sang like a 50 year old. Soulful, and weathered beyond anything I’d ever heard from a 25 year old young man.”
Worsham also offered up heartfelt memories of his friendship with Stoklasa, saying in a social media video, “I first met Abe Stoklasa through Derek Wells, when I was putting a band together to play the Ernest Tubb Record Shop Midnight Jamboree. He was wickedly hilarious and wickedly talented. I’d never met anyone who could play steel guitar and saxohone really well, and who loved Vince Gill and Aretha Franklin with equal depth … he was so principled and so kind and caring.” Worsham recalled that the last time they wrote together, they penned a song inspired by the television series The Golden Girls, called “Dorothy and Rose.” “It was probably the best song I wrote in six months,” Worsham said, “’cause that’s just how good Abe was … I loved him dearly, as we all did, who knew him.”
For artists who choose not to sign with a record label, some may be independent and others will be do-it-yourself independent.
What’s the difference? Take Laufey, the Icelandic jazz artist whose latest album, Bewitched, reached No. 23 on the Billboard 200 albums chart in September. Laufey is signed to AWAL, the Sony Music-owned company that provides marketing and distribution services for independent artists. She hasn’t signed away the rights to her music, but AWAL helps promote her recordings at digital service providers and retail.
Oliver Anthony Music, on the other hand, is DIY independent. By all appearances, the “Rich Men North of Richmond” singer, whose real name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford, has left his recordings on autopilot without any kind of marketing behind them since he broke into the national consciousness in August and topped the Hot 100 for two straight weeks. Following the success of “Rich Men,” Lunsford has released more songs without the usual promotional muscle required to get new music noticed. As he told Billboard earlier this week, he manages himself and is avoiding record labels as he prepares to record an album.
He’s clearly getting some help. Lunsford has a basic but professional website and an e-commerce store that sells a handful of variations on Oliver Anthony Music hats, T-shirts, bumper stickers and beer koozies. For concerts, Anthony signed with UTA for representation and has a year of touring ahead of him, starting in February with dates in Europe and the Eastern half of the United States. He has an informal publicist who helps with media requests. And he told Billboard he has encountered “many artists,” such as country star Jamey Johnson, who have lent support and guidance.
Comparing “Rich Men” to other tracks to reach No. 1 on the Hot 100 this year, though, suggests being DIY creates some missed opportunities. Combined sales and streams of Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers,” Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero,” Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” and SZA’s “Kill Bill” dropped between 17% and 55% over the 10-week period after the last date those tracks were No. 1. “Rich Men,” in contrast, dropped 83.4%. It makes sense: A major label marketing machine is better than an independent artist’s system in helping a track get hot and maintain momentum over months and years.
With a little help, “Rich Men” could arguably have far more sales and streams. As a DIY artist, Lunsford uses social media activity to keep listeners engaged and depends on the continued interest of journalists to keep him in the public eye. As he told Billboard this week, becoming a full-time musician means “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.”
But Lunsford has done extremely well taking the DIY route. Billboard estimates that “Rich Men” has grossed $2 million from recorded music and publishing royalties from U.S. sales and streams since its release in August. While his weekly download sales are down sharply from their peak in August, our estimates still put the track’s royalties at an impressive $60,000 per week. And because Oliver Anthony Music is a DIY independent artist who retains the rights to his master recording and publishing, he should be pocketing nearly all that money (less any fees for distribution and publishing administration).
Besides, Lunsford seems content being a DIY artist — even if that means leaving money and celebrity on the table. There’s something to be said about saying “no” to the usual impulses to staff up and scale a business as fast as possible. Lunsford can ease into stardom at a comfortable pace rather than jump headfirst into the music business’ shark-filled waters. Read through the YouTube comments to his videos and you sense that listeners put value in Lunsford not being an industry insider — it adds to his authenticity. At the end of the day, not being too much of a business is probably good for Lunsford’s business.
Surprisingly, “Rich Men” has held up better than a couple of other No. 1s in 2023: Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” and Jimin’s “Like Crazy.” Track sales and streams for “Try That” dropped 91.1% in the 10 weeks after it was No. 1. For “Like Crazy,” the first No. 1 for a solo member of superstar K-pop group BTS, track sales and streams dropped 92.9% over the same period. Although “Rich Men” has fallen far from its peak, its 83.4% drop in track sales and streams is considerably better than those other two hits.
There are obvious parallels between “Try That” and “Rich Men.” Both reached No. 1 because of widespread media attention. Both started conversations about social issues: race for Aldean, class for Lunsford. Both were celebrated as conservative anthems, although Anthony has distanced himself from political partisanship. Both are country tracks — Aldean’s a mainstream song built for maximum radio play, Lunsford’s a more old-fashioned slice of Appalachian roots music.
What’s more, both “Try That” and “Rich Men” did brisk business in track sales. As Billboard noted when “Rich Men” ascended the chart, artists popular with conservatives often have strong download numbers. In a typical week, the No. 1 track on the Hot 100 might sell 15,000 downloads, but when the culture wars stoke demand, the No. 1 will sell ten times that many. “Try That” sold 175,000 downloads in the week it was No. 1, while “Rich Men” averaged 132,000 weekly downloads in its two weeks atop the Hot 100.
Download buyers don’t offer the same consistency as streamers, though, and both “Rich Men” and “Try That” lost 99% of their track sales in the 10 weeks after they topped the chart. And because download sales were a big reason why those tracks reached No. 1, their total consumption (measured in both download sales and streams) dropped more than No. 1s that relied more on streaming. But heavy download sales were instrumental in getting each track to No. 1, and “Rich Men” still sells well, too: Last week, the track was the No. 41 most purchased track in the United States., according to Luminate.
Lunsford could easily ditch the DIY approach and assemble a team, but he’s in the rare position of not necessarily needing one. “Rich Men” succeeded without help from a marketing expert, social media guru or even a manager. Instead, Lunsford benefitted from an unprecedented groundswell of interest that gifted him an immense online following. His 1.15 million YouTube followers give him a similar audience as more established country musicians Kenny Chesney and Zac Brown Band, and twice as many as Grammy winner Kacey Musgraves. He has about as many Spotify followers as Bailey Zimmerman, a rising country star signed to Warner Music Nashville and Elektra Records.
When Lunsford eventually releases a new album, he won’t need many resources to instantly reach millions of fans — and he prefers it that way. “I think the most special thing about it being on the chart at all,” he told Billboard, “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.”
Dan + Shay, the duo of Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney, bank their 11th top 10 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart as “Save Me the Trouble” lifts to No. 8 on the list dated Nov. 25. During the Nov. 10-16 tracking week, the single increased by 6% to 19.2 million impressions, according to Luminate. With […]
Though Lauren Watkins was born and raised in Nashville, it took leaving Music City for her to come into her own. She honed her acumen as a writer, and poured her talents into her new, six-song project Introducing: The Heartbreak, out today on Songs & Daughters/Big Loud Records.
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“I want people to feel like they know me better,” Watkins tells Billboard while seated at an eatery in Nashville’s Green Hills area. “I want to be a vessel for the songs to get heard. I thought the best way to do that was first introduce ‘the girl,’ and then introduce the things I’ve been through, which is the heartbreak.”
Introducing: The Heartbreak balances husky vocals, razor-sharp lyrics and sonic touches that range from tender to tough, positioning Watkins as far beyond a heart-on-her-sleeve singer-songwriter. “Stuck in My Ways” details the myriad habits she doesn’t plan to change post-heartbreak, while “The Table” conveys a relationship arc from flirtatious desire to heartbroken freedom.
Growing up, it was Watkins’s older sister Caroline who showed an early bent toward music. Their father worked in health insurance and their mother was a painter; meanwhile, the sisters began performing together at the restaurant Corner Pub in the Woods just outside of Nashville.
“We brought our little speaker and invited all of our family and friends, and played on their little outdoor patio,” Watkins recalls. Her sister was already writing songs, so Lauren chimed in on harmonies. “There were moments where I was like, ‘Oh, I kind of wish I was singing lead,’ but honestly, I was too scared to do it by myself. She was like my security blanket.”
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While her sister signed a publishing deal right out of high school and enrolled at Nashville’s Belmont University, Watkins began carving her own persona and creative vision by taking a different path. Watkins followed in her parents’ footsteps by attending the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in Oxford, Mississippi.
“I knew I wanted to go to Ole Miss and I knew if I wanted to have a career in music, it would have to be something I did on my own,” Watkins says. “At the time, I thought if I left Nashville, that meant I had to choose between school and music.”
Watkins largely put her musical ambitions behind her, and didn’t perform for the bulk of her university years. But still, “There was this hole in my heart, this tugging,” she says.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, upending everyone’s plans. On-campus college classes quickly pivoted to remote courses, leaving Watkins with ample time to reflect on her goals, write songs — and eventually, make frequent trips back home to Nashville. When her sister traveled to Oxford to visit and perform a show, Watkins sang a few songs with her, a moment that fully reignited her passion for singing.
With still just over a year to go before college graduation, Watkins threw herself into writing songs, drawing inspiration from everyone from Kacey Musgraves to George Jones, and joined a local cover band in order to gain performance experience. Like most Gen Z artists, it was second nature for Watkins to share both some originals and some of her cover song performances on social media.
One of those videos caught the ear of songwriter Rodney Clawson, husband of singer-songwriter and Songs & Daughters label head Nicolle Galyon, setting off a chain reaction that led Watkins to her current publishing and label deals.
Watkins is a co-writer on all six songs on the Joey Moi-produced Introducing: The Heartbreak, alongside her sister Caroline, as well as Galyon, Rodney Clawson, The Warren Brothers, Will Bundy, Emily Landis and David Garcia. She recently wrapped her three-night Nashville residency, dubbed the Heartbreak Supper Club, and is on the road with Austin Snell and upcoming concerts opening for Conner Smith.
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Watkins, November’s Rookie of the Month, spoke with Billboard about signing with Songs & Daughters/Big Loud, and shared the stories behind her new project.
What was the process like of preparing to sign a publishing deal and then a label deal?
After I met Nicolle, she let me do my own thing. She let me just write for a while and kind of hustle on my own. She watched me grow as a writer and then signed me to a publishing deal, maybe a year after we met. I still had a lot of developing to do as an artist. All I did for the past few years was write and write. She let me develop on my own before I signed with Songs & Daughters and Big Loud. You hear horror stories about labels where they want you to fit this certain mold, and I never felt that with them. It felt like this is where I needed to be signed.
“Fly on the Wall” features your Big Loud label mate Jake Worthington. How did he come to be part of this?
The first time I heard of Jake is when he opened for Ernest last year; they took me on the road for a weekend on that tour, so I got to open shows for Jake and Ernest. Jake’s music is so good and he’s just so real country—and he’s not putting it on; he’s really like that. I didn’t write the song as a duet, but the more I listened to it, it needed a male voice on there. It was perfect to highlight the contrast of the couple arguing in the song. The song is so old-school and I wanted it to come across that way.
“The Table” has a great “non-ending,” where the melody carries the lyric itself. How did you arrive at that moment?
Originally, we had “on the table” as the final lyric, and Joey [Moi] and I went back and forth about whether to take the line out. The songwriter in me was like, “Take it out — people know what it means and the music does it for you.” Then I talked to other people and some were like, “Leave it in there; people aren’t going to get it,” but I just didn’t listen to them. I’m so proud of this song. I wrote it with Nicolle and the Warren Brothers on a writing a year ago.
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Carter Faith joins you on “Cowboys on Music Row.” When did you write that song?
She’s one of my good friends and as another female artist, she just understands all these niche things that only other artists really understand. We were on a writing retreat earlier this year in Pigeon Forge, and we were there with my sister Caroline, Lauren Hungate, Ashley Monroe, and Jessie Jo Dillon. We love Tales From the Tour Bus and some of the girls hadn’t seen it so were were showing them all the George Jones and Tammy Wynette episode, the Waylon Jennings episode and that sent us down a rabbit hole of documentaries on those guys. We were inspired because they were just singing about their real lives. It came together quickly, and by the time we were almost done with the chorus, Carter sang part of it and she just has this great sound to her voice that was perfect.
What has the response been like?
Sometimes it can ruffle feathers, that type of song. But we’ve just been saying, “If it ruffles your feathers, then maybe you should look inward,” right? There are real cowboys on Music Row. This song is a hyperbole. There are definitely some real cowboys — Jake Worthington is a great example — and they’re not getting offended. They’re going, “Yeah, tell it to the world. We know we’re here.”
Do you feel like it is easier to write on retreats, versus the day-to-day Nashville writes?
There is definitely something to be said for showing up everyday, writing Monday through Friday. That’s a huge part of it, but as an artist and writer, there’s also something to be said for getting away from Nashville and disconnecting. And there’s this respect that you go and do your thing and they know you’ll come back with something great if you’re just relaxed and focused on writing. And you forge such great friendships—we all got so close on that trip and we still go to dinner when we’re all in town. We hope to do the same retreat again and make it an annual thing. You just write better songs with people that know you and know what you want to say.
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Does having a sister who is also involved in music further strengthen your sibling bond?
We write together so much, and at the same time, I have my artist thing and she has her songwriter thing that’s separate. We have success together but we also have success outside of each other. It’s a lifestyle that so few people understand, and so to have your sister be in it with you is great.
What do you hope listeners take away from your music?
This is me at my most natural place. I love country and I want to be my own form of modern and old-school, and I also want to make all my heroes proud with these songs.
Having been inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame last year, Parton is making good on her promise to create her first full-fledged rock album, with Rockstar releasing Friday (Nov. 17), via Butterfly Records/Big Machine Label Group. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news The 30-track […]
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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