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Taylor Swift will always love Dolly Parton. In a new Hollywood Reporter profile on the 77-year-old country music legend, Swift was candid about all the reasons she admires Parton, who’s gearing up to release her first ever rock album — Rockstar — later this month. “Dolly is a force of evolution and transformation in our […]
Dolly Parton has no problem saying no to big offers. Whether it’s giving a firm no thank you to Elvis Presley when his manager asked for the half the publishing on “I Will Always Love You” for the honor of the King recording her song to initially declining induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Parton isn’t afraid to stick to her guns.
Even when the NFL comes calling, which they have, several times. Parton told The Hollywood Reporter that she’s turned down playing the coveted Super Bowl halftime gig several times, and for very good reasons.
“Oh, sure. I’ve been offered that many times,” Parton told THR of turning her back on one of the most high-profile gigs in music. “I couldn’t do it because of other things, or I just didn’t think I was big enough to do it — to do that big of a production. When you think about those shows, those are big, big productions. I’ve never done anything with that big of a production. I don’t know if I could have. I think at the time that’s what I was thinking.”
Had Parton said yes, she would have joined a very small roster of country stars who’ve taken the stage for what is typically the highest-rated broadcast TV program of the year, a list that includes 1994’s “Rockin’ Country Sunday” line-up with Clint Black, Tanya Tucker, Wynonna & Naomi Judd and Shania Twain (with No Doubt and Sting) in 2003.
But with her first-ever rock album, Rockstar, due out on Nov. 17, Parton said she’s thinking about blow-out performances in a much different way. “It would make more sense,” she said of playing the blow-out gig that will host Usher on Feb. 11, 2024 in Las Vegas. “That might change. I might be able to do a production show.”
The singer who has won 10 Grammys, been nominated for two Oscars and placed 25 No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart is about to move into uncharted territory with the 30-song album, which features a handful of originals and collaborations on rock classics with everyone from Paul McCartney and Elton John to Stevie Nicks, Sting, Joan Jett, Ringo Starr, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, Emmylou Harris, Lizzo, P!nk, Brandi Carlile and more.
After initially turning down the offer to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because she said it didn’t feel like the right fit, Parton was inducted last year after gaining a better understanding of how the Hall works. “They’re going to put me in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and somebody like Meat Loaf or some of these other great artists never even made it?’ I didn’t want to take away from somebody that has spent their life in that world like I had spent mine in country [music],” she told THR.
But after learning how the invitation process works, and seeing the variety of acts who’ve been inducted, from rappers (Jay-Z, The Beastie Boys) to pop icons (Madonna, Janet Jackson) — not to mention this year’s class featuring fellow country legend Willie Nelson, rapper/producer Missy Elliott and late pop star George Michael — she now gets it. “They told me all the ways that people’s music has influenced other people around the world … and told me about other people that were in it besides rock. Then I accepted it,” she said.
“But I still didn’t feel great about it. I still thought I needed to earn it,” she said. “That’s why I thought, ‘Well, timing is perfect. There’s a real reason for me to do this rock ‘n’ roll album. Here I am a rock star at 77.’”
UTA has signed The War And Treaty for booking representation, with exclusive worldwide representation in all areas. Founded in 2014 by the husband-and-wife duo Michael Trotter Jr. and Tanya Trotter, The War And Treaty has quickly become one of the most exciting new musical acts. They recently teamed with Zach Bryan for the song “Hey […]
Nashville-based booking outfit The Neal Agency, known for a roster that includes artists Morgan Wallen and Bailey Zimmerman, has launched a music publishing division, Billboard can reveal.
The Neal Agency’s head of business development, Ryan Beuschel, will spearhead the new division. Beuschel joined The Neal Agency earlier this year following stints at Warner Chappell Nashville (as vp of A&R/strategy and ASCAP.
The new division’s first signing is singer-songwriter Palmer Anthony via a co-publishing venture with Warner Chappell Music (WCM). Anthony previously signed with The Neal Agency for booking.
“The ultimate goal for the company is to be truly a place to develop artists,” Neal tells Billboard. “Obviously, a big part of that is on the road, but [also] being able to have a hand in the creative process. … As the music industry continues to evolve, we have the opportunity to help create and build artists from the ground up.”
Beuschel says, “I think Palmer is a great example of being the first person that we did this with because he was signing to the agency, and then shopping around and looking into publishing deals. At one point, he mentioned, ‘It would be amazing if we could work together,’ and we knew each other before he signed with The Neal Agency. He had been touring in Texas and was writing some really compelling stuff alone and with co-writers. I felt like it was a great opportunity for The Neal Agency to have creative direction and touring strategy inside the same building, communicating with each other back and forth to push his career as far and as fast as we can.”
“Working with Ryan, with his background at ASCAP and Warner Chappell, this partnership makes a lot of sense,” adds Warner Chappell Music Nashville president/CEO Ben Vaughn. “I met Palmer because of [Beuschel and Neal] and it’s been really cool to watch Palmer starting to network through the town and co-writing. It’s great to build this new thing out with them.”
Anthony grew up primarily in northern California and went on to play baseball at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before pursuing songwriting. After graduation, he moved to Fort Worth, Texas, and immersed himself in the Texas music scene, opening for artists including Riley Green, Chase Rice and Randall King.
The Neal Agency agent Haley Teske was responsible for bringing Anthony’s talent to the attention of the company in the first place, leading to his initial signing for booking.
“I saw him at [Nashville music event] Whiskey Jam and I could tell he was a hard worker, and [I] just kept in touch until the time was right,” says Teske.
“I’ll say it was a best-case scenario for me, too,” Anthony says, “because Haley was a supporter very early in the whole scene and the fact that all these pieces kind of fell into place, with Ryan at The Neal Agency and Ben at Warner Chappell. It was a perfect scenario for me to keep it kind of in-house for publishing and booking.”
Neal launched The Neal Agency in 2022, following his departure from WME. The company’s initial roster included Wallen, ERNEST, Riley Green, HARDY, Seaforth, John Morgan, Chase Rice. and Ashland Craft. It has since grown to include Zimmerman, CCM/country artist Anne Wilson, Ella Langley and lifestyle brands Stevenson Ranch and Whiskey Jam.
Neal says passion — not an allegiance to a certain genre — will continue to drive new signings.
“Me, personally, I listen to a lot of alt-rock. I grew up on Southern hip-hop, Project Pat,” he says, noting that the agency also works with rapper mike for booking. “So we’ve grown to understand that, having to forge relationships with promoters and festivals that we didn’t before, is that there are no barriers for us as a company. It’s about passion, not genre, for myself and all of our agents and staff.”
Back in July, Jason Aldean came under fire for his controversial “Try That in a Small Town” which features scenes shot at Tennessee’s Maury County Courthouse, where a Black man named Henry Choate was lynched in 1927. The Columbia Race Riot also occurred there in 1946.
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In a new interview with CBS, the country singer says that he might have second guessed the filming location if he had known its racist history. “Knowing what I know now, probably not,” he said of whether or not he’d choose to film there now. “But it’s also — I’m not gonna go back 100 years and check on the history of this building because, honestly, if you’re in the South, you could probably go to any small-town courthouse, you’re gonna be hard-pressed to find one that hasn’t had some racial issue over the years at some point. That’s just a fact. For anybody that thinks that we picked that building specifically for that reason, because there was a lynching there, whatever.”
Aldean added that he also get his “car tags” at that court house every year, and it’s in the county he lies in. “There was people of all color doing stuff in the video. That’s what I don’t understand. There was white people in there, there was Black people. This video did not shine the light on specific group and say, ‘That’s the problem.’ And anybody that saw that in the video, then you weren’t looking hard enough at the video,” he explained. “I thought it was actually a song that said something for a change. Not just, ‘Here’s another song for radio.’ I didn’t expect it to get the kind of heat that it got. And I think that was probably more because of the video more so than because of the song.”
He concluded, “The whole idea behind the video was to show the lawlessness and the disrespect for cops and just trashing cities. … I’m just not cool with that. I feel like the narrative got switched over and became more of a racial type thing. If that’s what you got out of the song and the video, that’s almost on you, because that wasn’t our intention.”
The video, released on July 14, features footage of American flag burning, protesters having confrontations with police, looters breaking a display case and thieves robbing a convenience store. CMT has pulled the video from its rotation after running it for three days, Billboard confirmed.
“In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song (a song that has been out since May) and was subject to a comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests,” Jason wrote in a statement at the time. “These references are not only meritless, but dangerous. There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage- and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music- this one goes too far.”
The song went on to top the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart dated Aug. 5, 2022.
“You’ll never know unless you try.”
Throughout history, some form of that advice has been given to people who doubted their own entertainment ambitions. Almost no one gets a movie part without auditioning, or has a hit as a recording artist without stepping up to the microphone.
But the competition is stiff and there is no sure-fire metric to guarantee that following the path pays off. So nearly every creator who has chased their dream for any length of time questions periodically whether they should quit.
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That makes HunterGirl’s debut single, “Ain’t About You,” one of those personal songs with universal relevance. In 2021, she had been in Nashville for five years, playing the bars, writing songs and networking with other aspiring artists and musicians. As some of them made important steps forward, she continued grinding it out with no visible opportunities on the horizon, and as her fatigue increased, so did her pessimism about the road she had taken.
“Nothing was really happening, and a lot of my friends were getting record deals and publishing deals,” she recalls. “I was honestly just kind of the friend falling behind and not really knowing if I was on the right path or if I made a mistake.”
One day in autumn 2021, HunterGirl seriously contemplated giving up on her dream. She gritted her way through a lunchtime performance at a bar on Nashville’s Lower Broadway, which she thought might be one of her last shows in Music City. At 6 p.m. that same day, she faked a smile during a Tuesday-night Zoom writing appointment with veterans, whom she regularly helped process their experiences through songwriting in the Freedom Sings program. One particular woman, who had been holding back for months, announced that she was ready to put her story into a song, and HunterGirl helped her find the words and begin to release some of her turmoil. As often happens in those sessions, they ended the exercise in tears, and the veteran offered a heartfelt thanks: “Hunter, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
After the call, HunterGirl shed more tears, and she instinctively picked up her guitar and began questioning what it would have meant to this veteran if she had given up on music. She began writing about her feelings — essentially processing her inner world the same way she asked the veterans to do it.
“I call this one my 45-minute conversation with Jesus,” she says. “It was supposed to be my thinking-about-leaving-Nashville song, and ended up being my staying-in-Nashville song.”
She crafted an opening line about how she had begun the day, reviewing all the reasons she should quit. But the feedback from the veteran about what a difference HunterGirl had made for her changed the journey in the song.
“That’s where the thought, ‘What if it ain’t about you?’ came from,” recalls HunterGirl. “It’s about how many people that you could be letting down, or the people that you can touch.”
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That line would become a key part of the “Ain’t About You” chorus, which she decided should change each time it occurred. The first chorus was easily written about a little girl who needed encouragement to believe in herself, the second chorus acknowledged a young boy who needed permission to cry — and the final chorus, about providing hope through her music, was written with the veteran in mind.
She devoted the second verse to the trap of comparing one’s life against other people, a problem compounded by social media. She felt that it needed a bridge before she could conclude, and that posed the biggest hurdle — though with “Ain’t About You,” that lasted only a matter of minutes. She ultimately decided to put quitting in a spiritual dimension, cinching her decision to stay in Nashville.
“If you throw it all away, you’re telling God He made a mistake, but He never makes ’em,” she says. “Whatever He was planning was bigger for me than anything that I could imagine and greater than I could come up with, and I just had to be patient.”
HunterGirl had no intention of ever playing it for anyone, but it at least changed her mindset. During the next week, friends encouraged her to audition for American Idol. Days later, she played another bar show, and at the end, a former Idol crew member suggested she tryout. She took it as a sign, and the audition led to participation in Idol’s 2022 season, where she finished runner-up and earned a recording contract with Wheelhouse.
She still had no intention of sharing “Ain’t About You” until a barbecue where fellow Idol alums Noah Thompson and Chayce Beckham asked her to play something she had never played for anyone else. Their overwhelming reaction made her more open with the song, and at a later event, BMG Nashville president Jon Loba walked in as she was about to play it again. He insisted it needed to become a single.
So HunterGirl cut the song at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios with producer Lindsay Rimes (Nate Smith, LOCASH), who helped her make “Ain’t About You” a little more consistent by repeating a prechorus melody that originally appeared only once. The session was her first time to record in a significant studio, so he gave her a mini-tour to make her feel at home and took efforts to get her comfortable with the musicians. Since “Ain’t About You” was so personal, he asked her to perform it for the band so they could fully understand how it fit her.
Guitarist Ilya Toshinskiy fashioned the acoustic foundation similarly to the way she played it, forming an intimate undercurrent.
“I didn’t want to take away from the guitar, and the vocal — that was sort of the DNA of the song,” notes Rimes. “I wanted it to sound like she was sitting there playing the guitar, even though obviously, Ilya was playing the guitar. That’s the foundation of the song.”
Only three musicians played prior to the first chorus, when the entire band joined the proceedings, though they still approached it lightly. Electric guitarist Sol Philcox-Littlefield weaved in faint atmospheric touches, then hinted at an emergency siren in the background of the decisive bridge.HunterGirl recorded the final vocals at Rimes’ studio, where he again took steps to make her feel comfortable. They revisited the difficult emotional circumstances in which she wrote “Ain’t About You,” and she ended up in tears again as she delivered those feelings in her performance.
“The most important thing is whatever is happening in my room here between the mouth and the microphone,” Rimes says. “That’s the magic. I think the environment, my energy — everything contributes to a great vocal.”
Wheelhouse released “Ain’t About You” to country radio via PlayMPE on Oct. 2. HunterGirl is believed to be the first female country singer on a major label to appear as the sole writer of her first single since Mary Chapin Carpenter in 1989. The experience has affected the way that HunterGirl writes songs.
“Sharing the most personal parts of my life -— like all my insecurities, everything that I was dealing with at the time — it made other people feel comfortable to feel that way, too,” she says. “And so this song completely changed the way that I wrote from here on out. Everything after this is going to be full heart, my full honesty, everything in me 100% because there’s no telling who else is going through the same thing.”
CTM Outlander has inked a deal with four-time BMI songwriter of the year winner Ross Copperman, including both the acquisition of Copperman’s catalog (via Iris in the Sky with Diamonds) as well as a publishing deal for his future works.
Copperman has had songs recorded by Keith Urban, Tyler Hubbard, Luke Bryan, Blake Shelton & Gwen Stefani, Gabby Barrett, Kenny Chesney & P!nk, Dierks Bentley, Brett Young, Darius Rucker and more. CTM will create new opportunities for Copperman through a creative partnership with SMACKSongs. Copperman was previously with Sony Music Publishing.
As part of the arrangement, CTM Outlander also acquires Copperman’s writer share for songs previously published by Plain Jane, including “Love Ain’t” by Eli Young Band, “Happy Anywhere” by Blake Shelton feat. Gwen Stefani, “Get Along” by Kenny Chesney and “Living” by Dierks Bentley.
Copperman said in a statement, “I am profoundly grateful for the opportunity to work alongside remarkable individuals like CTM and SMACK in my new team. CTM’s visionary leadership has already brought us exciting opportunities beyond Country, expanding our horizons. I’ve always held immense respect for SMACK, and I eagerly anticipate the promising collaborations and accomplishments that lie ahead.”
André de Raaff, CEO at CTM Outlander, said, “From the first moment we met Ross we felt his energy, passion and drive for music. His goal is set to break new artists and help creative new opportunities with the ones he’s already been working with. We are here to support him in any type of way and see Ross as somebody that is helping to develop the country music genre into a global genre.”
CTM Outlander is a partnership between the innovative and disruptive Dallas, Texas based Outlander Capital led by Les Ware and Mike McKool and the Dutch-based leading independent music entertainment company CTM, led by industry veteran André de Raaff. CTM Outlander previously acquired Shane McAnally‘s catalog earlier this year, in addition to other SMACKSongs works. In 2022, the CTM Outlander acquired catalogs of Natalie Hemby, Michael Tyler and Ben Burgess.
Mike McKool, director of CTM Outlander, said, “When we created CTM Outlander, we had no specific agenda as far as genre was concerned. It was only after meeting and developing relationships with the songwriting community in Nashville, that we decided to place an emphasis on country music. As we continue to invest and grow our portfolio, Ross is another example of the kind of artist we want to be in business with. We couldn’t be more excited to work with him moving forward, while also furthering our relationship with SMACKSongs.”
Robert Carlton, president of SMACKSongs, added, “SMACK is proud to further our partnership with CTM through this deal. Ross has been one of the premier writers and producers in Nashville over the last decade. We’ve been fortunate to share quite a bit of success with him through co-writes, but feel truly honored that he chose to entrust SMACK with this next chapter of his career.”
A second round of performers has been added to the 57th annual CMA Awards, led by Morgan Wallen, Kenny Chesney, Luke Combs, Kelsea Ballerini and Alan Jackson. Also performing are Dan+Shay, Jordan Davis, HARDY, Cody Johnson, Post Malone, Mac McAnally, The War and Treaty and Zac Brown Band. Luke Bryan and Peyton Manning will again […]
Nashville music publishing company Boom Music Group has severed ties with SESAC Nashville Music Awards’ 2020 songwriter of the year Matthew McGinn, after felony and misdemeanor charges were filed against him on Oct. 28 in Davidson County, Tenn. “Boom Music Group is extremely saddened about the reprehensible events that transpired this weekend with Matt McGinn,” […]
Jason Aldean and Brittany Aldean took the political route for their Halloween costumes this year, taking to Instagram on Tuesday (Oct. 31) to share a skit in which they acted as Donald Trump and Joe Biden during a presidential debate. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news In […]
