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Chris Young has parted ways with Nashville-based management company The AMG (short for Artist Management Group), a rep for the singer has confirmed to Billboard. Along with Brad Paisley, Young was one of Rob Beckham‘s flagship clients when he launched The AMG in 2019 with music manager Bill Simmons. The AMG’s official website still lists […]
It’s an understated song with loads of longing and alchemical alliteration.
“Tucson Too Late” takes Jordan Davis out of the general pockets he has explored in previous singles. Contrasting with experienced ballads “Buy Dirt” and “Next Thing You Know” on one side, rock-edged productions “What My World Spins Around” and “Singles You Up” on the other, “Tucson” rides a midtempo pace with traditional country roots.
“This is the type of song that I grew up on,” Jordan says. “This feels like I could have picked this song up and put it in the playlist that my dad was listening to whenever I was falling in love with country music, whether it’s ‘Watermelon Crawl’ or ‘Holes in the Floor of Heaven,’ ‘Check Yes or No.’ And maybe it is the nostalgic kind of sound that makes the song a little extra special.”
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It doesn’t hurt that “Tucson” is the product of a friends-and-family foursome: Davis, Jacob Davis, Josh Jenkins and Matt Jenkins, the group that penned “Buy Dirt.” It definitely helps that the melody makes effective use of musical tension, hitting the kinds of notes that make listeners lean forward in their seats, edging toward resolution. That happens, in fact, three times in the last line of the chorus.
“There’s an ache to that s–t,” says Josh.
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Josh had the original title, “Tulane Too Late,” which — by referencing a New Orleans university — tugged on the Davis brothers’ Louisiana roots. He brought it up during a 2022 writing session that Jordan had to miss. In its first incarnation, the title linked Tulane and two-lane highways, though the school’s real-world location is in the center of a start-and-stop urban grid. The three writers toyed with other possible locales that suggested wide-open terrain and landed on Tucson.
“That title feels classic,” Matt says. “When you say ‘Tucson,’ it just fits the story of getting somewhere too late, the girl’s already gone. Nothing feels more lonely and sad than a lonely cactus out in the desert, a tumbleweed rolling across the road.”
The three writers played a bit with the idea but didn’t commit to any specific direction. Jacob called Jordan later and relayed the “Tucson Too Late” title, firing up his brother’s songwriting instincts.
That came in handy when the other three joined Jordan on tour a few weeks later, on July 16, 2022, to write on the bus outside the Magic Springs Water & Theme Park in Hot Springs, Ark. They had no new ideas that day, so Jordan asked about “Tucson.” The city name triggered thoughts of classic country tunes “Marina Del Rey” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” and Jordan specifically suggested they capture the tone of “Miami, My Amy,” a Keith Whitley single that also benefits from blatant wordplay.Josh slid into a slightly unusual progression, strumming a two minor chord to kick off the chorus on a then-new guitar.
“It’s a really crappy nylon that I bought for like 150 bucks at Guitar Center,” he recalls. “It doesn’t stay in tune, but it was the first time I took it out on a bus run, and I think there was some spirit to this gut-string that paired with the vibe and the chords and the hook. This sounds hippie-dippie, but it was like it was inviting us to explore some of those chords.”
After inserting a lonesome, descending guitar line into the stanza, Josh came back to the two minor, and they logged the chorus’ last two lines of lyrics, emphasizing the three unresolved notes in the melody on the way to the hook. They reverse-engineered the chorus’ words from there, the guy “racing through the desert” to stop his woman from leaving on a jet plane, realizing the whole way that he would not make it.
Why doesn’t he just call her? “I wanted to answer that in the video,” says Jordan. “We have him run over his cellphone.”
Backing up to the song’s beginning, Josh fashioned a five-note lead-in — similar to the guitar in Rodney Crowell’s desperate “Ashes by Now” — then gave the verse a different version of the chorus’ descending motif, this one akin to Danny O’Keefe’s desolate “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues.” In the song’s opening two lines, the protagonist pondered whether the relationship had simply been a mirage.
“I can’t remember who said it — that wasn’t me,” Josh notes. “But it was such a cool way to play on the desert, Tucson — the lonely aesthetic — in a fresh way.”
They moved to the three minor — another out-of-the-norm chord — for the pre-chorus, and it sounded so good that they repeated that pre-chorus in the second verse, shortening the verse to reach it earlier. They returned to the three minor one more time in the bridge, dropping a reference to Merle Haggard’s “Silver Wings” during that stanza.
“The 16-year-old me that would be listening to George Strait sing ‘Marina Del Rey’ or ‘Galveston,’ or one of these songs that would have some of those chords, would be proud,” says Matt.
The four writers made a guitar/vocal work tape over the sound of the air-conditioning and the bus door — “I think somebody was making coffee during the second verse,” Jordan says — then passed that rudimentary recording to producer Paul DiGiovanni (Dustin Lynch, Travis Denning). It was, in turn, the reference tape during a Nov. 7 tracking session at Nashville’s Sound Stage for the studio band: guitarists Derek Wells and Ilya Toshinskiy, drummer Nir Z, keyboardist Alex Wright and bassist Jimmie Lee Sloas.
DiGiovanni gave them plenty of leeway to capture a less-is-more, classic country vibe. Nir Z played on the rim almost all the way until the second chorus before he squarely hit the snare drum. (DiGiovanni would later give the first-verse drum a slightly trashy sound with a “rim crunch” effect.) Wells threaded a baritone guitar part that recalls “Wichita Lineman”-era Glen Campbell in the track and heightened the tension with judicious swells over the key three minor chord in both pre-choruses.
“He’s doing this little fake steel thing,” notes DiGiovanni. “It’s just like a volume pedal on a clean electric guitar with some reverb.”
To differentiate the bridge’s three minor from the pre-choruses, they dropped the quasi-steel; instead, harmony singer Trey Keller piled up 13 background vocal tracks in that passage, staggering them across several entry points. “I didn’t really have a super plan for that,” DiGiovanni concedes. “That was just part of what we had, and we rolled with it.”
“Tucson” and “Damn Good Time,” the leadoff track for Bluebird Days, were both recorded the same day after the rest of the album was completed. Jordan envisioned “Tucson” as the second single, though “Next Thing You Know” supplanted it, based on heavy streaming. MCA Nashville finally released “Tucson” to country radio on Aug. 7 via PlayMPE.
“I was pushing myself as an artist and as a writer to do something that maybe a fan would listen to and be like, ‘Hmm, I wouldn’t see him put a song out like that,’ ” says Jordan. “I love the song, I love the cut of it. Let’s see how it shakes out.”
Tape Room Music has entered a strategic partnership with Red Light Ventures and Firebird Music, which purchased more than 350 songs from various Tape Room Publishing catalogs as part of the transaction. The catalog sale includes “Body Like a Back Road” (recorded by Sam Hunt), “Do I Make You Wanna” (Billy Currington), “Sunrise, Sunburn, Sunset” […]
Collaborations continue to abound in this week’s batch of new country releases, with Country Music Hall of Fame member Dolly Parton teaming with ex-Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, while Luke Combs joins with Charlie Worsham and Old Dominion pairs with Megan Moroney on a new release. Meanwhile, Rhiannon Giddens offers a sterling new release, while bluegrassers Andrew Crawford and Brandi Colt offer a dark tale of one woman’s journey of adventures and misfortunes.
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Dolly Parton feat. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, “Let It Be”
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Here, Dolly Parton teams up with McCartney and Starr on this song from her upcoming album Rockstar, which pairs Parton with numerous rock and pop artists to record classic rock tracks. The project is out in November. Parton’s glorious soprano is powerful here as she takes on the Beatles’ themes of hope from their 1970 Billboard Hot 100-topper, her voice weaving the serene melody with a dedicated believability without sounding trite. The trio’s harmonies are magnetic, aided by the thick arrangements of McCartney’s stately piano playing, searing guitar from Peter Frampton and Mick Fleetwood on drums.
Old Dominion with Megan Moroney, “Can’t Break Up Now”
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Old Dominion teams with “I’m Not Pretty” singer-songwriter Moroney on this sultry realization that though two lovers are hitting a rough patch in their relationship, they’ve invested too much into the relationship — and are too embedded into each other’s lives — to shatter what they’ve built. He knows the exact kind of coffee she likes, they share the same friends and even his dog now likes her better. Sonically, the track is classic Old Dominion with its well-constructed lyrics and semi-pop sheen. Lead singer Matthew Ramsey’s voice is well-paired with Moroney’s honey-hued vocals. The song is from Old Dominion’s upcoming Memory Lane album.
Rhiannon Giddens, “Too Little, Too Late, Too Bad”
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Written by Giddens and Dirk Powell, “Too Little, Too Late, Too Bad” offers an empowered dismissal to a lover who has signaled their disloyalty through “too many lies/ too many alibis.” Plucky percussion, moody bass, horns and soulful harmonies layer behind Gidden’s unflappable vocals, drawing on classic soul and R&B. This song is included on Giddens’ Aug. 18-released, genre-traversing album You’re the One, in which Giddens wraps her mighty voice around a range of styles, including country, R&B, blues and jazz.
Charlie Worsham with Luke Combs, “How I Learned How to Pray”
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Singer-songwriter-session musician Worsham teams with reigning CMA entertainer of the year Combs for this song, which centers around learning to call on a higher power not through rote Sunday school learning or church sermons, but during the nadir of his life (wrecking his car and losing his freedom), though also the serendipitous moments (meeting a potential lover). Combs’ hearty, raspy vocal is nicely paired with Worsham’s relaxed, euphonious singing. Worsham wrote the song with Jeremy Spillman and Ryan Tyndell, and the song will be included on his upcoming album Compadres, out Oct. 13.
Andrew Crawford and Brandi Colt, “Wabash River”
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Back in 2021, Crawford issued his debut bluegrass album, but over the past year, this husband-and-wife duo have been steadily releasing a slate of bluegrass songs together. On their latest, they delve into a story of a young girl who grew up in high society, only to fall in love with a young man from the poorer side of town. Razor-sharp fiddle, spright mandolin and Crawford’s on-the-spot harmonies bolster Colt’s crystalline lead vocals, which grow moody as the story unfolds, with the song’s two lovers ultimately leaving behind nothing more than a note and muddy footprints along the banks of the Wabash River.
It was less than four months ago that Kid Rock got so worked up about Bud Light teaming with transgender TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney for its Bud Light Easy Carry Contest during the NCAA’s March Madness that the “Don’t Tell Me How To Live” singer tried to destroy 12-packs of Bud Light with a semi-automatic rifle as he yelled, “F–k Bud Light and f–k Anheuser-Busch.”
What a difference a few months make.
In July, CNN reported that despite his apparent animus for the world’s largest beer company, Rock, 52 — who didn’t specifically mention Mulvaney (or the word “trans”) in his video, or call for a boycott of products from Bud Light parent company AB Inbev — was still selling Bud Light at his Nashville restaurant; Newsweek additionally reported at the time that Rock’s restaurant/bar was selling Bud Light during the June 9-12 Country Music Association Festival and that a Twitter user told the magazine that a waitress at the bar said “they actually stopped selling it for a week right after [Rock’s video], then started selling it again.”
And over the weekend the rapper-turned-country rocker was pictured enjoying a tall cool Bud Light at Colt Ford show in Nashville according to TMZ, which caused a torrent of comments on Twitter (now X) about the apparent hypocrisy from the “Devil Without a Cause” star. “Damn, never thought I’d have to give Kid Rock the Bud Light treatment but here we are,” wrote one commenter. “Just shot up all my Kid Rock vinyl and CDs. I loved Kid Rock, but I hope Kid Woke goes broke.”
Another, Fred Guttenberg — father of murdered Parkland High School student Jaime Guttenberg and gun control advocate — had equally harsh words for Rock, writing, “It’s just hard to keep a good beer down and I LOVE BUD LIGHT!!! Apparently, so does @KidRock. To all of you hypocritical lunatics who actually started this bulls–t attack on my favorite beer, cheers to you.”
Billboard has not been able to confirm the veracity of the pictures of Rock drinking the Bud Light at press time and a spokesperson for the singer had not returned a request for comment.
At the time of CNN’s report, it was unclear if the band on Bud Light at Rock’s Music City establishment had been lifted, or if one had ever been put in place, but at the time of the Mulvaney controversy Rock appeared happy to jump on the bandwagon of ban-calling against Bud Light.
While country singer John Rich pledged at the time to pull Bud Light from his Nashville bar Redneck Riviera and Travis Tritt said he would remove the formerly best-selling brew in the nation from his tour rider in the midst of the transphobic backlash against the Mulvaney promotional stunt, Rock never specifically said he’d stop selling it at his Broadway district spot.
In the original Mulvaney clip from April, she revealed that the company helped her celebrate her “365th day of womanhood” with “possibly the best gift ever” — a commemorative can of Bud Light with Mulvaney’s face on the side that was not commercially available, but instead meant as a personalized one-off souvenir.
Check out some of the comments about Rock’s Bud Light moment.
I’ve seen multiple different sources. It’s confirmed. Without principles we are nothing. I choose to move on from Kid Woke but everyone else can make their own decision.— Anthony Carrey (@SocksMoney187) August 19, 2023
Damn, never thought I’d have to give Kid Rock the Bud Light treatment but here we are.Just shot up all my Kid Rock vinyl and CDs. I loved Kid Rock, but I hope Kid Woke goes broke.— Anthony Carrey (@SocksMoney187) August 18, 2023
It’s just hard to keep a good beer down and I LOVE BUD LIGHT!!! Apparently, so does @KidRock. To all of you hypocritical lunatics who actually started this bullshit attack on my favorite beer, cheers to you 🍻 https://t.co/DH0FUOpYLo— Fred Guttenberg (@fred_guttenberg) August 19, 2023
First, he doesn’t just vow to boycott Bud Light, he shoots a case of it on camera with an AR-15. Then, not only does he go back to immediately drinking Bud Light again but he does it in public and gets caught. Can’t make this stuff up. https://t.co/vAbBJOKdyF— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) August 18, 2023
Over the past couple of weeks, singer-songwriter Oliver Anthony Music (real name: Chris Lunsford) has seen his name recognition surge as his song “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which criticizes various issues including greedy politicians, high taxes, low pay, and issues surrounding the welfare system. A performance video, posted by radiowv on Aug. 7, has earned over 25 million views, while the song itself has topped the iTunes country chart and the Spotify Top 50-USA chart and seems to be a contender for the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart when it arrives on Monday (Aug. 21).
Anthony brought his live show to fans in North Carolina over the weekend. On Saturday (Aug. 19), he spearheaded a free show at Eagle Creek Golf Club and Grill in Moyock, N.C., a tight-knit community just south of Norfolk, Va., with a population of just over 5,000 people (as of the 2020 census).
Attendees began showing up to the venue around 11 a.m., as lawn chairs and blankets proliferated across the grounds, and people packed in close to the stage, standing shoulder to shoulder prior to the singer-songwriter’s afternoon set. Some members of security estimated the day’s attendance roughly between 6,000 and 8,000 attendees.
Prior to his set, a drone could be seen flying over the crowd, while camera operators filmed crowd footage, noting it was intended to be used for an upcoming music video. A merch stand featured T-shirts emblazoned with Anthony’s name, with some of the shirts also bearing crosses or scriptures. A few lawn signs emblazoned with “Oliver Anthony 2024” were scattered across the lawn, while some children were sporting “Oliver Anthony for President” shirts.
The “Rich Men From North of Richmond” hitmaker took the stage, which was decorated with American flags, and began his afternoon set in a unique fashion; not with crashing cymbals or jangly guitar rhythms, but with prayer. The crowd stayed quiet as Anthony followed by reading a biblical scripture.
He began his set with “I Want to Go Home,” before offering up “Ain’t Gotta Dollar,” “’90 Some Chevy,” “I Gotta Get Sober” later performing his main draw, “Rich Men From North of Richmond.” No pyrotechnics, no flashy stage lights, no choreography; Anthony primarily stayed close to the microphone, playing a set heavy on mid-tempo songs. Though he noted at one point that his grizzled voice was a bit tired, he sounded strong as he rolled through a slate of songs he’s released over the past year or so.
Though some conservative-leaning media personalities were among the many sharing the song, initially helping it to gain traction, the artist himself made no political statement during the show, keeping his music front and center. He kept his comments to the crowd brief, primarily thanking them for their support of his music. At one point, the crowd began chanting “USA! USA!” and at another moment, a crowd member attempted to begin a “Let’s Go Brandon” anti-president Biden chant that quickly fizzled, even drawing criticism from some attendees seated farther from the stage. Other attendees held up American flags during the performance.
Though Jamey Johnson previously showed up as a surprise guest during one of Anthony’s previous shows; the Moyock show had no special guests, but the artist did reprise a performance of Johnson’s “In Color,” welcoming one of the day’s opening acts to the stage.
Here, we look at five standouts from the day:
A Canine Affair
In his first major interview, Oliver Anthony’s co-manager Draven Riffe talked to Billboard about the whirlwind that has surrounded the Virginia country singer over the past week-and-a-half since his everyman anthem “Rich Men North of Richmond” went viral and record labels have clamoring to sign him.
On Saturday (Aug. 19), near a playground in front of the venue before Anthony’s afternoon show at Eagle Creek Golf Club and Grill in Moyock, N.C., Riffe explained how he met the singer-songwriter and why Anthony’s newly assembled team is “taking it slow” when it comes to weighing the multitude of offers coming his way, even those from high-profile artists. During the conversation, thousands of fans flocked to a nearby outdoor stage surrounded by a few food and beverage trucks, waiting for Anthony, whom Riffe said was saving his voice and, therefore, declined to speak with Billboard.
Riffe only became aware of Anthony (whose real name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford; his stage name is in honor of his grandfather, Oliver Anthony) within the past month. A Missouri friend of Riffe, from the manager’s days as a touring musician, sent him Anthony’s music. Riffe knew it was perfect for radiowv, the YouTube page Riffe co-launched in 2018 that highlights unsigned Americana and country musicians from the Virginia/West Virginia region.
“I listened to Oliver’s music and I just knew he was special,” Riffe tells Billboard. “Normally, it’s ‘OK, this person has a good song and I want to help them out and get them on the channel.’ With Oliver, I called on my friends and family and, on my way to record him and also on my way back, to tell them how special [he was].”
Riffe recorded Anthony outside on his farm in Virginia, where both had the feeling they were embarking on something bigger than just posting the artist’s music. “Personally, I feel like God had a hand in Oliver’s music,” Riffe says. “Me and him, we prayed before the session. Me and him together. We both prayed before we recorded ‘Rich Men North of Richmond.’ We both had an interesting experience the whole weekend. We just felt like it was for a purpose that was way bigger than us, just two old regular dudes, you know what I mean?”
“Rich Men North of Richmond,” which takes on politicians, taxes, welfare and other issues from a struggling working man’s perspective, exploded after radiowv posted it Aug. 7 and has since garnered more than 24 million views on radiowv’s YouTube page. By Aug. 11, the song had reached No. 1 on the iTunes Country chart, outpacing the former chart leader, Jason Aldean’s controversial track “Try That in a Small Town.” The song is a contender to debut at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 that arrives Monday (Aug. 21). Other songs from Anthony, who has been recording music since 2021, also climbed up iTunes and Spotify’s charts, including “Aint Gotta Dollar” and “I’ve Got to Get Sober.”
“In our opinion, God has chosen to speak through Oliver and to speak to all Americans through his music, all around the world,” Riffe says. “We’ve gotten comments from Zimbabwe, every country you could think of.”
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Riffe, who manages Anthony with businessman Brian Prentice, says the push has been organic.
“There was not a whole lot of planning involved,” he says. “We just knew if we got the video out there people were going to love the song and it would resonate with a lot of folks. There wasn’t some big massive planning team around this. I had a few friends who helped us push the song out there, like my friend Josh [Baer], who has a page called Country Central. We all coordinated and Oliver’s following as well, we just tried to push it out there all at once with our little group of friends and that’s how it happened.”
Almost immediately, social media jumped on the song. Even though Anthony said in a video that “I sit pretty dead center down the aisle on politics and always have,” among those amplifying the song were right wing pundits and politicians, including Joe Rogen, Matt Walsh, Breitbart and Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, through posts on X (formerly Twitter) and other outlets. Anthony’s followers have also soared, reaching 743,000 on Instagram and nearly 400,000 on X.
High-profile artists — including John Rich, who offered to produce his music, and Jamey Johnson joined him onstage last weekend at a free show in North Carolina — have also provided support.
“There have been other artists who have reached out, honestly just to be a mentor,” Riffe says, namechecking Brent Smith of Shinedown, Jelly Roll, Ryan Upchurch and Randy Travis’ team. Johnson, who Riffe says showed up unprompted last weekend, meant a great deal to Anthony. “He got to talk to Jamey, which was sentimental to Oliver because he grew up burning the speakers up on his vehicle listening to Jamey, so to get up there [on stage] your first time — that was special to Oliver.”
Riffe says, “We’re literally open to working with everybody,” but that no decision has been made as to when and with whom he will enter the studio.
Similarly, though record labels and booking agents have aggressively chased Anthony — one label head told Billboard, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this before” — Anthony posted on Facebook on Thursday (Aug. 17) that he was in no rush to sign a deal. “People in the music industry give me blank stares when I brush off 8 million dollar offers,” Anthony wrote.
Riffe affirms that Anthony plans to do as much as he and his team can themselves. “As far as taking things slow, people act as if it’s so complicated, but really, it doesn’t have to be,” Riffe says. “He could play a stadium show tomorrow, but it’s about the music and it’s about making sure it’s right… we just want to take things slow and we’ve built a tight-knit team.”
Taking it slow entails booking their own shows, including an Oct. 7 concert at Big River Outdoors Campground in Irondale, Mo. From Anthony’s standpoint, the idea is to lift other artists and friends as his own star ascends.
“Oliver’s very passionate, not just about getting his message out, but helping a lot of other musicians [get] their message heard,” Riffe says. “That’s a key part of it. Yes, he can play some big shows with big musicians, but he’s very passionate about bringing other unknown, unheard musicians up and helping them get their music out as well.”
Riffe says that help extends to providing jobs for those in Anthony’s community. “We’re doing all the booking ourselves,” he says, adding the Anthony is booked through the end of the year. “We’re trying to keep everything in-house as much as we can… If we could have a hand in helping get a person a job they’ll love then we want to do that rather than contracting it out to something that we don’t even know where the money is going.”
Though Anthony is in no hurry to sign any major label deals, that doesn’t mean more music isn’t coming. Riffe says there are five more acoustic videos to roll out from the sessions radiowv recorded at Anthony’s farm that will hit radiowv’s YouTube page and streaming platforms soon.
“That way they’ll get to see the actual live performance and then a more cleaned up version of the song that they get to listen to that’s from the video they’ve seen,” he says.
Assistance provided by Melinda Newman
Bailey Zimmerman posts his third straight career-opening top 10 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart (dated Aug. 26), as “Religiously” rises 11-9. In the Aug. 11-17 tracking week, the song increased by 8% to 19.1 million audience impressions, according to Luminate. The song, co-written by the 23-year-old, is from his LP Religiously. The Album., which arrived […]
Nearly a decade after earning a 10-week No. 1 run atop Billboard’s Christian Airplay chart with “This Is Amazing Grace,” California native and worship leader Phil Wickham has been enjoying a solid run of radio hits over the past few years.
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In 2021, he had two multi-week chart toppers, with “House of the Lord” and “Battle Belongs” each spending four weeks at the chart’s pinnacle. This year he returned to the Christian Airplay chart’s pole position for two weeks with “This Is Our God,” from his forthcoming 10th studio album, I Believe, out Friday (Aug. 18 on Fair Trade/Columbia).
He recently made a strong showing when the GMA Dove Awards nominations were announced, earning four nominations including the coveted artist of the year category, as well as a song of the year nod for his role in writing the Casting Crowns hit “Then Christ Came,” and a worship song of the year nod for “This Is Our God.”
“It’s an honor,” says Wickham, who last year picked up two GMA Dove Awards trophies. “It’s just God’s grace. It feels like God taking some loaves and fishes and multiplying it to a place where someone would say, ‘This is worth recognizing,’ which is crazy.”
Wickham has become a standout in a new generation of worship leaders in the Contemporary Christian Music space, though his roots in the genre are familial and deep, as the son of members of the 1970s Christian band Parable.
“There’s a service and a thoughtfulness to the listener in worship music,” he says. “I’m not writing this just to share my story. I’m writing in a way that this is everybody’s story, and to give them a new prayer to sing back to God, this is something for us to do together.”
I Believe finds Wickham delving deeper into songwriting and collaboration, alongside his frequent collaborator Jonathan Smith, who is the sole producer on the entire project — an increasing rarity these days.
“It was such a partnership, from choosing songs to getting hyped about the vision for the album,” Wickham says. “We worked on the album on and off for over a year. He wrote on ‘I Believe,’ ‘Sunday is Coming’ and ‘The Jesus Way. I’m kind of sporadic when it comes to making albums and I want to hear every option before I decide on something, musically, which is a producer’s worst nightmare, in a lot of ways. But I love working with him so much because he’s the same way—he wants all the options in front of him.”
Nearly two years ago, Wickham, Smith and others visited the Charlotte, North Carolina campus of the multi-site megachurch Elevation Church, known for the hit worship ensemble Elevation Worship. Wickham and company met for a two-day writing retreat with fellow singer-songwriter Brandon Lake and Elevation Worship pastor/songwriter Steven Furtick. They made the most of the short duration, writing for over 12 hours each day.
“I don’t think we even left to eat,” he says. Numerous songs on the 14-track album came from those sessions, including “This Is Our God,” “Praise the Lord,” and “Relationship.”
“Steven is a writer on so many songs that have just blanketed church music across the world. He understands how to dig deeper to find new ways of phrasing things. But a lot of the songs end up coming from an initial seed of an idea that I have. I just don’t want to go into a session and be like, ‘Gimme your best ideas.’ Like with ‘The Jesus Way,’ I had all the verses and the chorus and was like, ‘I need a bridge.’”
“The Jesus Way” originated in 2020, as a poem that would come to serve as both reminder and self-challenge to live his life with love, grace and forgiveness. “Jesus met people where they are at. He met the poor, visited with sick people that no one else wanted to be around,” Wickham says. “For years, I thought the poem was just for me, but earlier this year, I just felt like people should hear it.
He was so moved by the song’s challenge that he hesitated to record it. “I was reading the lyrics and realizing how far I was from that being the reality of my life,” Wickham says. “I can be selfish and quick to be impatient with people. I’ll think, ‘God’s been so gracious to me and I’m not showing grace right now.’ I hesitated to record it because it’s like, I know how much I fall short of it. But it was written and it felt right, but it was a three-year process to write that song.”
As collaborative in the recording process as he is the writing room, Wickham features two women performers on the album: Tiffany Hudson on “Psalm 23” and Naomi Raine on “Holy Moment.” “Psalm 23” takes the biblical chapter and sets it to music and melody and originated from a plan for a project that would incorporate as many phrases directly from the Psalms as possible.
“I thought it would be fun to put out a Psalms project, making the music feel non-traditional and more singer-songwriter, moodier. I wrote like four or five Psalms, and the project just didn’t happen.” Wickham later came across some of his old voice memos and realized the song would make a perfect fit for his project, a moment of “beauty, and sincerity and sweetness,” he says, “and I knew Tiffany’s voice would sound perfect.”
His collaboration with Naomi Raine on “Holy Moment” came by way of an inspired moment, after the two musicians had been on the same tour. “I wanted another moment on the album where you hear more than just my voice and I thought if I could have anyone on the album, it would be Naomi,” he says.
He didn’t even have a song written at the time he asked her to record with him, but when they looked at their calendars, by happenstance, they both had the same evening open in Nashville (“It was crazy because neither of us are from Nashville,” said Wickham, who still resides in California).
They set up shop in a studio and a conversation about holiness evolved into singing and Wickham estimates they had the song written within an hour or so. “We had no title for it, we didn’t know what we would end up creating, but it became such a song in itself, a holy moment in the studio, we had to call it ‘Holy Moment.’” Wickham says.
Wickham, who is repped by WME, is incorporating several of the album’s songs while on the road on his recently-launched Summer Worship Nights Tour, co-headlined by Lake, with KB offering direct support. Wickham and Lake met years ago, when a mutual friend recommended Lake’s music to Wickham. The two began co-writing together and formed a fast friendship. They now share the same management home, Breit Group.
“We share a lot of the same team members and we wanted to go on the road together and throw a praise party, with as many people as possible,” Wickham says.
On Friday (Aug. 18), singer-songwriter Warren Zeiders, who first broke through with his 2021 hit “Ride the Lightning,” issues Pretty Little Poison — his debut, full-length major label project on Warner Records. But a scant four years ago, Zeiders had his sights set on a sports career, not music.
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Growing up in Pennsylvania, Zeiders’ childhood was focused on lacrosse games, tournaments and practices. Outside of the occasional tinkering with a guitar he picked up in sixth grade, there were none of the childhood musical outlets that singer-songwriters typically espouse, such as church choirs or high school bands. He continued playing lacrosse while studying at Frostburg State University, until a series of sports concussions ultimately sidelined his sports ambitions in 2019, swiftly followed by the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which forced him to find a new outlet.
“I had an identity crisis when I had to give up lacrosse,” Zeiders tells Billboard, calling from a tour stop in Montana. “I was a collegiate athlete; that’s what me and my family had worked for — the money invested, the travel, the tournaments and leagues. They were always at sporting events, traveling with me, meeting with colleges and all that. So going through seven concussions, I went through a bit of depression, because concussions are not easy to go through. I had a really severe one my freshman year of college. I was confined to a black room for a while, missing classes, missing exams. I could barely watch TV, because of how jacked up I was.”
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he began posting acoustic cover songs on TikTok, reengaging with his love for music. The videos’ views began soaring, and soon, listeners were asking for original material.
Zeiders grew up in a business-oriented household; his parents were entrepreneurs; his mother was a CFO, with an accounting background. Meanwhile, his father sold insurance and investments. So when fans began asking Zeiders to post his own original songs, he says, “I had that business mindset of, ‘If they want this from me, maybe I should start marketing myself,’ because I was starting to build traction.”
In December 2020, Zeiders released his original track “On the Run.” Soon after, Underscore Works’ Charly Salvatore signed Zeiders as one of his flagship management clients at the company. Zeiders came to Nashville for a series of co-writing sessions, resulting in “Ride the Lightning,” which he wrote with Rob Crosby and Eric Paslay.
“Ride the Lightning” surged on TikTok, while Zeiders issued an acoustic covers project and The 717 Tapes EP. By the time Zeiders revealed he had signed with Warner Records in January 2022, he was also celebrating an RIAA Gold certification for “Ride the Lightning.”
The song proved a showcase for his grainy, full-throated voice, something he says he painstakingly worked on throughout his upcoming project, produced by Ross Copperman, Bart Butler and Ryan Gore.
“There was a heartache with doing this, because I’m such a perfectionist, and I think most artists are in our own ways,” Zeiders says. “I must have sang ‘Pretty Little Poison’ a thousand times in the studio. I wanted the instrumentation to be perfect, to fit the vibe of what this song is saying. Each individual song has its own life and its own story to tell. I believe it needs its own character for each song, and you can sing a song a million different ways. I wanted to be in the mindset of that character to convey each story with absolute truth.”
He wrote the album’s title track last summer, with Jared Keim and Ryan Beaver; the song has now cracked the top 40 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart.
“I remember when we got [to the writing session], I said, ‘I want to write a love song, in Warren Zeiders’s terms.’” Zeiders recalls. “It was minor keys, and a dark twist on a love song, because the lyrics are really about someone’s who you know isn’t great to be in a relationship with, but you keep going back to them. Ryan had the concept a possible title called ‘Pretty Poison.’ I added the word ‘Little’ to it, and once we had that concept and title, we were off to the races. We wrote the song in just over an hour, maybe two hours and I was like, ‘I need that demo as soon as possible.’ They got it to me the next day, I sent it to my manager and it went to A&R, the label. Everyone felt it was going to touch a lot of lives.”
Elsewhere on the album, homage to his Pennsylvania roots in “Pittsburgh Steel” and leans on his faith in “God Only Knows.” He reunited with his “Pretty Little Poison” co-writers to craft the album’s closer, “Cowboy Rides Away.”
Zeiders is a co-writer on nearly every song on Pretty Little Poison, with the lone exception being “What Goes on Inside Your Head,” written by Chris Stapleton and Lee Thomas Miller.
“I remember meeting Lee at our listening party a couple of months ago, after the record was recorded,” Zeiders recalls. “Lee thanked me for recording the song and was like, ‘You have no idea how many years this song has been passed around town and how many ‘Nos’ we’ve gotten.’ I was like, ‘How would no one want to cut this song? It’s beautiful.’ And he was like, ‘You’d be surprised. Some people can get scared to cut it after they listen to a Chris Stapleton demo.’ But I loved the song and I wasn’t trying to do Chris Stapleton’s version — I wanted to do my own version. I loved recording it and I was like, ‘This is one I will sure as hell sing the crap out of.’”
With the hit songs have come a surge of performances; in May, Zeiders played his first stadium show — ironically, opening up for Stapleton and Little Big Town during George Strait’s show at Ohio Stadium. In June, he joined Jelly Roll onstage during the Tailgates and Tallboys festival, for a rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man.” Jelly Roll also recently gave Zeiders a shoutout on social media. This fall, Zeiders will return for the second half of his own headlining Pretty Little Poison tour.
Zeiders’ strong familial bonds continue now in his music career — his mother has taken on the role of his business manager, while his father will be joining him on the road this fall.
“He just wants to help out any way he can, so he might be selling merch or whatnot,” Zeiders says. “He just likes seeing the shows and meeting the fans. They are actually moving to Nashville as we speak, packing everything up in Pennsylvania, which is crazy to think I won’t be back home to say goodbye to my old house.”
Zeiders may not have spent his entire life performing onstage, but says his extroverted personality and the discipline he learned on the sports field have been assets.
“I’ve always had a big personality; I was always the talker in my family and had a marketing and sales background. I sold cars for two years. I just have always loved connecting with people. After I played my first show, it just felt like this is what I was made to do. I try to keep myself in a good position, physically and mentally, because people who come to shows are giving their time, their money, getting babysitters for the night, doing what they have to do to be at shows. My job is to be the best version of myself to put on a show, so I can welcome them into what I’m building and hopefully keep them as fans.”
