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Luke Bryan, a co-host of this year’s CMA Awards and a two-time CMA entertainer of the year winner, is set to guide viewers through country music’s current moment, offering fans a journey into the artists, songs and stories that have led the genre over the past year, when he hosts the ABC News special Vegas Lights & Country Nights: Countdown to the CMA Awards — A Special Edition of 20/20.
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The one-hour special will air Tuesday, Nov. 19, at 10:01 p.m. ET on ABC, and will stream the following day on Hulu and Disney+.
Filmed in Las Vegas, the special will take fans behind-the-scenes as country music gears up for the 58th Annual CMA Awards. The awards ceremony is hosted by Bryan, Peyton Manning and Lainey Wilson, and will air live from Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena on Wednesday, Nov. 20, on ABC, and the following day on Hulu.
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Vegas Lights & Country Nights will feature Jason Aldean, who will sit down for a candid discussion of his career history in Vegas, at his new Jason Aldean Kitchen+Bar Vegas location; he will also surprise first responders from 2017’s Route 91 Harvest Festival with an intimate musical performance. Bryan’s fellow American Idol judge and eight-time Grammy winner Carrie Underwood will take fans behind the curtains of her Reflection: The Las Vegas Residency, while Blake Shelton will show fans around his Ole Red Las Vegas bar while talking about his life and upcoming residency.
From there, Keith Urban will also reflect on his new album, High, and his Las Vegas residency, while Shaboozey will discuss his breakthrough year and his 17-week Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” Shaboozey has two nominations leading into this year’s CMA Awards, including new artist of the year and single of the year for “A Bar Song (Tipsy).”
The special will also feature conversations with Thomas Rhett, who will launch a limited Las Vegas residency in December, as well as Carly Pearce, who offers an all-access pass to her “Hummingbird” tour stop in Las Vegas. Dustin Lynch, Brandi Cyrus and the YEEDM DJ duo VAVO will also provide an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at their performances at the Professional Bull Riders after-party.
Vegas Lights & Country Nights: Countdown to the CMA Awards – A Special Edition of 20/20 is produced by ABC News Studios and 20/20. Emily Whipp serves as executive producer, and Janice Johnston is senior executive producer. Monica Escobedo serves as senior entertainment producer.
Get an early look at the ABC News special below:
Blake Shelton has issued his first release under his new label home, BBR Music Group/BMG Nashville and Wheelhouse Records, with a lost-love anthem that nods to ’80s and ’90s-era country, and offers a nod to country great George Strait. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news “Texas,” written […]
“A Bar Song (Tipsy)” may still be riding high atop the Billboard Hot 100, but Shaboozey has more “Good News” to share. On Friday (Nov. 15), the country breakout star dropped “Good News,” his first new single since the release of his Billboard chart-topping Where I’ve Been Isn’t Where I’m Going LP. Once again joining […]
In 2023, Dolly Parton released her first rock music album, Rockstar, teaming with a lengthy list of luminaries including Elton John and Paul McCartney. On her latest album (out Nov. 15), the globally-known artist and East Tennessee native delivers one of her most intimate projects yet, working with members of her family to celebrate their familial legacy and Tennessee roots on the new album Dolly Parton & Family: Smoky Mountain DNA – Family, Faith & Fables.
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“I cannot believe that it has been 60 years this month since I graduated from Sevier County High School and moved to Nashville to pursue my dreams,” Parton said in a statement. “My Uncle Bill Owens was by my side for many years helping me develop my music. I owe so much to him and all the family members past and present who have inspired me along this journey. I am honored to spotlight our families’ musical legacy that is my Smoky Mountain DNA.”
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Parton’s family has been an integral part of her success through the years. Owens helped Parton get her first job on the local Cas Walker Show, and supported Parton throughout her career. Owens and Parton also started their own music publishing company, Owe-Par, in the 1960s. Parton and Owens co-wrote “Put It Off Until Tomorrow,” which became a top 10 Billboard Hot Country Singles chart hit for Bill Phillips in 1966 (Owens also wrote songs for other artists including Loretta Lynn and Porter Wagoner).
The new album delves into both Parton’s paternal family, and also her mother’s family, the Owens, chronicling the family’s journey from the United Kingdom in the 1600s to their home in East Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains.
Parton’s cousin Richie Owens produced the album, which includes over three dozen songs, featuring many members of Parton’s immediate and extended family, resulting in a multi-generational project.
Among them, Parton’s niece Heidi Parton joins on the song “A Rose Won’t Fix It,” while the voice of Parton’s mother, Avie Lee Parton, is heard on “Rosewood Casket.” Parton’s sister Stella joins on “Heart Don’t Fail Me Now.”
Listen to Dolly Parton & Family: Smoky Mountain DNA – Family, Faith & Fables below:
When Jack and Jill went up the hill, they got more than just a pail of water. Or, at least, Jill did. Jack didn’t really stick around.
Jordan Fletcher, in the closing track on his Triple Tigers EP Classic (released Sept. 27), rewrites the centuries-old “Jack and Jill” nursery rhyme with a surprising, modern-day twist. “About Jill” is a sensitive, almost celebrant, portrait of a single mom raising a boy who looks very much like his father, an immature rich kid who leaves a pregnant girl to fend for herself.
But Jack isn’t really the story of “About Jill.”
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“No one likes Jack,” Fletcher allows, “but you don’t want to make him the focal point.”
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Fletcher didn’t know Jack would be the topic du jour when he showed up for a co-writing session with Nora Collins (“Leroy”) at Sea Gayle in Nashville on March 16, 2022. They ended up talking about how she was rebounding from the pandemic, and in the process, Fletcher started thinking about the challenges that single women face trying to succeed in a male-dominated world. He turned to his phone for an appropriate title.
“I think I’ve got 50,000 – that’s a real number – I think, 40,000 or 50,000 voice memos on the phone of partial songs, ideas, partial ideas, full songs, completely unorganized,” he says. “And I had this thing called ‘Jack and Jill.’”
They figured out pretty quickly that they could use that title to write about a woman finding her way.
“He said, ‘You know that everybody knows Jack, but they don’t know jack about Jill,’” Collins recalls. “That got me. He started playing a little guitar part, and then I started writing that first verse.”
The nursery rhyme gave them an obvious starting point, and they altered the rhyme just enough to change the story’s direction: “Jack and Jill had time to kill.” They make out on a back road, and things develop quickly: by the end of line three, she’s pregnant, he decides he’s “too young for kids,” and he leaves it to “Jill to choose.” It’s a subtle hint that she considered an abortion (they wrote that line three months before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision stripped many women of that choice). They broached the topic so gracefully that the controversy is all but eliminated.
“I think that that was important,” Collins says. “It was, you know, ‘Let’s lightly discuss a really hard topic, and let’s empower Jill.’”
The remainder of the verse and the chorus paint Jack as a playboy who eventually ends up living an easy life with a girl he meets in college. And it’s at the end of that chorus that the hook makes its debut: “Everybody knows Jack/ But they don’t know jack about Jill.”
Musically, “About Jill” disguises the serious nature of the story, using a light chord progression and breezy tempo, maintained by a strong upstroke, owing in part to Fletcher’s reggae appreciation.
Verse two contrasts Jill’s struggles with Jack’s good fortune. She works two jobs, drives a hand-me-down car and can’t look at her boy without seeing Jack’s reflection. But she still loves the kid. “She has a very, very difficult situation,” Fletcher says. “This turns out to be a lot of people’s story, and I didn’t realize that. It’s a story that wasn’t really told often.”
The bridge reiterated her ability to stay positive, concluding that life had given her lemons, but “she makes damn good lemonade.”
“You can’t predict what life’s gonna hand you,” Collins says. “It’s all a choice, how you choose to deal with things. Life by no means is easy for anyone, and if you’re a single mom or a single parent, you do the best that you can for your kid, and you got to make lemonade.”
Collins sang on the work tape at the end of the day as they considered several women – including Lainey Wilson, Ella Langley and Miranda Lambert – as potential matches. “About Jill” received good feedback, but no cuts. Meanwhile, Fletcher posted a back-porch video of the song a week after they wrote it, with the sounds of birds and traffic in the background. He finally decided to record it himself for the Classic EP.
“It honestly is sweeter coming from a guy, because it just seems more objective,” he reasons. “I could definitely see how a female would feel like it was a man-hating song, but if a guy’s singing it, it’s just a very observant song.”
Producer Austin Nivarel (Jelly Roll, Austin Snell) identified “About Jill” on first listen as a song they needed to cut, and he and Fletcher agreed that it should be presented as simply as possible. “We wanted it to just feel so real and raw,” Nivarel says.
They accomplished that by cutting it as a guitar/vocal track at the Black River studio complex on Nashville’s Music Row. Engineer Nick Autry set up two mics in the center of the studio and a couple more placed elsewhere to capture room noise. But after one or two test passes, Nivarel had the room mics shut down, deciding instead to make it authentic to Fletcher’s back-porch demos.
Fletcher played about two feet away from the mics, tracking the guitar at the same time as his vocal, which meant that his voice and the supporting instrument both appeared on every track. The performance itself had to be right, since Nivarel was unable to do much tinkering later – if he were to boost the low notes in Fletcher’s voice, for example, it would also boost the bass in the guitar notes.
“Since the vocal mic is picking up the guitar, you get what you get,” Nivarel says. “You can’t perfect performances. You can’t do too much to edit something like that. So everything the listener hears is very real.”
Fletcher also cut 3-5 minutes of environmental sound from his back porch, and the resulting atmospherics are used to present the singer even more authentically.
“About Jill” provides the clearest picture of Fletcher’s vocal sound and artistic sensitivity. But it also has increased value in the immediate aftermath of the election. Within days, misogynists began posting crude “Your body, my choice” threats on some women’s social media pages. As a result, “About Jill” rises from a well-crafted song to an important one about decency and real American values.
“I want to give light to it,” Fletcher says. “It just tells the positivity and the strength of this woman that [does what] so many women do daily. It’s the side of the coin people don’t want to look at, but it is right there.”
Tyler Childers is gearing up for an extensive headlining tour in 2025, when his Tyler Childers: On the Road makes stops at venues including Lexington’s Kroger Field (April 19), two nights at New York’s Forest Hills Stadium (Sept. 29-30) and two nights at Nashville’s GEODIS Stadium (Oct. 10-11), as well as shows at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl (June 10), Las Vegas’ MGM Grand Garden Arena (June 7), Minneapolis’ Target Center (April 9) and Boston’s Xfinity Center (Sept. 25).
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The tour launches April 3 in New Orleans and runs through Nov. 15, ending with a show at the 02 in London.
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Joining Childers on the trek are guests Wynonna Judd, Charley Crockett, Robert Earl Keen, The Hold Steady, Medium Build, Deer Tick, Hayes Carll, S.G. Goodman, Cory Branan and SOMA.
Artist presale tickets will be available beginning Nov. 19 at 10 a.m. local time, with general onsale launching Friday, Nov. 22, at 10 a.m. local time. Presale registration is open now through Sunday, Nov. 17, at 11:59 p.m. ET.
Those who purchase tickets on Ticketmaster and can’t attend will have the option to resell their tickets at the original price paid using the Face Value Exchange. To protect the Exchange, Childers has requested that all shows ticketed by Ticketmaster — except those in New York and Virginia, where Face Value Exchange can’t be mandated — use tickets that are mobile-only and restricted from transfer. For AXS-ticketed events, fans will be able to resell their tickets for face value plus fees through AXS Official Resale Marketplace.
Last year, Childers’s Rustin’ in the Rain album debuted at No. 10 on the Billboard 200. The album’s single “In Your Love” was nominated for Grammys including best country song and best country solo performance, and marked the singer-songwriter’s debut on Billboard’s Hot 100.
$1 from every ticket sold will benefit both Hickman Holler Appalachian Relief Fund (HHARF) and REVERB. Established in 2020 by Childers and Senora May, HHARF brings awareness and financial support for philanthropic efforts in the Appalachian Region. REVERB’s efforts reduce environmental impact in live music and fund carbon impact programs.
See the full list of tour dates below:
https://twitter.com/TTChilders/status/1857109117543833902
Wynn Las Vegas is hosting its first ever dance/country hybrid show in December inside the venue’s famed nightclub, XS.
Happening Dec. 6-7, Desert Saddle will feature performances by Kane Brown, Marshmello, Diplo performing as his country alias Thomas Wesley, country star Dustin Lynch, dance/country hybrid project Vavo and DJ Brandi Cyrus.
Desert Saddle is Wynn Nightlife’s first ever dance/country hybrid event, with its debut reflecting the recent surge of dance/country collaborations, with Brown and Marshmello’s “Miles On It” currently in its 26th week at No. 1 on Hot Dance/Electronic Songs and a flurry of other hybrid tracks including Tiësto and Alana Springsteen’s “Hot Honey” finding traction this year.
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“Wynn is all about staying ahead in the hospitality and entertainment scene,” Wynn Nightlife vice president Ryan Jones tells Billboard. “With country music gaining huge popularity, along with the success of big festivals and sold-out tours, we wanted to be the first to bring this new two-day experience to life and offer something fresh and exciting for our guests.”
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Wynn Nightlife is co-presenting Desert Saddle with Paris Texas, the Toronto-based country venue and entertainment brand. Two-day passes for the show start at $50 and are available now.
Desert Saddle takes place during the National Finals Rodeo, happening in Las Vegas from Dec. 5 to 14. The Rodeo is bringing a flurry of country music stars to Las Vegas, with Garth Brooks, Shaboozey, Wynonna Judd and many other all performing around town during the event.
In terms of uniting dance fans and country fans at the club, Jones finds the fit to be a natural one, particularly given how well the two genres are currently merging in music and on the charts.
“We don’t see any challenges with integrating country music into the nightlife landscape, in fact, we see massive potential,” he says. “There are many similarities with country music audiences and dance music audiences — people with high-energy looking to have a great time! Take Diplo, for example, at Stagecoach: It was a completely jam-packed performance with an audience enjoying the best of both music genres! Our goal is to keep up with the times and offer guests this ‘new age country party’ if you will.”
Nearly a decade after the release of his 2016 album Swimmin’ Pools, Movie Stars, and four decades after he turned the Nashville establishment on its head with his distinct brand of West coast honky-tonk, punk and rockabilly, Dwight Yoakam isn’t erecting creative boundaries anytime soon.
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His new album Brighter Days, out Friday (Nov. 15), was forged by years of life shifts, both personal and professional, and finds him moving ahead musically with a new set of inspirations. In March 2020, he wed photographer Emily Joyce and in August of that year, the couple welcomed their first child, son Dalton Loren. Meanwhile, like the rest of the world, Yoakam and his family weathered the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
His devotion to family is threaded through songs on the album, including the realistically romantic “I Spell Love,” and the title track “Brighter Days,” which developed from a tender moment with his son Dalton, whom Yoakam gave a co-writing credit on the song.
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“He had a little Fender Telecaster-shaped ukulele he would wear,” Yoakam recalls. “He came bouncing in the room one day and said, ‘Get your guitar.’ I picked it up and he would attempt to answer what I would play and I looked at him and said, ‘You know what? The future is you,’ and I started singing ‘Brighter Days,’ and he kind of sang it back to me. I came up with the first verse just watching him and singing and having him sing back to me.”
The new album also comes after Yoakam parted ways with Warner Records, instead releasing the album on his own label Via Records, in partnership with Thirty Tigers.
“Everything had changed at Warner Brothers where I’d been the last couple of studio albums and we were kind of in flux,” Yoakam tells Billboard. “I left and wasn’t sure where we were going to do the next record. After the chaos of 2020 and 2021, David [Macias] at Thirty Tigers approached me and said, ‘Would you be interested in doing a record here?’ And I said yes.”
Brighter Days also finds Yoakam with more co-writing credits on the project, unlike many previous albums which have featured mostly his solo writes. As the world was still reeling from the pandemic, Yoakam found himself collaborating with California native and fellow hit country songwriter Jeffrey Steele (“What Hurts the Most,” “These Days”) on Zoom co-writes, ultimately crafting six of the album’s songs together, including “California Sky” and “I’ll Pay the Price.”
“I don’t co-write a lot. The first one was a very auspicious beginning, with Roger Miller in 1990. Most albums, probably 70% or 80% is my own solo writing,” Yoakam says, adding, “We had such fun discussing [Steele’s] relationship to all things California music. He was raised in the Valley and his dad owned a garage blocks away from the famous Palomino Club, so he grew up in the shadow of that. ’I’ll Pay the Price’ was a bit of an homage to the late ‘60s, early ‘70s when Linda Ronstadt put her first band together.”
The project wraps in covers of Cake’s “Bound Away,” “Time Between” from the Byrds, and The Carter Family staple “Keep on the Sunny Side.”
“If you think about what brought California’s version of country music, it was the Dust Bowl. It was another mass event in the 1930s and it drove hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people to relocate to California from the Great Plains. And the Great Depression, so you had two events, driving this displacement of large segments of our society to California and they brought their version of their colloquial musical expressions…It’s a winding story, but all of these tracks are connected in various ways,” he says.
His willingness to filter a range of sounds and inspirations through his own musical lens is what led Yoakam to his breakthrough in the mid-1980s. He first tried his luck in Nashville, coming up against roadblocks due to his retro-progressive musical style. He decamped to California, refining his music and further soaking in the influence of Bakersfield and Buck Owens. In 1984, Yoakam independent project Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. caught the attention of label execs, and he signed with Reprise Records. He re-released the project, earning acclaim with songs including a super-charged version of Johnny Horton’s “Honky-Tonk Man,” as well as the project’s title track.
Subsequent albums would yield success including top 10 Billboard Hot Country Songs hits with “Little Sister,” and “Please, Please Baby.” Three of his albums, 1986’s Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., 1987’s Hillbilly Deluxe and 1988’s Buenas Noches From a Lonely Room, reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart. The two-time Grammy Award winner was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019.
Yoakam finished recording Brighter Days in 2023. Just as he and his team were gearing up for its release, Yoakam got an unexpected invitation from Teas native Post Malone, known for his swirl of pop songs such as 2019’s “Circles” and “Sunflower,” to collaborate.
When they were planning their collaboration performance of Yoakam’s “Little Ways” during the Stagecoach country music festival earlier this year, Post Malone asked if he could join Yoakam on his album. Yoakam and Post Malone’s friendship stretches back to 2018, when Post Malone joined Yoakam for an episode of Yoakam’s SiriusXM Greater Bakersfield show, where they performed songs including Merle Haggard’s “The Bottle Let Me Down.”
“I had literally just finished the album a week and a half earlier, and I was unaware that he had done the F-1 Trillion album at that time,” Yoakam says. “I knew he was doing stage shows and I knew something was afoot about duets he was doing, but I didn’t know how extensively what it was all about.”
Yoakam had already been toying with a song idea, and quickly wrote the Western swing- soaked “I Don’t Know How to Say Goodbye (Bang Bang Boom Boom),” and adjusted the album’s releases schedule to accommodate the Posty collaboration. It turns out Post Malone was working on not only his country-leaning F-1 Trillion, but collaborating with another superstar.
“We delayed the release of the album by about six months,” Yoakam says. “I didn’t realize Post came in [to record his vocal] between days of shooting the video he did with Taylor Swift [“Fortnight”] . We rescheduled the album release because we decided it was something we wanted to put on the album.”
Outside of music, Yoakam is known for a plethora of creative pursuits, notably his film and television career, which has included roles in Sling Blade and Wedding Crashers. His Sling Blade co-star Billy Bob Thornton “has agreed to work on a series I wrote, called ‘A Thousand Miles From Nowhere’ — it’s not about the song, though it sort of is. It’s a period piece that takes place in the 1870s. So that’s afoot, and there are a couple of film roles I’ve been approached about that we are seeing if they make sense to do.”
But currently, as evidenced by Brighter Days, Yoakam has set about crafting an album for those seeking an emotional uplift, as he was when he wrote the title track.
“I thought, ‘When the fog of all this rises, brightness is what we’re hoping for — the brighter days,” Yoakam says.
It’s only been a handful of years since singer-songwriter and Oregon native Max McNown was inspired to pursue a music career in earnest thanks to a stranger he met while strumming his guitar on the San Clemente Pier in California. Since then, he’s topped Billboard’s emerging artists chart and seen his song “A Lot More Free” rise to No. 29 on the Hot Country Songs chart.
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The song, which highlighted his raspy, conversational vocal, was the centerpiece of his debut album, Wandering, which released in April. In the process, that song, along with followups such as “Love Me Back,” have placed McNown squarely in the ranks of acoustic-driven, folk-country artists such as Wyatt Flores and Sam Barber.
Named as Billboard’s Country Rookie of the Month for November, McNown will launch 2025 with a new full-fledged album, the nine-song set Night Diving, out Jan. 24, 2025, Billboard can reveal.
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As with songs his fans have come to know, such as “A Lot More Free,” the new music centers on his poetic, observational writing style, while adding polish to his personally-crafted songs. The upcoming album will include songs such as his new release “Better Me for You,” his recent outing “Hotel Bible,” and a collaboration with Hailey Whitters on “Roses and Wolves.”
Though McNown says he always harbored hopes of being a singer, he says, “It was kind of a pipe dream. I never thought I’d pursue it. Realistically, I wanted to do something in architecture or business management, but it wasn’t until I was 21 that I even took a step toward music.”
After graduating high school at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, McNown began working at a coffee company while taking university courses online. Within months, he found himself feeling burnt out and restless. “It was all kind of building up. One day, I decided I needed to change up the scene and try something new,” he says.
Armed with a guitar his father gave him, McNown set off for California. He again worked for a coffee shop, and a co-worker encouraged him to play guitar down by the San Clemente Pier. As he was singing through songs such as Tyler Childers’ “Lady May,” a stranger came up to him and introduced McNown to Zach Bryan’s music.
“She showed me three songs, and one of them was ‘Get Out Alive,’” he explains. “I loved it and loved his voice. He did sound very similar to my tone, and it gave me so much courage because my whole life I’d been trying to sing pop songs from Shawn Mendes or Justin Bieber and my voice sounded nothing like them. I was like, ‘Okay, if he can do this with guitar and poetry, maybe I can, too.’”
Now based in Nashville, McNown spoke with Billboard about the success of “A Lot More Free,” his upcoming album, collaborating with country artist Hailey Whitters and his musical ambitions.
How are you handling the success of “A Lot More Free” and adapting to a career in music?
It’s completely life changing. It’s like everything on the exterior feels like it’s just spinning everything. We’re hitting all the different points that we need to hit in our journey. I’m just so extremely grateful and I’m definitely prioritizing keeping my foundation strong and humility in that department.
“A Lot More Free” took off about a year after the song released. What spurred that?
When “A Lot More Free” first released, I remember the first video I made for it. I was with my sister at the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon. She filmed scenes of me walking in front of the gorge and I said, ‘What if this became a travel song?’ That breakdown in the song of the harmonica and the instruments, just the feel it created started resonating with people, and they started creating their own videos of traveling to their favorite places. I saw the momentum, so I started to create compilation videos of their videos.
I would post those and say, ‘Oh, thirty-three videos have been made, thank you so much.’ Then the next day, maybe 400 videos have been made and I would make compilation videos of those and thank people for making them. It snowballed and that was the beginning of the first round of growth.
When views [eventually] started falling a bit, we put out a video of me singing the song — that second massive growth that happened was linking song to artist. I saw this massive influx of followers on TikTok and Instagram — we went from 90,000 Instagram followers to like 950,000 in a matter of under two months. We saw the difference in concert as well — at first, I would play an entire show and at the end I would play the song and you could hear the murmurs, like, ‘Oh, I love this song. Is he covering this song?,’ but after all the social media growth, on the [10-show fall] Canadian tour, people were singing the words and they knew it was me singing it.
On the new album, you team with Hailey Whitters on the song “Roses and Wolves.” How did she come to be part of the project?
I’ve been a fan on Hailey for forever. Evan Honer did a collaboration [“Fighting For”] with her and Hailey has a very distinct, pretty country voice, but she went into this register that I hadn’t really heard from her before on that collaboration, and I was like, ‘Man, I’m dying to know what she would sound like on Roses and Wolves, specifically that song. And she is just such a credible country singer.
I think part of my journey has been trying to shake the TikTok kid stigma that a lot of people will have, but I like to think that what’s coming is greater than a ‘flash-in-the-pan TikTok kid.’ To have Hailey come on to this song with her beautiful voice – I also heard from a lot of people in my camp who are connected to her, and everyone loves Hailey. So we reached out, and she said “yes” to the song. We actually just filmed some content for it and she’s the sweetest, sweetest human being.
You also circle back to another song that fans have related to, “Freezing in November,” which was inspired in part by your brother’s battle with cancer. How is it different revisiting this song on the new album?
When I wrote “Freezing in November” initially, I had no vocal training, no vocal experience, and the song was just a simple melody that stayed consistent. I been playing shows and over time I’ve started to alternate between different melodies at each show, to find a different way of driving home the emotion I want to get across. I started belting out the second verse, in the second chorus and I can just feel the different vocal capability. So to re-sing it, I feel like I did it justice the second time around.
What drives you, creatively?
I definitely prioritize writing. The lyrics are the most important thing in my music. I’m maybe not the best instrumentalist, and so I rely on lyrics anyway. The music that I’ve always loved has always been lyric centric. It’s always been about the story that you’re telling and the emotion that it’s invoking. And so yeah, lyrics and poetry are definitely where I start with all my music.
What is your favorite concert you have ever been to?
NF, which is maybe out of left field. On the topic of honest lyricism, there’s not many better than NF. I was a huge fan in high school, so to see him in person, it’s the only time in my life where I’ve seen somebody—and I had some nosebleed seats—but I watched him walk out on the stage and to see someone you adore and deeply respect, to see them there and think, ‘He’s in the same room. He’s a real human being.’ That’s crazy.
What is your go-to album that you can always listen to?
Forever by Noah Kahan. Just sonically, the instruments and the feeling…my songs are very heavily influenced by that album. Artists like Noah, Zach Bryan, Tyler Childers gave me that launchpad courage. These are basically guys with guitars, writing beautiful poetry over four chords.
When you are on the road, what is your favorite road snack?
You can never go wrong with a Snickers. If I’m a little hungry, but don’t need a full meal, that’s my go-to.
11/14/2024
Hearing your name called even once is a thrill, but repeating is the ultimate goal.
11/14/2024