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Kelsea Ballerini recently shared her initial reaction to ex-husband Morgan Evans’ post-divorce song “Over for You” in the latest episode of Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast.
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“If I’m being honest, I felt like that was really opportunistic for him to put that out when he did when we were still going through the legalities of getting divorced,” Ballerini said. “I felt really used in that moment. And again, his healing journey is his healing journey, I respect that. But publicly exploiting it feels a little nasty to me, before it’s final.”
The three-time Grammy nominee added that she was initially “so angry, so angry” after hearing the song. “I had a pretty good grasp on my grieving journey until that song came out and I was livid. I think that maybe there’s a world that he was blindsided. I did not blindside him. Two things can be true at once, and I think like if he truly was blindsided, then where was he?”
Shortly after news of the couple’s divorce went public in August 2022, Evans released “Over for You,” featuring the pointed lyrics, “How many times did you say you loved me when it wasn’t true?/ I’m just wondering how long has it been over for you?” The couple met when Ballerini was 22 and became engaged nine months later, on Christmas Day in 2016. Ballerini and Evans wed in 2017 in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
Ballerini revealed her own perspective on the relationship’s dissolution on her recent six-song EP, Rolling Up the Welcome Mat, which was released on Valentine’s Day. The album’s handful of songs are littered with details of the couple’s crumbling marriage and the emotional wreckage left in its wake. In one song, Ballerini recalls sleeping on the couch and heading out to a big awards show separately from her husband. Elsewhere, she detailed how physical distance led to emotional distance.
In the new Call Her Daddy interview, Ballerini also said she wished she had released the album back in August, when the relationship was reaching the peak of its dissolution.
“I wish I would have had it in August,” she said. “I wish in August when I would have been like, ‘I’m blowing up my life, I’m doing it’ that someone would have had those six songs that I could have listened to, to like go through the intricacies of the emotions of everything you think your life is going to look like, it’s not.”
On Tuesday, in the wake of Ballerini’s media comments, Evans took to his socials, stating, “It’s really sad for me to see this person, who I spent so much of my life with, and loved with all my heart, saying things that aren’t reality and that leave out what really happened. She knows I’m not the type of guy to speak on those things publicly. If this is what she needs to heal, I hope it helps. All I ask is that if you’re on my pages, please don’t be mean. Don’t be mean to Kelsea, don’t be mean to each other. Life’s too short.”
Ballerini now says she’s moved on from the pain of hearing Evans’ song.
“Now we’re like months past it,” she said. “We’re moving on and I’ve taken the time to, like, actually sit in my feelings and go through that grieving process and take ownership of what I brought to the table too.”
Ballerini has recently been seen with Outer Banks actor Chase Stokes, also telling the Call Her Daddy podcast that the two met by Ballerini sliding into the actor’s DMs.
“I was ready to open back up,” Ballerini told Cooper. “I just felt, why not? I’ve never really dated; I don’t know how it works. I’m like, ‘Let’s just put ourselves out there — let’s just vibe.’ And it’s been fun.”
She added, “I’ve never seen his show, but I just knew of him, and I just swan-dove right on in. … His handle is @hichasestokes, and I said, ‘Hi, Chase Stokes.’”
She also added that she had not taken her ex’s feelings into consideration when moving on, because “I’m not married to him anymore and I don’t need to care about his feelings anymore. I mean that with all the respect in the world, but his journey is not mine anymore. I hope he is protected from whatever he needs to be protected from seeing — I hope he has people in his life that help him do that — [but] that is not my job.”
The Voice announced that country icon Reba McEntire will serve as the Mega Mentor for the upcoming 23rd season of the show when it returns on NBC on March 6. McEntire will be on hand to join new coaches Chance the Rapper and Niall Horan as well as returning chair turners Kelly Clarkson and Blake Shelton, who is making his final spin on the series as the only original cast member after a 12-year run.
McEntire and the coaches will mentor the acts who make it through the Battle Rounds as the teams prepare for the Knockouts that begin on April 17. McEntire was a Battle Advisor to Shelton’s team during season one, which makes her return for Blake’s final curtain even more poignant.
A release announcing McEntire’s return also noted that the show will add some important changes to the format that will make the competition even more fierce this time around. Starting on March 27, the new “Playoff Pass” will let both artists in a battle advance, with one “Pass” winner snagging a big advantage when they skip the Knockout Rounds and automatically advance to the Playoffs.
Each coach will have one Playoff Pass and one steal during this round, with seven artists from each team advancing — six to compete in the Knockout rounds and one Pass artist. During the Knockouts, artists will be paired against each other and pick their own songs to perform individually while their competitors wait and watch from the sidelines. The coaches will then choose the winner, with the artist not selected available to return via a steal; each coach has only one steal during this round as five artists per team advance.
Finally, during the return of the playoff rounds beginning on May 1, the 20 remaining acts will face off as each coach has to pick two to advance to the live semifinals. This season’s live shows will kick off on May 15. The season 23 premiere of The Voice airs on NBC on March 6 at 8 p.m. ET.
Kelsea Ballerini is finally opening up how she and Outer Banks star Chase Stokes met. On Wednesday’s (Feb. 22) episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast, the “Love Me Like You Mean It” singer spoke candidly about the actor and shared the relatable technique she used to strike up a conversation with him.
“I was ready to open back up,” Ballerini told host Alex Cooper. “I just felt, why not? I’ve never really dated; I don’t know how it works. I’m like, ‘Let’s just put ourselves out there — let’s just vibe.’ And it’s been fun.”
She continued, “I’ve never seen his show, but I just knew of him, and I just swan dove right on in. … His handle is ‘@hichasestokes,’ and I said, ‘Hi, Chase Stokes.’ ”
While Ballerini did not confirm if she and Stokes are dating, she did state that she is “having fun” with him. The country star added that she is approaching dating with a brand new perspective in light of her divorce from her husband of five years, Morgan Evans.
In the interview, the 29-year-old revealed that she does not consider how her ex may be reacting to her moving on so quickly “because I’m not married to him anymore and I don’t need to care about his feelings anymore.”
The three-time Grammy nominee did take a moment to clarify. “I mean that with all the respect in the world, but his journey is not mine anymore,” she said of Evans. “I hope he is protected from whatever he needs to be protected from seeing — I hope he has people in his life that help him do that — [but] that is not my job.”
Ballerini further opened up about the divorce proceedings, and said that their split came down to splitting their home or paying alimony. “‘Can you articulate to me that I have a choice right now, to [either] give up half of a house that I bought and he contributed [to], but not equal … or stay, legally, in this marriage and have public alimony hearings indefinitely?’ And they’re like, ‘That’s correct,’” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Give him the house. I want out.’”
Evans responded to Ballerini’s comments on Call Her Daddy in a statement posted to his Instagram. “It’s really sad for me to see this person, who I spent so much of my life with and love with all my heart saying things that aren’t reality and that leave out what really happened. She knows I’m not the type of guy to speak on those things publicly. If this is what she needs to heal, I hope it helps,” he wrote. “All I ask is if that you’re on my pages, please don’t be mean. Don’t be mean to Kelsea, don’t be mean to each other. Life’s too short.”
Ballerini and Evans married in December 2017, and finalized their divorce in November 2022.
Listen to Ballerini’s Call Her Daddy episode in full below.
By the time Lainey Wilson showcased for BMG Nashville staff in 2018, she was at a crossroads. She had already been in Nashville for over five years after leaving her small Louisiana hometown of Baskin and was struggling to fit in. Her heavily accented, twangy country vocals and Southern swagger weren’t in fashion as the genre leaned more toward pop, but her attempts to accommodate that style weren’t working either. So she doubled down on her tough-but-vulnerable authenticity. With that attitude, she sang, “She’s a soldier/When I hold her/Up in the air” in her defiant “Middle Finger.” “Take that, Nashville,” she thought.
Wilson, now 30, laughs when she remembers that time. “I just got to a certain point where I’d been in Nashville for so long [and] my give-a-damn was a little busted. I felt like, ‘Why not just say what I want to say how I want to say it?’ That’s one of the thoughts that really set me free.”
Lainey Wilson photographed on December 1, 2022 at Eldorado Canyon in Nelson, Nev.
Sami Drasin
That fearlessness — and her robust, honest voice — captivated BMG Nashville president Jon Loba, who had been turned on to Wilson by another artist on his roster, Jimmie Allen.
“[She had] this absolute confidence. And it was an amazing vocal and, even at that time, amazing songs,” says Loba, who immediately signed her to Broken Bow Records. “But it was her narrative in between the music [where] you really got a sense of who she was: this strong woman from a small town in Louisiana who did not want to compromise who she was.”
Five years later, Wilson’s refusal to compromise has taken her to the top of the charts and awards show podiums. Her first album for the label, 2021’s Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin’, included her first No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart, “Things a Man Oughta Know.” “Never Say Never,” her duet with Cole Swindell, reached No. 1 seven months later. Her current single, “Heart Like a Truck,” from last year’s Bell Bottom Country, and her feature on HARDY’s “wait in the truck” are racing toward the peak of the chart. With six nods, she led all nominees for November’s Country Music Association Awards, taking home new artist and female vocalist of the year. Between supporting slots for Luke Combs — she’ll appear on his stadium tour this spring and summer after opening his 2022 arena tour — she headlined her first large club tour.
Lainey Wilson photographed on December 1, 2022 at Eldorado Canyon in Nelson, Nev.
Sami Drasin
Along the way, Wilson, who co-wrote all but one of the songs on her two albums, developed a signature look — a wide-brim hat and bell bottoms, which she has worn daily for several years — as recognizable as her clear, strong vocals and striking songs. “When I was little, my mom bought me a blue leopard-print pair of bell bottoms I was absolutely obsessed with,” she says. “At one point, she was like, ‘You’ve got to take them off, we’ve got to wash them.’ I’ve always been in love with things that are throwbacks, whether it’s music or stories.” Wilson came by her love of bell bottoms honestly, but they’ve also served a purpose: “Trying to be an artist here in Nashville, a female artist specifically, you’ve got to figure out what you can do that’s a little different to stand out — so I definitely leaned into that as much as I possibly could.”
Not bad for an artist who got her start imitating someone else. Wilson worked her way through high school as a Hannah Montana impersonator. One of her last gigs, at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Memphis, helped prompt her move to Nashville. While performing, she established an intense connection with a little girl recovering from brain surgery. “Everybody in the building was crying as she sang every word to [Miley Cyrus’] ‘The Climb.’ I handed her the microphone, and my Hannah Montana wig was hanging off sideways. She hands me back the microphone and what she meant to say was, ‘Hannah Montana, you’re my star,’ but she said, ‘Hannah Montana, I’m your star.’ And I was like, ‘Yes, you are,’ and I thought, ‘I’ve got to figure out how to do this the rest of my life.’ ”
Lainey Wilson photographed on December 1, 2022 at Eldorado Canyon in Nelson, Nev.
Sami Drasin
Wilson’s own climb has been simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting as she navigates how to make a lifelong career in music sustainable. The self-described “homebody” slept in her own bed only 15 nights during her “whirlwind” 2022. “Last year definitely threw me for a little bit of a loop,” she says. But as her ascent continues, this year’s Rulebreaker is finding ways to make the road feel more like home, including bringing her French bulldog, Hippie Mae (who, of course, has her own Instagram account, with a bio reading “owner of that b–ch @laineywilson”), on the road with her, as well as her essential oils, meditation apps and grounding mat.
Those comforts have proved especially key as Wilson’s rise has expanded beyond music. Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan designed a recurring role specifically for her this season on TV’s most popular show, which Wilson found the courage to take on after considering what some of her own favorite rule breakers, Reba McEntire and Dolly Parton, would do. (She even has a song on her first Broken Bow album called “WWDD,” short for “What Would Dolly Do.”)
“When it comes to Dolly and Reba, I feel like they really do listen to their heart. I feel like they’re not scared to go outside that box and do things that are a little scary,” she says. “I had never acted a day in my life. But I thought to myself, ‘Dolly and Reba, they’ve always made sure that their music is No. 1, but that has laid the foundation for so many opportunities to come their way.’ And so, if it’s a way for me to share more of my music with the world, even if it is a little scary, you’re dang right I’m going to do it, because that’s what they would do.”
Lainey Wilson photographed on December 1, 2022 at Eldorado Canyon in Nelson, Nev.
Sami Drasin
Wilson’s radio hits and Yellowstone role have brought her fame that she’s still wrapping her head around. Late last year, her team posted a video of her onstage with an angle that unintentionally highlighted her posterior and, she says, “The next thing you know, everybody’s TikToks are about my rear end.” The clip went viral and spawned imitators with women showing off their own bountiful booties, but it also invited legions of opinions about Wilson’s body.
“I definitely went down the rabbit hole reading comments,” she says. “A year-and-a-half ago, people didn’t give a rat’s ass to say something bad about me. Now the more well-known you are, the more negative comments you’re going to get … The reason why I take it so personal is because I do believe that words are powerful.”
Wilson is handling what newfound fame throws at her much as she has her career: with an authenticity that harks back to her roots, and on her own terms. She recently purchased 30 acres in Nashville and is renovating the house on the property, bringing in her own creature comforts to create a personal oasis. It’s a far cry from the camper she lived in for her first three years in Nashville. “I’m going to have some horses,” she says, adding that she decided against moving her childhood horse, Tex, up from Louisiana given his advanced age. “I want to be able to go somewhere and turn it all off and just jump on a four-wheeler.”
Lainey Wilson photographed on December 1, 2022 at Eldorado Canyon in Nelson, Nev.
Sami Drasin
This story will appear in the Feb. 25, 2023, issue of Billboard.
By the time Lainey Wilson showcased for BMG Nashville staff in 2018, she was at a crossroads. She had already been in Nashville for over five years after leaving her small Louisiana hometown of Baskin and was struggling to fit in. Her heavily accented, twangy country vocals and Southern swagger weren’t in fashion as the genre leaned more toward pop, but her attempts to accommodate that style weren’t working either. So she doubled down on her tough-but-vulnerable authenticity. With that attitude, she sang, “She’s a soldier/When I hold her/Up in the air” in her defiant “Middle Finger.” “Take that, Nashville,” she thought.
Wilson, now 30, laughs when she remembers that time. “I just got to a certain point where I’d been in Nashville for so long [and] my give-a-damn was a little busted. I felt like, ‘Why not just say what I want to say how I want to say it?’ That’s one of the thoughts that really set me free.”
That fearlessness — and her robust, honest voice — captivated BMG Nashville president Jon Loba, who had been turned on to Wilson by another artist on his roster, Jimmie Allen.
“[She had] this absolute confidence. And it was an amazing vocal and, even at that time, amazing songs,” says Loba, who immediately signed her to Broken Bow Records. “But it was her narrative in between the music [where] you really got a sense of who she was: this strong woman from a small town in Louisiana who did not want to compromise who she was.”
Read Lainey Wilson’s full Billboard Women in Music story here.
Morgan Wallen leads all five of Billboard’s country charts (dated Feb. 25), becoming the first artist to achieve the quintuple domination since Luke Combs nearly four years ago.
Wallen’s “Last Night” tops the streaming-, airplay- and sales-based Hot Country Songs list for a second week, with 28.3 million U.S. streams, 1.3 million in radio airplay audience and 10,000 sold in the Feb. 10-16 tracking week, according to Luminate.
“Last Night” also leads Country Digital Song Sales for a third week and Country Streaming Songs for a second week.
Concurrently, Wallen banks his eighth Country Airplay No. 1 with “Thought You Should Know” (33.2 million, up 4%). Both songs preview his 36-track album One Night at a Time, due March 3.
On Top Country Albums, Wallen’s prior LP, Dangerous: The Double Album, spends its record-extending 95th week in the penthouse (44,000 equivalent album units).
Wallen is the first act to rule all five country surveys since Combs dominated the charts dated March 9, March 30 and April 6, 2019.
One other artist has led all five charts simultaneously: Kane Brown, on Oct. 28, 2017.
‘Anyway,’ Here’s More
Luke Combs scores his 18th Hot Country Songs top 10 as “Love You Anyway,” which he co-penned, blasts in at No. 3. It drew 17.7 million streams and sold 9,000 downloads in its first week.
The song introduces his third LP, the 18-track Gettin’ Old, due March 24.
“Anyway” marks Combs’ fifth top 10 Hot Country Songs debut, a haul that includes a No. 1 launch in November 2020 for “Forever After All,” which went on to reign for 10 weeks.
Combs’ current single being promoted to country radio, “Going, Going, Gone,” from his 2022 album Growin’ Up, ranks at No. 8 on Hot Country Songs after reaching No. 5 in January. It drew 9.7 million streams and sold 2,000 in the latest tracking week. On Country Airplay, it pushes 4-3 for a new best (29 million, up 6%).
Brad Paisley has shifted labels, from his longtime home at Sony’s Arista Nashville, to EMI Records Nashville, under the Universal Music Group Nashville (UMGN) umbrella.
The move reunites Paisley with UMGN chairman/CEO Mike Dungan and president Cindy Mabe. Dungan was instrumental in signing Paisley to his first deal at Arista Nashville, while Mabe served as Paisley’s marketing point person through many of his early album cycles including Mud on the Tires and Time Well Wasted. He also joins a label group roster that includes several of his collaborators, including Carrie Underwood, with whom Paisley co-hosted the CMA Awards for more than a decade and together earned a No. 1 Country Airplay hit with “Remind Me” in 2011. He is also now labelmates with his “Start a Band” collaborator Keith Urban.
“There were two people that should get the credit that you even know my name – Mike Dungan and Cindy Mabe. I ran into Mike at the fishing department at Walmart after having met with several labels and he talked me into signing my first deal with Arista. They assigned this woman named Cindy Mabe to me – we graduated the same day at Belmont. I got to work with her on my first few albums and now I get to work with her at UMG,” Paisley said via a statement. “Cindy’s a genius and terrific human being. She heard what I was up to with the new music, and she pointed me further into the direction I was headed. I’ve never had this kind of enthusiasm and empowerment. She said, ‘Make music that matters.’ It’s an amazing thing to work with Mike and Cindy again. It’s great to know they believe in this music as much as I do.”
For more than two decades, Paisley’s razor-sharp songwriting, keen wit and dedication to country music have garnered him three Grammy Awards, 14 CMA Awards, 15 ACM Awards and more accolades. He was inducted as a member of the Grand Ole Opry in 2001. During his career, he’s posted nine albums at the pinnacle of Billboard’s top country albums chart, and earned nearly two dozen hits on the Country Airplay chart.
Paisley’s first UMG Nashville album is slated for later this year, while he will release a new song from the upcoming project on Feb. 24. Titled “Same Here,” Paisley wrote the song with Lee Thomas Miller and Dawes frontman Taylor Goldsmith, with production by Luke Wooten.
“Brad is a true creative. He has no boundaries to what he uses as his canvas. He has used his voice and his words as a gift to heal the world through his philanthropy, his song writing, his guitar playing, his entertaining, his music videos, his sense of humor and his heart,” Mabe said via a statement. “He has been a part of the country music duo with Carrie Underwood that helped define country music to the world. And getting to reunite with my friend and collaborator in his next creative adventure is something I’ve wanted for a long time. I cannot wait for him to share the music he has created with the world.”
Singer-songwriter Marcus King wed Briley Hussey on Sunday, Feb. 19, at Nashville’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center. People was first to report the news.
“I fell in love, hard!” King, 26, told the magazine of first meeting Hussey. “She waltzed up on my bus like she owned it, and I was taken with her sweet southern drawl. She asked to connect to the Bluetooth, blared Linda Ronstadt and Aretha Franklin and we sang and danced till it was time for the bus to leave. I told her the next morning to quit her job and marry me instead.”
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Fellow country singer-songwriter Jamey Johnson officiated the wedding.
South Carolina native King told People of the wedding ceremony and reception, “We wanted the ceremony to be simple and elegant and our reception to be the complete opposite. A lot of color, candles, fun linens and china, lights, trees and foliage — definitely a glam garden vibe.”
In 2022, King released his second album, Young Blood, which included the songs “Hard Workin’ Man” and “Blood on the Tracks.” The album debuted at the pinnacle of Billboard‘s top blues albums chart.
King also joined his soulful brand of music with Zac Brown Band on the song “Stubborn Pride,” from the latter’s 2021 album The Comeback, and opened shows for the group last year on their From the Fire Tour, which also featured openers King Calaway and Tenille Townes. King also showed off his blazing guitar riffs when he performed alongside Zac Brown Band during the group’s performance of “Out in the Middle” at the 2022 CMA Awards.
Defining love is one of the unspoken duties of songwriters across generations.
Depending on the source, love is a wonderful thing, love is a rose, love is thicker than water, or love is a many-splendored thing. Of course, thousands of songs about heartache suggest that even if love really is like oxygen — as was suggested by Sweet — we may not all be breathing the same air.
“Love looks like a cheesy, happy Disney World to some people,” Ingrid Andress reasons, “and love looks like a slow build to other people.”
Sometimes love looks different to the same person after they’ve gone through a breakup. Andress earned her first hit, the Grammy-nominated “More Hearts Than Mine,” with a storyline that imagined bringing a beau home to meet the parents. That song was about a real boyfriend, and he had not met her folks at the time she released it. The relationship eventually bit the dust.
“It was one of those random things where I was just like, ‘I don’t think this is working’ — which at the time seemed crazy, because we had been together for a minute,” she says. “Everybody was like, ‘Oh, you’ll get back together.’ Like, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ And then I met somebody new, and I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is like night-and-day difference. I think this was the thing that I was missing from this first one.’ ”
Andress and pop singer-songwriter Julia Michaels had been threatening to write together for a while, and when their schedules finally matched up, with an appointment at the home of Nashville songwriter-producer Sam Ellis (“Lady Like,” “What If I Never Get Over You”), the two women discovered they were at the same place in their dating cycles.
“Her and I had recently gotten out of bad relationships, and then we had both randomly just started falling in love with new people, so it was very organic,” Andress recalls. “We were telling our story and our journey to how we got there, because we both at the time we were just in such a happy place romantically.”
But not in a Disney-level happy place. The opening verses reflect on the bad relationship experiences — manipulation, gaslighting and jealousy — as if they had recorded parts of a visit with an analyst.“The verses are like a full therapy session, for sure,” says Andress.
Conversations with a therapist are often unpredictable, and the “Feel Like This” writers were similarly unsure where the song was going. Ellis had developed a careful, vulnerable piano foundation, and it provided an appropriate framework to explore the unknown.
“It was just sort of a big pile of lyrics,” he says. “We had to find what the song wanted to be out of that.”The verses got the most attention early, and a four-line pre-chorus, which occurs twice, makes a nifty transition from the verses’ contemplative look backward into the present-day enfoldment of this new, seemingly unprecedented relationship. But instead of an anthemic, I-see-stars celebration, the chorus offers restrained, sensible contentment.
“It’s kind of a low chorus,” says Ellis. “It lifts, but it doesn’t hit you huge, melodically. It’s just — the pocket is cool, and that’s what those two do so well.”
They struggled temporarily to find an appropriate tone for that section that would balance optimism with cautious realism. Ellis broke away for a bit to the kitchen, and when he returned, Andress and Michaels had eased into “homemade cookin’ ” and “backyard kissin’,” portraying love at a comfort-food level while working up to the vulnerability that it supports.
“I thought I knew what/ I knew what love was,” Andress sings at the chorus’ peak before a desperate admission: “Guess I didn’t know at all.” They still didn’t have a title, but as they tried to define this reassuring emotion, Michaels blurted the chorus’ defining line: “I think love’s supposed to feel like this.”“Feel Like This” wasn’t the kind of bumper-sticker phrase that typically works for a country song title — “My songwriter brain would never allow that,” says Andress. “Sounds boring” — but it worked for this particular piece, hinting at its positivity without going over the top.
“We’re both emo songwriters,” Andress says, comparing her work to Michaels. “I thought we were going to write a sad song that day, and we did not.”
Rather than write a bridge, they left a section for some vocal inspiration after the second chorus. Ellis oversaw a demo built around piano and kick drum, and got Andress to lay down a lead vocal, which would ultimately become the performance that appears on the master recording, her voice cracking appropriately near the end of the chorus. She also ad-libbed atmospheric lines to create a bridge, essentially establishing a short space without lyrics that gives the listener time to absorb the psychological lessons that had already transpired.
“With Ingrid, it’s always awesome when we write,” says Ellis. “Sometimes we’re like, ‘Oh, I don’t have a bridge yet,’ so I’ll just kind of play through the song just to get a vocal down, and I’ll leave a big section where something could come up. Nine times out of ten, Ingrid will sing something that ends up being this whole new hook or this whole new melody.”
Ellis did more production work on it in the short run, finishing an estimated 70% of the production. But Andress was hardly ready to assemble her next project.
“It kind of got left in demo world for a couple of years while she was figuring out the next record,” he says. “Once we decided that this was going to go on the record, we kind of cracked open the session again and took inventory of where we wanted to go.”
Multi-instrumentalist Devin Malone and Ellis developed all the parts, with Malone adding both the suspenseful steel guitar and the weighty, melancholy cello. Ellis plucked single ganjo notes to provide subtle, spacious rhythmic enhancements in the second verse and to offset the mood a bit.
“The plucking was intentional,” Andress says. “It brings a lightness to the section. It keeps it elevated. It keeps it moving.”
Atlantic/Warner Music Nashville elevated “Feel Like This” to single status, releasing it to country radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 31. It’s accompanied by a motorcycle-themed video that matches the subtleties of the song’s emotional journey. Instead of a happily-ever-after fairytale, “Feel Like This” is an adult approach to the mysteries of relationships.
“Dark comes with light,” says Andress. “You can’t have one without the other, so this song feels true to me in balance. I relate to it because I want to know the gritty stuff before we get to the good stuff.”
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit are set to release a new 13-track project, Weathervanes, on June 9, marking the followup to 2020’s Reunions and 2021’s Georgia Blue. The group just released the first taste of music from the upcoming album with “Death Wish.”
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“There is something about boundaries on this record,” Isbell said via a statement. “As you mature, you still attempt to keep the ability to love somebody fully and completely while you’re growing into an adult and learning how to love yourself.”
On Feb. 20, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit also released a video on YouTube that served as a teaser for the upcoming album, which will release via Isbell’s own Southeastern Records, in conjunction with Thirty Tigers.
“Isbell is a storyteller at the peak of his craft,” says ESPN’s Wright Thompson, who narrates the video clip. “Observing his fellow wanderers, looking inside himself and trying to understand, reducing a universe to four minutes. He shrinks life small enough to name the fear and strip it away, helping his listeners make sense of how two plus two stops equalling four, once you reach a certain age, and carry a certain amount of scars.”
Thompson goes on to describe the album as a collection of “grown-up songs … songs about adult love, about change, about the danger of nostalgia and the interrogation of myths, about cruelty and regret and redemption … life and death songs, played for and by grown-ass people.”
See the full tracklist for Weathervanes below, as well as the trailer video:
“Death Wish”
“King of Oklahoma”
“Strawberry Woman”
“Middle Of The Morning”
“Save The World”
“If You Insist”
“Cast Iron Skillet”
“When We Were Close”
“Volunteer”
“Vestavia Hills”
“White Beretta”
“This Ain’t It”
“Miles”
