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Nashville is Music City, where on any given evening music pours from venues ranging from the massive Nissan Stadium and the nearly 20,000-seat Bridgestone Arena, to relatively smaller venues such as the Ryman Auditorium and Station Inn.
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But on Wednesday evening (Feb. 15), the 90-person capacity venue The Bluebird Café, long considered a mecca for singer-songwriters, had one of the hottest tickets in town—a rare full concert from three-time Grammy winner Trisha Yearwood, which sold out moments after tickets went on sale.
Over the past several years, Yearwood has joined her husband and fellow artist Garth Brooks on his world tour, and added to her growing business ventures which now includes cookbooks, pet products, home goods and cocktail mixers. But at the Bluebird Café, it’s all about the music. Yearwood told the audience it was likely her first solo concert at the intimate venue since she signed her first record deal with MCA Records as an aspiring artist in 1990.
“I’ve performed here a bunch of other times with other people, and it’s always such a joy to be here,” she told the crowd, which was a sturdy mix of die-hard fans and music industry execs. “It’s not like I’ve just been sitting at home writing cookbooks. I’ve been singing, but most of the time, I’m a shiny quarter—Garth goes out and does his show and when he’s losing them, he brings me out,” she said in jest, drawing laughs from the audience. “That is where my fitness is as a singer, so did I mention I’m scared s—less?” she said, holding up a glass of amber liquid. “This is alcohol.”
She needn’t have worried—the room was filled with love for Yearwood and her music.
Earlier in the evening, Yearwood held a private event celebrating her new signature cocktail mix “Cheers in a Cup” at the grand opening of Williams Sonoma in Nashville. The event also raised funds for Dottie’s Yard, Yearwood’s charity endeavor which assists animal rescue efforts. She surprised music fans by announcing a show at the Bluebird and was soliciting fan requests for the setlist. The show promptly sold out.
Several of her most well-known radio hits made the list including “Walkaway Joe,” “Wrong Side of Memphis” her 1994 chart-topper “XXX’s and OOO’s” and “The Song Remembers When,” but the bulk of the evening was dedicated a range of album cuts and other promotional singles. She offered “The Matador,” from her 2019 album Every Girl, the bluesy Tia Sillers/Craig Wiseman-penned track “Sweet Love,” (from 2005’s Jasper County), “Victim of the Game” (from her 1991 eponymous debut), as well as “Little Hercules” and “A Lover is Forever” (both from 1996’s Everybody Knows).
The attentiveness and enthusiasm of the intimate crowd, paired with Yearwood’s innately conversational performance style, made the concert feel like an evening with a close friend (who happens to be a phenomenal vocalist).
Yearwood has always shown respect for songwriters, selecting the choicest of compositions over the years to pair with her pristine voice. Throughout the evening, she peppered her comments with nods to many of the songwriters behind many of her hits, among them Matraca Berg, Hugh Prestwood and Gretchen Peters.
“I know I’m standing here because I’ve been lucky enough to know some really amazing songwriters who have trusted me with their children, and I hope their trust is well-placed.”
Yearwood recalled receiving a copy of the Bobbie Cryner-written song “Real Live Woman” in her mailbox, immediately loving the title and relishing that the rest of the song was as good as its title. Her rendering of the song was replete with agency, as Yearwood noted to the audience her favorite lyric: “I no longer justify reasons for the way that I behave/ I offer no apologies for the things that I believe and say” (though she coyly added, “Well, sometimes I apologize”).
Among those in attendance was Yearwood’s longtime producer Garth Fundis.
“The reason I wanted to sing was I love music,” Yearwood said. “Music moved me. Garth Fundis and I have always sat down, whether it was with a cassette tape or a DAT or someone singing on a guitar and our whole rule of thumb was that we wouldn’t record anything that we didn’t both love.” She later told Fundis, “Thank you for finding all these great songs with me.”
Prior to performing “XXXs and OOO’s (An American Girl),” she said the song was originally recorded as the themesong for the pilot of a two-hour movie that Yearwood called “kind of a precursor to Nashville.’
“Another artist was supposed to do the song and she couldn’t do it, so I got an 11th-hour call, of like, ‘This is a Matraca Berg and Alice Randall song, could you sing it? And the track is cut by the way, so can you sing it in the key that it is in and it’s for a TV movie so it doesn’t really have a form.’ We recorded it for the movie, but the movie didn’t get picked up and was never made. But we liked the song, so we took it in to MCA and everybody loved the song—the only problem was we didn’t have an album, so the whole Thinkin’ About You album got made around this song. Anybody new who comes into the band when we play it live is like ‘Why do the chords change in the last chorus?’ I’m like, ‘Because it wasn’t a chorus, we just kind of made it work over the chords that are there.’”
She nodded to her love for the music of Linda Ronstadt by performing stellar, powerful renditions of “You’re No Good” and then “Try Me Again,” which earned Yearwood a standing ovation.
In performing a stripped-down version of Frank Sinatra’s 1958 hit “Come Fly With Me,” she also nodded to her 2019 tribute album Let’s Be Frank, which she recorded with a 55-piece orchestra at the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles, using Sinatra’s original microphone. She also hinted that there could be more Sinatra music ahead, in the form of her own upcoming concerts with a symphony orchestra.
“October,” she said quickly, with a sly grin.
She also discussed something she learned from a recent Kennedy Center Honors event she attended with Brooks. “He was singing to honor Gladys Knight, and we got to go to a dinner the night before. One of the recipients got up and talked about how—she was nervous—she talked about how when she is getting ready to do something big, she calls on all her angels. She prays and talks to God, but she also calls on the people in her life that have gone on. So I did that tonight because I was so incredibly nervous. I’m wearing my mom’s ring and I believe that she’s with me.”
Yearwood also gestured to a load-bearing post that was on one side of the room, and positioned in front of a sign bearing the Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey brand logo.
“From where I’m standing, and where that post is, all I can see is Jack, and that’s my dad’s name,” Yearwood said. “It’s all love out here and I feel it. I can’t thank you all enough. As long as I’ve been doing this—and I’m a pretty confident person, but getting up in front of a lot of people and singing, especially when you haven’t done it in a long time, is kind of scary. I felt all of your love tonight…it’s been a really special night.”
She concluded with the evening’s most-requested song, delivering a stunning rendition of Gretchen Peters’ “On a Bus to St. Cloud.”
“This is fun. I may have to do this again,” Yearwood said near the conclusion of the evening, nodding to Bluebird Café COO/GM Erika Wollam-Nichols in the audience.
Indeed, given the warm reception from the audience and how fast tickets to the last-minute event sold out, the notion of repeat shows, or even a Bluebird Café residency from Yearwood, feels both logical and immensely desired.
Trisha Yearwood celebrates her new signature cocktail mix “Cheers in A Cup” at the Grand Opening of Williams Sonoma in Nashville.
Acacia Evans
After winning the CMA Awards’ song of the year honors for his chart-topping hit “Buy Dirt,” and following that with the Country Airplay No. 1 hit “What My World Spins Around,” Jordan Davis admits reality has exceeded his expectations.
“I feel like I’m playing with house money. I moved to town to be a songwriter and all I wanted to do is write songs,” says Davis, whose MCA Nashville album Bluebird Days comes out Friday (Feb. 17). “I think about those early goals, and I think about where I’m at now, and I’m just like, ‘God is crazy. He’s good. I’m super, super blessed.’”
Bluebird Days is an impressive 17-track set that includes 15 songs co-written by Davis that run the gamut from the spirited opening track, “Damn Good Time,” to the poignant homage to his grandfather, “Fishing Spot,” to the title track, a haunting examination of his family’s journey from happy times to the ache of his parents’ divorce.
Bluebird Days is the Shreveport, Louisiana native’s second full length album, following 2018’s Home State, which spawned the Country Airplay No. 1s “Singles You Up,” “Slow Dance in a Parking Lot” and “Take it From Me.” Davis also released two EPs prior to Bluebird Days, including a 2020 self-titled set and a May 2021 release that included “Buy Dirt.” “Barring the two Covid years, I definitely think that we would have made a [full] record around the first EP,” he tells Billboard. “Not touring and being at home more took a little while to get used to, so my writing schedule got thrown off — not to mention shifted in what I was writing about.”
The deeper, more personal themes he tackles on Bluebird Days were a result of the downtime during the pandemic combined with the success of “Buy Dirt,” a multi-platinum duet with Luke Bryan that celebrated the things that truly matter in life and is included on Bluebird Days. “When you are touring, it’s hard not to stay in the touring mindset as you are writing a song,” he says. “You start writing a song for a spot in the set and not necessarily just writing a song. With the space and with the time off, it allowed me to just truly sit down and write an honest real song. Without that time off, I don’t think we would have written a lot of these songs that are on this album.”
In listening to Bluebird Days, Davis thinks people will recognize “that we’re all pretty human.” Much of the album is written with frequent collaborators such as his producer Paul DiGiovanni, Josh Jenkins, Davis’ brother Jacob and Matt Jenkins (the latter three penned “Buy Dirt” with Davis).
“With us saying that we wanted to be honest with this album, there was no one foot in and kind of easing into this,” he explains. “It’s like, ‘All right man, if we’re going to be honest, you’ve just got to be honest,’ whether it’d be talking about my temper on ‘Short Fuse’ or talking about the way I view money on ‘Money Isn’t Real,’ how fast my kids are growing and the guilt I feel being gone half the year… that’s all real stuff, and I know I’m not the only person in the world that’s going through that.”
In light of the recent accolades and success at radio, Davis admits he was a little apprehensive about his second full length effort, including picking “What My World Spins Around” as the follow-up to “Buy Dirt.” “The space between ‘Buy Dirt’ and ‘What My World Spins Around’ going to radio was the most nerveracking — and when ‘What My World Spins Around’ had the impact the way it did and ended up being a big song in its own right, I think that took a lot of the pressure off,” he says. “I was able to see I don’t have to redo ‘Buy Dirt’ again — I just have to be honest and up front and real in the writing.”
To follow up “What My World Spins Around,” Davis says they almost went with another single before deciding to release “Next Thing You Know,” which Davis wrote with Greylan James, Chase McGill and Josh Osborne. “After a week of playing it live, I walked off stage one night and told my manager that I’m an idiot if I don’t give this song a chance at radio,” Davis says. “I don’t know if I’ve had a song that’s impacted the way this song has, even ‘Buy Dirt.’ It’s truly pretty special to watch. And it doesn’t have a chorus, which is kind of weird. It’s a totally linear story of life, but it doesn’t matter if you’re 70, 50, 40 or 20 — you have a part in this song, and I truly feel like that’s why so many people are gravitating to it.”
Even the songs he didn’t write speak for him, including “Money Isn’t Real,” penned by Jake Mitchell, Jameson Rodgers, Josh Thompson, Sarah Turner. “I was trying to write this song called ‘When the Money Runs Out,’ about, ‘Who you are going to be, what are people going to say about you, when the money runs out?’ And I couldn’t get it right,” Davis says. “Jameson sent over ‘Money Isn’t Real,’ and I remember being like, ‘Holy smokes! I’ve been trying to write this song for three years and you just sent me this song I’ve been trying to write.’”
Danielle Bradbery joins Davis on “Midnight Crisis.” “The first time I heard her sing, I was captivated, and she’s just the sweetest person in the world,” he says. “I truly think she’s on the verge of being one of the most powerful females in country music. I knew Danielle would crush it, and she was the only one we sent it to.”
Growing up in Louisiana, Davis was heavily influenced by the local sounds and acts coming through town. “The special thing about Shreveport was it truly was a melting pot,” he says. “There were places where you could go listen to traditional country. There were places that were doing writer’s rounds and clubs that would have rock bands. At 10-years-old, I was going to [defunct renowned Louisiana club] Western Sky because my Uncle Stan [Paul Davis] was playing there with his band. Texas country [acts] Robert Earl Keen and Pat Green would come play the casinos, and we’d go see them, and then jazz bands out of New Orleans would come up and me and my buddies would go see them. It was such a diverse musical city and I just pulled pieces from all that. I was lucky to grow up there.”
Initially, Davis didn’t see himself on stage. Growing up, his brother Jacob was always the performer of the two siblings, following in the steps of their uncle, a local legend. “He was playing all over Louisiana and I was just carrying his equipment in and out of venues,” Davis recalls. “So when I moved to town, he was working on getting a record deal and I was trying to get a publishing deal.”
But Davis got discouraged when he saw his contemporaries landing publishing contracts that eluded him. Then a friend told him that songwriters who were also artists were much more attractive to publishing companies, and those were the writers who were getting signed. “I was like, ‘All right, well, I want to be an artist too,’” he says. “I didn’t want to bartend anymore. I wanted to just write songs.”
These days, he’s grateful to be doing writing and singing and spending time on the road playing his songs. He’s out with Thomas Rhett through February before heading to Europe to play the C2C festivals in March in London, Dublin and Glasgow. In the summer, Davis will tour with Dierks Bentley, and he’s planning a potential headlining tour for the fall.
On early ’70s cuts like “Wild Horses” and “Dead Flowers,” The Rolling Stones showed their affinity for American country music. Now, some of top country artists are returning the love — with the 14-track set Stoned Cold Country, out March 17 on BMG.
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Featuring Eric Church, Brothers Osborne, Little Big Town, Zac Brown Band, Brooks & Dunn and Ashley McBride, among others, the set is an often-raucous salute to what many consider the world’s greatest rock band on the group’s 60th anniversary. Lainey Wilson’s slow-burning “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” drops tomorrow (Feb. 17), following last month’s release of Elvie Shane’s ominous “Sympathy for the Devil.”
The concept for the album was born over “three bottles of white wine at Angelini [Osteria] in Los Angeles,” says BMG CEO Hartwig Masuch, as his dining companion, producer Robert Deaton, put forth the concept. (It helped that BMG is also the publishing company for Rolling Stones’ main songwriters Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.)
As publisher, “obviously one of your main mandates is to say, ‘Okay, here’s a great catalog of songs’ — and, we all know, there is already one great version,” Masuch says. “’So, what do we do to extend the relevance of those songs in a couple of a dimensions? Here’s an audience, a different genre and a different generation.’ I think that’s a core task of a publisher.”
Even so, Masuch says, the quality of the project was more of a defining factor than the dollars. “A music company should be committed to the cultural DNA it’s based on, not just always looking at things and saying, ‘How much can I make my money back?’ — because that’s a little bit too cynical,” he says. “Of course, we all have to make money and it’s important this will be successful, but I think what drove our discussion was more so the chemistry of the whole thing than having a calculator out [and getting] the publishing royalties on [14] songs.”
Deaton adds that the next step, even though they didn’t need it, was getting Jagger and Richards to sign off on the project. “I feel like we have such reverence for them and their song writing,” he says. “They’re the soundtrack of our lives. I don’t think anybody would want to go as deep on something as we put towards the project without have the blessing and permission from Mick and Keith.”
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With the duo’s deep love of country music, it wasn’t a tough sell. “From the early days country music made a real impression on us. There’s an authenticity about country that’s always appealed to me, whether it be Hank Williams, Merle Haggard or a Willie Nelson record,” Richards tells Billboard in a statement. “Also, of course, Gram Parsons was a major player and influence,” he adds of his close friend, the pioneering country rock singer/songwriter.
Deaton, who dubbed the album “a Nashville love letter to the Stones,” says many of the artists, like Church, have long histories with the music: “[Church] said that when he was nobody and just playing guitar in front of 10 people, he got more tips when he played ‘Honky Tonk Women.’ The Stones have been so important to him for so long that it’s been an honor just to be able to say ‘thank you’ on this record.”
Masuch says BMG’s position is to look at such projects in a comprehensive way. Though there is no official word on a documentary, Deaton says, “there were six or seven cameras on every session that we did,” and Masuch brings up the idea of “maybe turning [the album] into a live event, if possible, at a certain point. It would be [amazing] to have those artists in a big venue, performing their favorite songs, and maybe getting one or two members of [the Rolling Stones] to be around.”
But all ancillary projects were secondary to making the album that served the music, Deaton says. Starting in January 2022, he listened to Stones’ songs “over and over, 100 times, so that I could get the right artists with the right songs … And then I thought about, how do I make it different? How do I make this a tribute to them and also still unique?”
To do so, Deaton had to ensure he had unfettered freedom to make the project he wanted. “Hartwig is one of my dearest friends, and I told him, ‘Listen, I’m getting ready to go deep on this and I need to ask you one question from a business standpoint before I go under here: how many BMG artists do I have to have on the record?’” Deaton recalls. “And he said, ‘Go make the best record you can make. There’s no minimum, there’s no maximum.’” The album ended up with three BMG artists: Wilson, Jimmie Allen and Shane.
As Deaton began casting the album, he says 95% of his attempts to match artists with songs ended up working out. “The only song that I left open was for Zac Brown Band, because they can do so many different things and so many different styles,” Deaton says. On their first conversation, Brown picked “Paint It Black.” Deaton and Wilson also went back and forth on four or five songs and had a false start, cutting “Get Off of My Cloud” before switching to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
“I went to BMG and said, ‘You know what, I think we got the wrong song’ because it wasn’t country enough,” Deaton says. “When I was trying to put together the record, I found that anything of that era was really hard to fit into our album because we’re being unapologetically country and we’re making a country record. It was very hard. ‘Get Off of My Cloud’ just didn’t fit in the overall arc of the record.”
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” resonated strongly with Wilson. “The Rolling Stones are global music icons, from the musicianship to the swagger to the relatable perspective with songs like ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want,’” she tells Billboard. “Man, if I haven’t had to learn that lesson time and time again. I know that feeling of resisting your fate, that struggle, but I also know that sense of pride and peace when you understand the tough times made way for something better. I try not to take myself too seriously — I’ve heard you can’t be great if you do — so I love the way the production builds into a light-hearted cathartic jam at the end. This song leaves me shaking my head, smiling at myself, and feeling grateful. And that’s what The Stones always did. They made you feel something, and they made you feel good.”
Understandably, Deaton had to occasionally contend with artists’ nerves when tackling the classic rock songs. “Karen Fairchild from Little Big Town said, ‘The only thing I’m concerned about is that Mick is going to hear all this, and I hope he doesn’t go, ‘Well, that sucks,’” he recalls. “Every artist wanted to put all their love into it, which was incredibly refreshing.”
The sessions were recorded without click tracks and with all the musicians playing live together, including the backing vocalists. To increase the authenticity, long-time Rolling Stones touring keyboardist Chuck Leavell played on “Shine A Light,” recorded by Koe Wetzel.
“I wanted everybody in the same room together so that they all could feed off of each other and [have] it be as organic and as real as possible,” Deaton says. “Whatever that Stones thing is that they have [whenever] they’re in a room, I wanted to be able to create that and get as close to it as we possibly could.”
Throughout the album, there are nods to great musicianship, even beyond the Stones. For example, Mickey Raphael, who has played harmonica with Willie Nelson for more than 50 years, opens “Miss You,” covered by Allen. “It ended being a tribute to what I feel are the best musicians in the world,” Deaton says.
A number of tribute albums by country artists have become best sellers, including 1994’s Common Threads: Songs of the Eagles, which the RIAA has certified triple platinum, and Lionel Richie’s Tuskegee, a 2012 platinum set that paired him with top country artists remaking his biggest hits.
Masuch sees Stoned Cold Country having a similar, if not wider, appeal, given the Rolling Stones’ global fandom and “the fascination in nearly all European countries for country music,” he says. Access can be lacking to country acts outside the US, so Masuch says it’s important that the project “will get onto [people’s] iPhones and can create much more excitement for some of the musicians outside of North America than ever before.”
Extending country’s reach has been one of Germany-based BMG’s goals ever since it bought Broken Bow Records in 2017, giving the company an instant foothold in Nashville. “I think it’s imminent that some of these artists will have big international careers,” Masuch says, “and hopefully this project can be one of the triggers in achieving that.”
Stoned Cold Country Track list
“(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” – Ashley McBryde
“Honky Tonk Women” – Brooks & Dunn
“Dead Flowers” – Maren Morris
“It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll (But I Like It)” – Brothers Osborne & The War And Treaty
“Miss You” – Jimmie Allen
“Tumbling Dice” – Elle King
“Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” – Marcus King
“Wild Horses” – Little Big Town
“Paint It Black” – Zac Brown Band
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” – Lainey Wilson
“Sympathy for the Devil” – Elvie Shane
“Angie” – Steve Earle
“Gimme Shelter” – Eric Church
“Shine A Light” – Koe Wetzel
Spoiler alert: This story contains information about contestants eliminated on Wednesday’s (Feb. 15) episode of The Masked Singer.
The ninth season of Fox’s The Masked Singer launched with formidable competition, with night one seeing the Mustang—an Academy of Country Music award-winning artist—galloping off into the sunset on the season’s premiere episode.
The evening featured Mustang showing off some serious vocal power on the Whitesnake classic “Here I Go Again,” which topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1987. It was an unexpected song choice from this sometimes traditional-leaning country vocalist. Guesses from judges ran the gamut, from P!nk to Suzanne Somers, with only one judge picking up on the hint of twang in Mustang’s voice — and even then, guessing (incorrectly) that Mustang might be Wynonna Judd.
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Guesses for Nancy Wilson and Joan Jett were also tossed into the mix, before it was revealed that hiding under the decadent red-and-black costume was “A Little Bit Stronger” singer Sara Evans.
Before her elimination, Evans spoke with Billboard about singing the Whitesnake classic, her reactions to the judges’ guesses and why she didn’t tell her family members she was competing on The Masked Singer.
What drew you to being part of The Masked Singer?
I thought it would be fun and something different to experience, and of course, being on television is good for anyone’s career. It’s also different from our normal routine of writing and touring, so any chance I get to do something different and exciting, it gives you a new energy.
Had you watched the show before?
I had watched maybe a handful of episodes. I didn’t realize everything that went into it and it’s just incredible and the secrecy is so fun. Some of my good friends, Clint Black and Lisa Hartman Black, I saw their time on the show.
Did they give you any advice on the show?
They were just like, “The costume can be claustrophobic, just know that going into it and they’ll do what they can to help you feel comfortable.” But it was great because my costume was, aside from a big horse head, which was heavy, it was really just like leather pants and a leather top. It wasn’t too restrictive.
How did you decide on the Mustang as a costume choice?
Producers and people sometimes help with those decisions. They came to me with that idea and I loved it. It was great because I grew up on a farm and I grew up on a horse and adore horses. There couldn’t have been anything better.
You performed “Here I Go Again” from Whitesnake, and also did the battle round, performing Rihanna’s “Diamonds.” Those were perhaps unexpected choices for you.
I was going to be on a different episode, doing ABBA Night. But then someone had to drop out and the producers asked me if I would fill in for that person and take their songs to be on the first episode of The Masked Singer instead. So I already knew the Whitesnake song; of course, everyone knows it, but I got it at like 11:30 the night before we had to film it, at the last minute. Everyone was really appreciative, though, and I ended up having so much fun singing the Whitesnake song, especially.
The judges had some great guesses—P!nk and Joan Jett among them. Were you surprised by any of their guesses?
I was flattered. Everyone they guessed, I was like, “Oh, my god. I’m a fan of hers, and hers, and she’s a legend.” It was great. I felt like it was a huge compliment.
It sounded like you didn’t tell anyone in your family that you were going to be on the show.
Yeah, ’cause I wanted my kids to be surprised and I didn’t trust my mom not to tell people. [laughs] I’m going to tell my mom and siblings and everyone tonight, like around five or six o’clock and ask them to watch.
What is coming up for you, musically?
I’m gonna make a new album. I’m still writing songs for it, and we will go into the studio probably around April and start recording it. I haven’t had an album out since 2020, so that will be a big part of our year. We’re also on the road. We usually do about 80 shows a year and that starts next week, so we are just always busy working and on the road.
That country kind of love. Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani celebrated Valentine’s Day on Tuesday (Feb. 14) with a romantic duet on social media.
In a black-and-white video posted to Shelton’s Twitter and Instagram feeds, the pair of lovebirds perform their 2019 duet “Nobody But You,” singing, “I don’t wanna live without you, I don’t wanna even breathe/ I don’t wanna dream about you, wanna wake up with you next to me/ I don’t wanna go down any other road now/ I don’t wanna love nobody but you/ Lookin’ in your eyes now, if I had to die now/ I don’t wanna love nobody but you.”
While the country star’s social team encouraged his followers to tag their valentines in the post, most opted to focus on The Voice coaches’ lovey-dovey relationship. “Find someone who looks at you like this two look at each other,” one fan wrote on Instagram, while another commented, “Happy Valentine’s Day to my favorite celebrity couple.” A third had an idea in mind in the wake of Rihanna’s epic Super Bowl performance, suggesting, “Blake and Gwen for the next Super Bowl halftime show!”
Shelton and Stefani most recently wrapped filming Season 22 of The Voice together, with the former winning his ninth season as a coach with champ Bryce Leatherwood. Team Gwen last won Season 19 with teen sensation Carter Rubin.
This spring, the “Hollaback Girl” singer is set to headline the 2023 BeachLife Festival in Redondo Beach, Calif., alongside The Black Keys and The Black Crowes.
Watch Shelton and Stefani’s cute Valentine’s duet below.
The lives of country artists’ spouses can be challenging — their partners spend long periods of time on the road, often chew up their home time with business meetings and songwriting appointments, and get interrupted periodically by strangers when the couple is out in public.
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So it’s telling that Lauren Akins, who celebrated her 10th anniversary with Thomas Rhett last October, sweetly defines herself by that relationship in the profile on her Twitter page: “Blessed to be married to my best friend.”
Rhett clearly remains enamored of his wife, documenting their lives together through much of his material, including “Life Changes,” “Look What God Gave Her” and “Star of the Show.” Part of that appreciation is his recognition of the abnormal scenario she freely embraces.
“Anyone married to someone in the spotlight, it takes a very special human being,” he says. “The amount of days I’ve been gone, the amount of times I’ve let work overtake my family life, the amount of times I’ve said yes to stuff that I probably should have said no to — and [she was] there with me the whole way.”
His newest single — “Angels (Don’t Always Have Wings),” which Valory released to country radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 23 — reflects both his gratitude for her and some degree of guilt for his job’s infringements, though Rhett didn’t necessarily intend to be the voice delivering that message.
“Angels” emerged from a co-writing appointment with Teddy Swims, a multigenre singer-songwriter who made Rhett a featured artist on his rhythmic 2021 track “Broke.” “Teddy Swims is like if Chris Stapleton started an R&B band,” Rhett says. “That’s what he sounds like — absolutely insane.”
Rhett aimed to write something that Swims might not typically record: a “frickin’ country ballad that the chorus is just at the tip top of his range,” says Rhett. “Selfishly, I wanted to hear Teddy singing something like that.”
The night before the session, Rhett read a book that raised the possibility of meeting an angel who presents in the physical world as a human being. From that idea, he drifted to the phrase “Angels (Don’t Always Have Wings)” and decided the concept applied to his wife. He introduced that idea during his Nashville writing date with Swims, Josh Thompson (“I’ll Name the Dogs,” “Ain’t Always the Cowboy”) and songwriter-producer Julian Bunetta (“Craving You,” “Beer Can’t Fix”). Everyone bought into it, with Rhett leading the charge.
“You have to stand around with, like, trash cans to pick up all the stuff leaking out of him,” Bunetta says. “You can’t pick it up fast enough. He’s one of the most prolific writers I have ever been around.”
They wrote “Angels” in a waltz time signature, placing the song’s female subject on a pedestal while the singer, self-described as a “mess of a man,” takes responsibility for his own failures and a “selfish heart.” It is, agree Rhett and Bunetta, an exaggeration of Rhett’s character, though Rhett expected Swims to sing it in the end anyway.
“It’s not like every movie that Robert De Niro is in, he had to live,” Bunetta reasons. “The greatest artists have always been able to interpret the song the way it needs to be interpreted. Whether or not they lived that is sort of beside the point.”
They fashioned “Angels” with the music and lyrics working in tandem to wring maximum emotion out of the experience. It starts humbly and conversationally in its opening verses, rising in the chorus to a higher melodic plain. In the process, it uses a fairly small number of words, allowing the phrases — and the song’s heart — to unfold slowly.
“The use of space in songs is good,” Bunetta notes. “Sometimes space says what needs to be said.”The mix of sweet adulation and self-abasement proved dramatic, reaching the climactic, semi-spiritual line in the narrative just before the chorus’ end: “I don’t know why you were patient and wasted good savin’ on me.” The foursome felt a bridge was needed to complete it, and they wrestled with numerous ideas before Thompson asserted himself, using “wings” as both the last word in the chorus and the first word in the bridge.
“He is the least-vocal songwriter that I write with — and by least vocal, I mean the person that is not just shouting out every melody and lyric that comes to his brain,” Rhett says. “I think he kind of allows the write to happen. He just kind of tucks away in a corner with his laptop that’s from 2001 because he’s too old school to upgrade. We got stuck; he just spat out that bridge. And we were just like, ‘That’s what it was supposed to be the whole time.’”
Swims sang over a drum loop and acoustic guitar for the Bunetta-produced demo, but by the next morning, Rhett was already having second thoughts about who should sing it. He checked in with Swims periodically to gauge what was happening with “Angels,” and after several months, got Swims’ permission to keep it for himself. Rhett recorded it with producer Dann Huff (Kane Brown, Brantley Gilbert), who honored the song’s spacious needs.
Rhett, meanwhile, needed private space for his vocal. The chorus tested his falsetto in a way that he had never quite encountered before in the studio, and he wasn’t certain he could capture the song’s vulnerability in front of a producer and engineer. So he holed up in his home studio and sang 60 or 70 takes, which would later be compiled into one vocal.
“I really just wanted to lock myself in that emotion alone and see what would come out,” he says. “The intricacies of my voice breaking up or the falsetto not being perfect — that’s the realness of it.”
After Rhett’s album Where We Started arrived April 1, 2022, his manager, G Major Management founder Virginia Davis, saw particularly strong fan reaction to “Angels,” and she encouraged Bunetta to explore a remix. He redid the bass and drums, and added a piano with a tremolo effect in the opening bars. “I thought that the intro, if we’re going to radio with this song, needed some ear candy to perk your ear up,” says Bunetta.
“Angels” debuted at No. 51 on the Feb. 11 Country Airplay chart and moves to No. 32 in its second week. The song also continues to generate direct messages on social media as fans adopt a song Rhett wrote about his wife as their own.
“It was really cool,” he says, “to watch something so personal resonate on such a large scale with people from different walks of life.”
Shania Twain’s sixth studio set, Queen of Me — her first since 2017’s Now — flies in at No. 2 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart (dated Feb. 18), becoming her seventh top five entry.
Released on Feb. 3, the LP earned 38,000 equivalent album units, with 34,000 in album sales, in its opening week, ending Feb. 9, according to Luminate.
On the all-genre Billboard 200, Queen starts at No. 10, awarding Twain her sixth top 10.
The set, whose 12 songs Twain co-authored, is her first of new material since Now, which opened at No. 1 on Top Country Albums and the Billboard 200 in October 2017. Now marked Twain’s fifth No. 1 on Top Country Albums and her second on the Billboard 200.
Twain first appeared on Top Country Albums in 1993 with her No. 67-peaking self-titled debut set. She then reigned with The Woman in Me, which spent 29 weeks at No. 1 in 1995-96; Come on Over (50 weeks, 1997-2000); Up! (six weeks, 2002-03); Greatest Hits (11 weeks, 2004-05); and Now (one week, 2017).
In between Now and Queen of Me, Twain’s Not Just a Girl: The Highlights soundtrack, which accompanied her career-spanning Netflix documentary, opened at its No. 15 Top Country Albums peak last September.
With its 50 frames atop Top Country Albums, Come on Over is tied for the second-longest reign with Luke Combs’ This One’s for You, which began its rule in June 2017. Since the chart premiered in January 1964, Morgan Wallen’s Dangerous: The Double Album boasts the longest command: it racks up its 94th week in the penthouse on the latest list, with 46,000 units (up 8%).
Meanwhile, Twain joins five other acts with top five titles on Top Country Albums in the 1990s, 2000s, ’00s and ’10s: Kenny Chesney, Alan Jackson and Tim McGraw, as well as Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, both of whose streaks date back to the ’60s.
Singer-songwriter Jordyn Shellhart’s family moved to Nashville when she was 10, dedicated to assisting the precocious musical talent pursue her dreams. Within a few short years, Shellhart’s aspirations were shifting to reality; by age 16, she had inked her first publishing and record deals and played on the Grand Ole Opry stage.
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This was the mid-2000s, at a time when another talented teen named Taylor Swift was just beginning to turn the country music scene upside down.
“It was on the heels of that phenomenon, so people were more willing to sign younger artists and I was a benefactor of that,” Shellhart recalls. However, things quickly went sideways. “I lost my voice and my record deal and had to totally regroup. I started over as a songwriter, trying to figure out what my life looked like in music without being a singer. It was pretty jarring at the time, but looking back, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
While working with vocal coaches to reclaim her voice, Shellhart became laser-focused on songwriting, earning her first cut at age 19 when Don Williams recorded “I Won’t Give Up on You.” More cuts followed, including “Secondhand Smoke” and “I Guess They Call It Fallin’,” both recorded by Kelsea Ballerini, “How You Love Someone,” recorded by Mickey Guyton, and “I Always Wanted To,” first recorded by Cody Johnson and later Garrett Hedlund. Along the way, she’s worked in writing rooms alongside legendary songwriters like Lori McKenna, Tom Douglas and Allen Shamblin.
Her previous cuts, plus Little Big Town earning a 2021 Grammy nomination for best country duo/group performance for the quartet’s recording of her song “Sugar Coat,” positioned Shellhart as one of country music’s most formidable new songwriters.
But Shellhart felt a yearning to be a performing artist again. Earlier this year, Shellhart, 28, released her debut Warner Music Nashville single, “Who Are You Mad At,” which she wrote with Marc Beeson and Shamblin. A full album is slated for later this year.
“It feels like returning to myself, like coming home,” Shellhart says.
Shellhart spoke with Billboard about her early career success, reclaiming her physical and artistic voice and crafting her upcoming album.
How did “Who Are You Mad At” come about?
Marc and Allen are two of my favorite songwriters, and we write quite a bit together. One day, Alan had this experience with someone that he was telling us about and I think most of us have been on the receiving end of someone’s rage, or disproportionate reaction to something that maybe we didn’t even do. I totally understood what he was going through and just started singing the chorus. It was just born out of that conversation.
This marks a homecoming of sorts for you, after going through a journey of losing — and regaining — your voice. What was that like?
It was a slow process. I was touring and performing a lot and it became difficult. I was never sure if my voice was gonna show up or not. So it was this mental anguish before I would have to sing. From there, it progressed to the point where I couldn’t talk anymore. Looking back, I feel like it was probably sort of a psychological spinout, basically just stressing myself out about it, and it made it worse. I think everyone carries stress differently — and for me, it got locked up right in my throat. It was pretty traumatic, looking back on it.
And you turned to songwriting.
It was by accident. My publisher at the time at Sea Gayle, Chris DuBois, was so supportive of me. He was like, “OK, you have nine months left in your deal, and let’s figure this out. Let’s keep trying to create.” So I started writing by myself for the first time. I learned how to write songs through co-writing at 14, while so many other people start out writing [solo] in their bedrooms. But my formative writing years were in rooms with older, superior writers. It took me losing my voice to go back to that innocence of, “What do I want to say, by myself, as a writer?”
Then you teamed with Lori McKenna and Josh Kerr to write “Sugar Coat.”
Lori was so gracious, and I don’t think Josh or I had written with her much before. I remember that first trip [to McKenna’s home near Boston], we just threw out all of these ideas and wrote two other songs, before she said, “I have this thing that I want to try to write,” and pretty much read what is the chorus of “Sugar Coat.” So we helped finish out the verses and the melody, and in the process, just got to absorb her brilliance that day.
You also wrote “I Always Wanted To” with Tom Douglas and Allen Shamblin.
That was one of the craziest co-writes for me. I got the idea for that song in the shower and just started writing the chorus, not really knowing what it was about, but knowing it was from the perspective of a guy who never did the things he wanted to do. It was my first time writing with Tom and Allen together. I shared that chorus, and Allen said he had verses he had written — and they are exactly what you hear in the song. Tom laughed and stared at us and said, “Guys, put that chorus with those verses and let’s go to lunch.” Allen didn’t have a melody with his verses, so I just sang the melody I had for the chorus around those verses and it was seamless. I’ve never had that experience before.
You have a new record deal with Warner and are returning to being a performing artist. Obviously, you are an adult now, but what else is different about being an artist this time around?
I think as a kid, I was so defined by being a singer — I had this death grip on it, because it was the only thing I felt like was worthy about me, and the only thing I had to offer anybody. So having that taken away from me, it made me reckon with my place in the world. So, for the last 13 years, I’ve been learning what it’s like to be human apart from the gifts I’ve been given. Eventually my voice came back, but it took awhile before I was brave enough to try recording again.
You started working with producer Cameron Jaymes, and you will have an album out later this year.
Cameron and I went into making this album with the lowest stakes. He was like, “Let’s just make something for you and maybe we get more co-writes out of it.” He was pulling favors with our friends who played instruments. Then Warner reached out, because they had cut a few of my songs on their artists. As soon as I started recording with Cameron, it felt like returning to myself, like returning home. I started engaging with Warner and co-chair/co-president Cris Lacy came by the studio and listened to the whole project. I felt like I was being seen and heard in such a real way. I just tried to cut songs that I knew I would feel annoyed if anyone recorded them except me.
As an artist, who would you most want to collaborate with in the future?
I would love to collaborate with SZA. I listen to her lyrics and I just feel a connection, like she speaks the same language as me a bit, and I find that inspiring. But also, just growing up listening to country music, I love storytellers in general. Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Kris Kristofferson, those are people who can just write a song and tell a story.
What was the first concert you remember seeing?
LeAnn Rimes. I saw her in California when I was like eight years old.
What is one song you wish you had written?
“Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
What are your must-haves when you are on the road?
The only thing I require before a show is hot tea or hot water and honey. That’s the only real diva thing I have at this point.
Valentine’s Day isn’t all love and romance, especially for the heartbroken people out there. Kelsea Ballerini captures that feeling in a new six-track EP released on Tuesday (Feb. 14) called Rolling Up the Welcome Mat, and its accompanying short film.
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In the 20-minute clip, the country star details the devastation of her divorce from fellow country Morgan Evans, opening the short film with “Mountain With a View,” in which the 29-year-old sits alone at a breakfast table. “I’m wearing the ring still / But I think I’m lying / Sometimes you forget yours / I think we’re done trying,” she sings.
She then visually portrays equally emotional tracks “Just Married,” “Penthouse,” “Interlude” and “Blindsided” before wrapping up with the reflective “Leave Me Again,” in which she sings, “For a while the shoe fit / But then I outgrew it / And staying only made me get real good at pretend / So, I hope I never leave me again.”
Ballerini originally announced her divorce from Evans in August 2022 via an Instagram Story. “I’ve always tried to share my life with you in a real and vulnerable way, while also protecting layers of my personal life as they unfold,” she wrote in the all-text message. “This is now public record so I wanted you to hear from me directly that I am going through a divorce.”
The couple met in March 2016 while both were co-hosting the CMC Awards in Australia. They became engaged in December of that year, and married Dec. 2, 2017 in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
Rolling Up the Welcome Mat also follows her 2022 album, Subject to Change, which reflects on her personal growth over the past few years.
Watch the new short film below.
Morgan Wallen rises from No. 4 to No. 1 on the Billboard Artist 100 chart (dated Feb. 18), becoming the top musical act in the U.S. for a sixth total week. He tallied his first five weeks at No. 1 in January-February 2021.
Wallen returns to the top spot thanks to seven charting hits on the Billboard Hot 100, led by “Last Night,” which vaults 27-3 after its first full week of tracking, becoming his fifth top 10 song and highest-charting career hit.
Here’s a recap of Wallen’s seven current Hot 100 hits, all of which are on his new album One Thing at a Time, due March 3:
Rank, TitleNo. 3, “Last Night”No. 13, “Thought You Should Know”No. 18, “You Proof”No. 38, “I Wrote the Book”No. 47, “One Thing at a Time”No. 51, “Everything I Love”No. 81, “Tennessee Fan”
Also fueling Wallen’s return to No. 1 on the Artist 100 is his prior LP Dangerous: The Double Album, which rises 6-4 on the Billboard 200. The January 2021 release, which sparked his first five weeks atop the Artist 100, spends a 106th week in the Billboard 200’s top 10, tying the West Side Story soundtrack from 1962 for the third-most weeks totaled in the region. They trail only the My Fair Lady original cast recording from 1956 (173 weeks in the top 10) and the Sound of Music soundtrack from 1965 (109).
Wallen extends his record for the most weeks spent at No. 1 on the Artist 100 among primarily country acts. Jason Aldean and Luke Combs follow with three weeks on top apiece. Taylor Swift leads all acts with 63 weeks logged at the summit.
Elsewhere in the Artist 100’s top 10, Shania Twain re-enters at No. 8, as she appears in the top 10 for the first time since reaching No. 2 in 2017. Her new album Queen of Me arrives at No. 10 on the Billboard 200 with 38,000 equivalent album units earned, becoming her sixth top 10. Notably, she joins Madonna as the only women with newly-charting Billboard 200 top 10s in the 1990s, 2000s, ’10s and ’20s (Madonna’s streak also includes the ’80s).
The Artist 100 measures artist activity across key metrics of music consumption, blending album and track sales, radio airplay and streaming to provide a weekly multi-dimensional ranking of artist popularity.
