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On No One Gets Out Alive, singer-songwriter Maggie Rose is sending a message.
“The theme of this record is using this finite amount of time well while we have it,” she says of the recently released project. She was in a reflective mood as she wrote and recorded the dynamic work, having gone through the pandemic, seen some friendships come to their natural conclusion and lost her best friend’s dad to cancer. “All these things that made me feel connected to my community were gone,” she says.
With its folk-pop-soul, acoustic production and Rose’s expressive, smoky vocals, the album recalls works from Bonnie Raitt, Yola and Dusty Springfield.
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Rose says she doesn’t necessarily think about what listeners will learn about her from hearing to the album, but instead what they will learn about themselves: “I think I have a really strong belief in myself and what I’m doing,” she says. “[It’s] not as much as I want them to learn about me, but hopefully that they will draw from this.”
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Produced by Ben Tanner, the album guitarist Sadler Vaden and drummer Chad Gamble from Jason Isbell’s 400 Unit, keyboardist Peter Levin (Amanda Shires, Gregg Allman), bassist Zac Cockrell (Alabama Shakes) and keyboardist Kaitlyn Connor and guitarist Kyle Lewis from Rose’s own band. “I believed in this Field of Dreams idea of build it and they will come,” she says, of assembling the players.
Rose, who released her first album in 2009, delivered the completed project to Big Loud Records, which didn’t change a thing, including the sequencing. “I am not by any means jaded, but it wasn’t what I was expecting a label on Music Row to deliver for me and fully embrace what I was doing,” she says. “I think that just is a testament to Big Loud and how progressive and artist forward they are. But all the tentativeness that I had just from having operated around Music Row for so long, that all went away just because I felt like I was really understood. This is the partnership I’ve been waiting for.”
Rose has played the Grand Ole Opry 106 times, and if mainstream country music gatekeepers have yet to embrace her, she feels totally accepted on that vaunted stage. “I think it speaks to all the different iterations of what the Nashville music scene is,” she says. “The fact that the Grand Ole Opry has been around for almost 100 years is probably due to the fact that they are malleable and they’re trying to adapt, and also be progressive and cast a little bit of a wider net than maybe our friends at country radio are doing. I don’t know that my music is like a bullseye for what you would typically expect to hear at the Grand Ole Opry, but I feel very much part of a community that I want to see go on for another 100 years.”
Below, Rose picks her five favorite tracks from the new album — though she admits her top selections can change on any given day — with explanations in her own words for each pick.
“No One Gets Out Alive”
The title by itself: If you just hear ‘No one gets out alive,’ it sounds really ominous and dark. When you hear the song in its entirety, it’s anything but. It’s really hopeful. I’d had this title just kind of rolling around in my head. I knew the day that I wrote this song with Sunny Sweeney and Natalie Hemby, that most likely I would end up naming the album that — just because I’d already written some other songs that were about moving on with only what you need and taking advantage of the time that you have. It was me letting go of some emotions that were holding me back creatively and keeping me from living to my full potential and extracting all the joy I can from what we’re doing.
I wanted this really dramatic ending, and I even got kind of scared of it. I said to Ben Tanner, “People are going to think I’m being too dramatic or over the top with this.” And he’s like, “You deserve to step into that theater and drama. That’s what the song is about.” There’s urgency. It’s demanding people live in the present right now.
“Mad Love” (feat. John Paul White)
“Mad Love” and “No One Gets Out Alive” are a little like twin songs. Every song has its little counterpart that it belongs with. “Mad Love” has that same kind of cinematic, Tarantino soundtrack feel as “Alive.” It was almost like I was trying to manifest this character that was a little braver than I was at the time. I’m like, this is Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill and pretending to step into this role. And maybe if I write this story and create this person in this persona, I’ll able to fulfill it and live up to it. I love performing that song. It just gives me like [Lee] Hazelwood/Nancy Sinatra, spaghetti western vibes. And it’s also goes with the theme of relationships running their course, and of owning a little bit of that anger and moving on from it.
I love John Paul White. He’s got the haunting melody/ harmony thing down. I was like, “What better voice than John Paul’s to have on a song like ‘Mad Love’?” And I didn’t even tell him what parts to sing. He’s just doing his own thing. It truly just adds this ghostly beauty to the song that I love.
“Fake Flowers”
I wrote it with Chuck Harmony and Claude Kelly, who have become really good friends of mine. It was maybe one of the first songs that I had written when I started to realize there’s an album that’s starting to galvanize here. Chuck and Claude are known for writing these huge, diva pop melodies, and have written for Christina Aguilera, Miley Cyrus, Whitney Houston and Britney Spears. We probably made nine efforts, just the three of us, for songs to be contenders for this record and “Fake Flowers” was one of them.
I felt like I owned my anger, which is not necessarily something women are always encouraged to do. It’s one that I really look forward to during the live show, because it’s so dynamic and it has [these] kind of spooky, intimate verses and then this explosive Motown chorus, where it kind of mimics raging out. I love when music and the sentiment of a song can really marry together so well like that. I have a fondness in thinking about writing that with them and knowing that the three of us really had something special.
“Too Young”
The song I wrote with Natalie Hemby is about ageism. Natalie and I both were drawing from our similar experiences of moving to Nashville when we were teenagers. Knowing that we were talented, knowing that we have good people or established people around us and things going for us, but we were kind of undermined in thinking that we didn’t know what was best for ourselves and our careers. We wrote the song based on that. Knowing that I’ve been in Nashville for 16 years and was feeling like, “OK, I’m 35 and making another record.”
I wanted to include at the end that you’re never too old to chase your dreams. No one is. I think ageism is a really tough subject to write about, but I feel like Natalie and I did a good job. And it was such an intimate day of us laughing and crying and going down memory lane of different things that we had experienced throughout our careers. There was a lot of beauty to it, too, and anticipation for what’s to come.
We have to push against that stigma within our industry. It’s ridiculous. I love hearing from artists who have lived experiences and who can draw from wisdom. I feel more rooted in what I have to say now than I ever have.
“Under the Sun”
I love the groove of it. It has this fun Fleetwood Mac feel, but the lyrics are this really strong juxtaposition of sadness and the idea that we’ve exhausted every effort to reconcile and it’s not going to happen. There’s a little sarcasm to it as well: I guess there’s nothing out there for us that will bring us back together. I just like when you are grooving along to a song and you think it’s like this happy bop and it reveals itself to you as “Oh, this is actually pretty introspective and kind of sad.” It’s one that I really look forward to playing live. The production’s kind of fun and it adds a cool element to collection of songs that makes it really well rounded.
With his second solo album, Strong, set to release April 12 via EMI Nashville, Tyler Hubbard says he feels “a little more established, found a little bit more of a rhythm. Until last year, I didn’t know who my fanbase really was, but I got to know them, being on the road so much last year. I know who my fanbase is, so this feels like the first project that I’ve written with my fans in mind.”
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Within little more than a decade’s span, as part of his former duo Florida Georgia Line (alongside Brian Kelley), Hubbard sent 16 songs to the pinnacle of Billboard’s Country Airplay chart and earned two massive, top 5 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, with “Meant to Be” and “Cruise.” Both of those songs reached even loftier heights, joining an elite group of compositions that have earned RIAA Diamond status. The duo also saw four albums peak at No. 1 on the top country albums chart.
Hubbard’s 2023 self-titled project represented the singer-songwriter forging a transition from duo member to sharing his own perspective and sound as a solo artist. With that project, Hubbard added to his arsenal of hits, notching a Country Airplay chart-topper with the light-hearted, love-filled and RIAA Platinum-certified “5 Foot 9,” and a No. 2 hit on the same chart with “Dancin’ in the Country,” which was certified 2x Platinum.
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“The first solo album was more introducing me to the world, but this is a bit deeper, more fun, more live-driven and fan-inspired, for sure,” he says. To be sure, the new album features more songs of love and good times, but meshed with songs that delve deeper into themes drawn from various moments on his life journey, drawing on themes of nostalgia and family.
He’s previewed his upcoming project with “Turn” and “Wish You Would,” as well as his nostalgic radio single “Back Then Right Now,” which currently resides at No. 7 on Country Airplay. Elsewhere, “Take Me Back” offers a nuanced look at his relationship with his hometown of Monroe, Georgia.
“I’m sure a lot of people have the same kind of story where they grew up, moved away and maybe didn’t come back as much as they would have liked, or left home indefinitely,” he says. “That’s sort of what I did. I’m proud of where I came from, but also don’t have a whole lot of reasons, other than a few friends and my brother, that are still there to really go back to. I haven’t spent a lot of time there and it was cool to try to channel that for a song concept. We write so many songs in country music about being proud of where we come from, as if we still live there, when some of us love our hometowns, but don’t live there. So this is the truth of the dynamic between me and where I came from.”
“’73 Beetle,” a solo write from Hubbard, was inspired by a 1973 Volkswagen Beetle that Hubbard and his father had worked on when Hubbard was a teenager. Hubbard says writing the song was “a nostalgic, therapeutic experience,” but hadn’t planned on releasing it, until he realized “’73 Beetle” served as a complement to “Miss My Daddy,” a song he’d written about his late father that appeared on his previous album.
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“This lets fans more under the hood on that relationship and the stories and memories that I have with him through that car. It’s from a vulnerable and real place and it’s great to be able to go there as a solo artist and channel that a bit,” he says.
Hubbard still has that ’73 Beetle, with plans to finish restoring it someday.
“It’s in the shop and still needs to be completed. It’s a keepsake and reminds me of my dad. We took the ’73 Beetle and completely rebuilt it, every aspect of it, so it’s super custom. We just wanted to build something kind of crazy. We went to a lot of car shows back in the day — the VW car shows, specifically — and we wanted to build something that had never been done. That’s hopefully what this car will be when it’s finished.”
He collaborated with The Cadillac Three member and songwriter Jaren Johnston on writing “American Mellencamp,” one of a few songs that Hubbard wrote at Ryan Tedder’s writing space in Los Angeles.
“This has Jaren’s fingerprints all over it. You can almost hear Jaren singing on it, for sure. I’m a big fan of Jaren and The Cadillac Three and he’s an amazing writer. We wrote this thinking about the live show and wanting something that rocks, was fun and checked all those boxes. When I’m out in L.A. working, I usually hit Ryan up and he has a house fully dedicated to writing and studio space, so I’ll usually borrow his pool house, which is a small writing place and just have time to be creative and get inspired.”
For the new album, the Borman Entertainment-managed Hubbard reunited with co-producer Jordan Schmidt, whom he worked with on his previous outing, and again worked with many co-writers from his self-titled album, such as Andy Albert, Chris LaCorte, and Corey Crowder.
Several songs on the new album, including “Wish You Would” and “Vegas,” were written over the past year or so, while Hubbard was on the road over the past year, which included opening shows for Keith Urban (this year, Hubbard has been opening concerts on Kane Brown’s Into the Air tour).
“I don’t really write for projects. I just write all the time and then when it’s time to make an album, I look at what I have and figure out what fits best,” he says, noting that album track “A Lot With a Little” was considered for his self-titled album. “I wrote a lot before my first album came out and I thought about putting this song on that, but at some point I had to call that album a completed project. When I started looking at songs for this album, that was the first one I decided to put on this.”
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Hubbard’s ascent into solo stardom comes at a time when country music is experiencing sweeping popularity among music’s greater scope, with major pop stars like Beyoncé and Post Malone making forays into country music. Hubbard sees one of the key benefits of the influx of pop artists is deeper involvement in Nashville’s songwriting circles.
“I feel like the genre’s in a cool season right now,” he says. “People from pop and everywhere else are wanting to be part of the genre and come to Nashville, which I think is cool. You see some artists coming to Nashville and really diving into the songwriting part of what we do, which I think fundamentally sets us apart. That’s one of my favorite parts of our community.”
Hubbard, of course, has been involved in Nashville’s songwriting and publishing community since the beginning of his career, as a writer not only nearly all of the songs he’s recorded as a solo artist and as part of FGL, but also hits recorded by Jason Aldean (“You Make It Easy”), Little Big Town (“Hell Yeah”), and Cole Swindell (“Hope You Get Lonely Tonight”). Having previously launched the publishing company Tree Vibez during his time as part of FGL, Hubbard has continued championing songwriters via the launch of his own publishing company HAYLO Music, led by general manager Josh Saxe.
“I wanted to create a culture that supports songwriters and that can be a creative space for songwriters to thrive and collaborate,” he says. “I really fell in love with publishing over the past eight years or so, watching Tree Vibez do what it did and grow the way it did. I wanted to build another infrastructure around songwriters.”
While that inclination for collaboration rules the writing rooms, fans won’t find a plethora of vocal collabs filling this new album, as Hubbard further cements his status as a solo artist apart from his work with his former FGL co-hort Kelley. “I’m wishing him the best and am excited for both of us,” he says of his former bandmate. “I’m excited to be where I’m at and doing what I’m doing. I’m feeling a lot of creative energy and I’m having fun with it.”
Strong culminates with its title track, a song he wrote with Matt Dragstrem and Josh Miller, in which Hubbard compares a solid romantic relationship to all manner of things that have demonstrated their heartiness and endurance over the years, from steel-toed work boots to hundred-year-old oak trees and calloused hands shaped by years of work.
“I love what the song stands for,” Hubbard says, who notes the song is a reflection of the strength of his marriage to his wife Hayley, whom he wed in 2015. “But ‘Strong’ is a word that has a lot of depth, a lot of dynamic. It means something different for everyone — it can mean spiritually strong, mentally strong, physically strong. We kept referring to a lot of the processes on this album being strong, whether it was a mix or a take or a photo shoot or any of the things that happened along the way. And so when it came time to name the album, ‘Strong’ really kind of fundamentally encompasses it all.”
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The annual CMT Music Awards have become a special place for Kelsea Ballerini and boyfriend of more than a year Outer Banks star Chase Stokes. Just days after hosting the show again, the “I Quit Drinking” star told E! News that their first big public outing was the 2023 edition of the CMTs, “so it kind of felt like a little full circle and we’ve gotten to live a lot of life together in that year.”
Most importantly, though, Ballerini, 30, was asked to pinpoint the moment she knew Stokes, 31, was “the one” for her. “We’re so happy and you know we both have big lives and we’re both trying to weave through it together and give each other our own space to thrive and grow,” she said and, when pressed for more detail, added, “straight out the Bronco.”
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The latter was a reference to their first date in Jan. 2023 in L.A., the day after she’d flow out to perform at a party. “I had just gotten done playing and he was like, ‘I”m the valet,’” she said on the Call Her Daddy podcast in November. Worried their phone chemistry might not manifest in person, Ballerini said the moment Stokes got out of his truck she was hooked. “He hopped out of his Bronco, and he did not say a word to me,” she said. “And he grabbed my face and he kissed me and he pulled my face away and he said, ‘Thank God you’re real.’”
Ballerini hosted the CMT Music Awards for the fourth time on Sunday night and in the E! interview she said her “final” time as MC was fun and loose. “I felt comfortable. It was the most present I felt. I had fun. I riffed a little bit,” she said of her calm demeanor at the show that was dominated by Jelly Roll’s three wins and the “Need a Favor” singer’s first awards show performance.
Ballerini and Stokes went public with their romance in Feb. 2023 and since then they’ve walked a number of red carpets together and frequently chronicled their love affair on their socials. The singer gushed about the joy of having Stokes on hand to support her on Sunday, noting that he caught a flight before the show was over to jet back to work the next day. “He shows up,” she said.
She also gave a glimpse into the couple’s private life, which she said often consists of hanging out at home in Nashville or Charleston and playing Yahtzee and hanging around with their dogs. Reminded that she filmed their first date together, Ballerini was asked to give some advice to other women for their first dates. “Honestly? Go in knowing you got you,” she said. “If it works, it’s meant to and if it doesn’t you’ve still got you. And I think that’s the most important thing.”
In the opening pages of her new memoir, My Black Country, which was released April 9 through Atria/Black Privilege Publishing via Simon & Schuster, hit country music songwriter, author, activist and scholar Alice Randall details the experience of being at The Bomb Shelter recording studio in Nashville last year. She was hearing new life being poured into one of her songs, as a Black female artist, Adia Victoria, sang the lyrics “He was Black as the sky on a moonless night,” from Randall’s cowboy ode “Went for a Ride,” a Radney Foster co-write that had been included on Foster’s 1992 album.
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“It makes me feel like crying right now to even reflect on it,” Randall tells Billboard. “I fight for all the Black cowboys who have been erased, all the country and western songs through the years that did not tell those stories. When I wrote songs like ‘Went For a Ride,’ a lot of people did not realize they were Black cowboys I was writing about… but 20 or 30% of all cowboys were Black and brown in the 19th and 20th centuries, so it’s one of the ways that African-Americans have contributed so much to the legacy of country music, is through cowboy songs.
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“The fact that some of [those songs] had their origins with Black cowboys and Black cowboy camps has gotten erased — that’s another way that we don’t understand the African-American presence in country music,” she continues. “So you get this moment with Lil Nas X [in “Old Town Road”] and he’s in jeans and cowboy clothing and people are questioning, saying, ‘Why is he wearing our culture as a costume?’ and not knowing that actually cowboy culture is white, Black, brown and indigenous, as is the culture of country music — that’s the great untold story of country music.”
Randall is one of the first Black women to write a No. 1 country hit, when she and Matraca Berg co-wrote “XXXs and OOOs (An American Girl),” which became a No. 1 Billboard Hot Country Songs hit for Trisha Yearwood in 1994. (Donna Summer previously co-wrote Dolly Parton’s Billboard Hot Country Songs chart-topper “Starting Over Again” in 1980). Randall is also a writer on the top 10 Hot Country Songs hit “Girls Ride Horses, Too” by Judy Rodman, and Moe Bandy’s top 40 Hot Country Songs hit “Many Mansions.”
For decades, Randall crafted country songs that offered Black narratives and perspectives, yet were recorded only by white artists. On her book’s accompanying album, My Black Country – The Songs of Alice Randall, out April 12 via the late John Prine’s Oh Boy Records, Randall welcomes a dozen Black women artists to perform those songs, and in doing so, reclaim the Black narratives and perspectives inherent in each of them.
In addition to Victoria’s “Went For a Ride,” Allison Russell sings “Many Mansions” and Rhiannon Giddens offers “The Ballad of Sally Anne,” while Rissi Palmer performs “Who’s Minding the Garden” and Randall’s daughter Caroline Randall Williams performs “XXXs and OOOs,” transforming it into an empowering, spoken-word performance. Randall says it was Russell who pointed her to Ebonie Smith, known for her work on Hamilton and Sturgill Simpson’s Grammy-winning A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, as the producer on the project.
“What is wild and wonderful to me about this album, is that so many brilliant women with busy careers of their own trying to make a living, taking bands on the road — Allison Russell, Rhiannon Giddens, Sistastrings, Adia Victoria, Leyla McCalla, my own daughter, Caroline Randall Williams — these women came riding to the rescue of my legacy,” Randall tells Billboard. “Re-recording these songs gave me a way to fall in love with them, again and giving a 21st century audience an opportunity to fall in love with them for the first time. And it was Ebonie Smith, and [Oh Boy Records’] Fiona Prine, all of these women putting their arms around me and creating a new and safe space for me to be creative. They have nothing to gain from that really, economically.”
Randall grew up in Detroit, where she was a witness to the rise of Motown and spent time with artists including Stevie Wonder. After her parents divorced, she moved with her mother to Washington, D.C. Randall grew up in a family that loved listening to country music, but it was while studying English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University (Randall also has an honorary doctorate from Fisk University) that she said she realized that Bobby Bare’s 1976 song “Dropkick Me Jesus (Through the Goalposts of Life)” “was really a metaphysical conceit.”
“I’ve been intrigued by the language play in country music,” she says, “but I was also intrigued by the idea that country music was a hidden treasure trove of Black genius and creativity that wasn’t acknowledged, and that the banjo was an instrument with African origins, and that there were all these Black people that had participated in the creation of country music that had gone unacknowledged.”
Randall began making trips to Nashville, playing her songs for primarily white, male music publishing executives. In her book, she recalls returning to Washington, D.C., only to receive a harsh rejection letter. Undeterred, she writes in My Black Country, “That was the day I decided to move to Nashville.”
She relocated to Nashville in 1983 and began attending songwriters rounds, as well as dissecting and analyzing the songs that were making an impact on the Billboard charts. She found an early champion in Bob Doyle, who was then a songwriter liaison at ASCAP. Doyle’s Bob Doyle & Associates is the longtime management for Garth Brooks. Another of her early mentors in Nashville was singer-songwriter Steve Earle, whom she met through Doyle.
“One of the things I learned from Steve wasn’t something he told me, but something he showed me,” Randall says. “He wrote about the politics of his time. He wrote about generational trauma and wrote about what troubled him in the world. Watching his example, I felt emboldened to do the same thing.”
She earned her first top 10 hit in 1987 with the Judy Rodman-recorded “Girls Ride Horses, Too,” which she wrote with Mark D. Sanders. She also launched the publishing company Midsummer Music (which she later sold), with the aim of aiding and developing a community of storytellers.
“We have a couple of Garth cuts through Mark Sanders and we have a lot of my cuts. I’m proud that with ‘Girls Ride Horses,’ the song was pitched to a woman’s label, MTM Records [a subsidiary of the production company owned by actress Mary Tyler Moore]. Not only did Mary Tyler Moore have that label, it was putting out material that was more feminist. Now I love that the new version of ‘Small Towns,’ by Leyla McCalla, puts Black women in the equation.”
In addition to her hit songs, a few of Randall’s career high points have included writing the treatment for Reba McEntire’s Is There Life Out There? music video, which won an ACM Award and features a cameo from Randall. She wrote and produced the pilot for the primetime drama XXX’s and OOO’s, which aired on CBS. Randall, who is on faculty at Vanderbilt University, has also written novels, including The Wind Done Gone and Ada’s Rules.
Randall’s new book is also unflinching when touching on some of the more difficult industry situations she encountered. In one part, she details how following the success with “XXXs and OOOs,” a music publishing executive pressured her into signing a contract, before she had time to let her lawyers look at the paperwork. Randall writes in the book that she ended up signing away much of her writer’s share of the profit on the song.
“It’s a tough business. Over time, I consider that to be my graduate school — that I learned to read contracts carefully and not to sign things without reading them,” Randall says.
But she also points out other experiences that have been favorable: “Working with people like Bob Doyle, that’s been 40 years of honest dealings. Bob Doyle was one of the people who encouraged me to write books. He said, ‘Your songs need footnotes. You should start writing novels.’ And I did. My experience in music business is that though there was one catastrophic loss for me, but without that, I’m not sure I would have written [her novel] The Wind Done Gone, because I was so heartbroken. I left the music business at the height of my success, but I went on to write novels, and I’ve come back to the music business with this amazing new album.”
Though My Black Country is Randall’s memoir, she refrains from focusing solely on her own story and her own songs; instead, she deftly weaves her own journey through the book, while also restitching the threads of country music’s Black roots and history and tying it to country music’s current moment. She highlights the stories of Black country artists — both musical forebears and contemporaries — such as the collective of artists she calls “The First Family of Black Country,” including Eslie “Lesley” Riddle (who directly influenced the songs and musicianship of The Carter Family), Grand Ole Opry star DeFord Bailey, pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong (who along with Louis Armstrong played on Jimmie Rodgers’ “Blue Yodel #9”), music luminaries Ray Charles and Charley Pride, and actor/musician Herb Jeffries, who in the 1930s starred in a series of Black Westerns such as The Bronze Buckaroo.
“Those creatives created all the strains that were existing in country when I arrived in 1983, as I was engaging it and I wanted to continue forward,” Randall says, adding, “I didn’t get to hear from DeFord’s own words. I did eventually find interviews of what he had experienced, of what Lil Hardin experienced in Nashville, and what Linda Martell experienced, in her own words. I wanted to leave that record for people coming now and coming after me, hearing in their own words how African-American creatives had experienced their life in country music. At the same time, I’m always interested in stories other than my own story.”
From there, the book chronicles a lineage of Black country artists, including the Pointer Sisters and Linda Martell, to many of the artists who contribute to the My Black Country album, including Sunny War, Miko Marks, Valerie June and Rissi Palmer.
Randall’s My Black Country book and accompanying album arrive at a time when history is being made on the Billboard country charts, as Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter sits at the pinnacle of the Top Country Albums chart, marking the first time a Black woman has earned a No. 1 country album since the chart’s inception.
“Beyonce is the only artist known to be a Black female artist to achieve that height, and she will not be the last,” Randall says. “Once something has been done and shown that it can be done, it becomes much more likely that it will be done again and again.”
As Cowboy Carter sits atop the Billboard 200 and Billboard Country Albums chart, Beyonce’s song “Texas Hold ‘Em” has reigned atop the Hot Country Songs chart for eight weeks.
Speaking with Billboard soon after the song peaked on that chart, Randall said, “I love that it’s not a one-week thing; it’s multiple weeks, and I’m so excited to see that. That’s one thing I said about ‘XXXs and OOOs,’ it was two weeks at the top of the charts. That second week is always so much sweeter, because the first week is a lot of business and everyone getting it there, most of the time. The conventional wisdom when I was coming up in the business [was that] the second week is about your real audience. That’s America talking.”
Parallel to Randall’s mission of uplifting the truths of generations of Black artists, Cowboy Carter has led to consumption gains for not only Black male artists including Shaboozey (who is featured on “Spaghettii” alongside Martell, and “Sweet Honey Buckin’”) and Willie Jones (“Just For Fun”), but Black female trailblazer Linda Martell and rising Black female artists Brittney Spencer, Reyna Roberts, Tanner Adell and Tiera Kennedy, who are all featured on the update of The Beatles classic “Blackbird” (stylized “Blackbiird” on Cowboy Carter).
In conversation, Randall reflects on the 2003 Vince Gill song, “Young Man’s Town,” with its lyric, “Even though you build it sometimes you got to sit back and watch ’em burn it to the ground/ Even though you’ve built it/ It’s a young man’s town.”
“I don’t think that’s true in the same way anymore,” Randall says. “I think in some ways Nashville, in this moment, is becoming a wild woman’s town.”
Grace Kelley, the 27-year-old daughter of country star Wynonna Judd, was arrested in Alabama after she allegedly exposed herself at a busy intersection. Kelley, whom Judd shares with ex-husband Arch Kelley III, was taken into custody on Friday afternoon (April 5) after she allegedly “exposed her breasts and lower body” at the intersection between Interstate […]
Ryan Gosling has been a star for more than three decades. And, judging by the way he absolutely crushed it during the mega song-and-dance performance of his spotlight Barbie song “I’m Just Ken” at the Oscars earlier this year you’d think the 43-year-old triple-threat lives in a zone where nerves are never an issue.
But in the first promo for his third stint as host of Saturday Night Live this weekend (April 13), Gosling is as jangled as a 12-year-old asking his first crush out to the movies. It’s all a put-on, of course. But in the endearing video, Gosling practices how he’s going to introduce himself to the night’s musical guest, country singer Chris Stapleton, and he just can’t seem to get it right.
Wearing a Stapleton T-shirt, Gosling works up his nerve to knock on the singer’s dressing room door as he rehearses his best meet cool lines for the “Tennessee Whiskey” singer. “Mr. Stapleton, big fan, love your music,” Gosling says as he grips a head shot of Stapleton and a black marker. “Nah, it’s stupid.”
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Trying out a more casual approach, Gosling whips his phone out of his back pocket and gets in selfie position as he says, “Yo Chris! One for the ‘gram?” That one also fell flat, so Gosling opts for a more formal, Shakespearean take, intoning, “Master Stapleton, ’tis I, Sir Gosling. That’s cool,” he says.
But when Gosling finally works up the confidence to open the door, he walks into a darkened room to find Stapleton’s perfectly lit, signature straw cowboy hat sitting majestically on a mannequin head. The image is so overwhelming that Gosling drops his marker and photo in awe as he struts toward the hat, thinks better of it, then plops it on his head contentedly as Stapleton’s “White Horse” blasts out.
Gosling will hit screens on Friday (April 12) in the action comedy The Fall Guy, in which he stars as aging choreographer Colt Seavers in the film loosely based on the 1980s TV series about stunt performers that starred Lee Majors. The actor made a surprise appearance on SNL last weekend during Kristen Wiig’s fifth hosting turn, presenting the beloved former SNL star with her five-timers hosting jacket.
Check out Gosling’s promo below.
Stars, they’re just like us! As the world continues its love affair with Beyoncé‘s record-breaking Cowboy Carter album, Emmy winner Sarah Paulson is still stuck on the “II Most Wanted,” the LP’s rousing Miley Cyrus-assisted ballad.
“Can’t stop listening to this,” Paulson wrote in an Instagram Story Tuesday (April 9) featuring a screenshot of her playing “II Most Wanted” on Apple Music and tagging both Beyoncé’s and Cyrus’ Instagram accounts. “But does anyone know why it makes me cry?”
The new track is clearly in Paulson’s rotation as she makes her way through a characteristically busy year on screen and on the stage. As she completes her starring turn in the 2023-24 run of Appropriate on Broadway, Paulson also guest starred on Donald Glover‘s Mr. & Mrs. Smith re-imagining for Prime Video.
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A heartfelt ode to ride-or-die friendships, “II Most Wanted” is the 16th track on Cowboy Carter, marking the first collaboration between the two powerhouse vocalists. On the Billboard Hot 100 (chart dated April 13), “II Most Wanted” launched at No. 6, becoming the second of three top 10 hits from Cowboy Carter and the first all-female collaboration to reach the the Hot 100’s top 10 in 2024. In the same week, Cowboy Carter became Beyoncé’s record-extending eight consecutive studio album to debut atop the Billboard 200, with the biggest first-week units total of the year. All 23 of its chart-eligible tracks also made the Hot 100.
On Cowboy Carter release day, Cyrus celebrated the collaboration with a sweet Instagram message, writing, “I’ve loved Beyonce since long before I had the opportunity to meet & work with her. My admiration runs so much deeper now that I’ve created along side of her. Thank you Beyoncé. You’re everything & more. Love you. To everyone who spent time making this song so special thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
At the 2024 CMT Awards, Brandi Cyrus, Miley’s older sister, revealed that she found out about “II Most Wanted” right before the rest of the world. “Usually, I know about [Miley’s] projects a year or so in advance,” she said. “I found out like two months before, I was like, ‘Wait, say what? Why didn’t you tell me this at the Grammys, when we sat right next to [Beyoncé]?’ She kept it under wraps!”
Cyrus is one of a plethora of guest stars on Cowboy Carter — many of whom are now Hot 100 first-timers — including Tanner Adell, Willie Jones, Tiera Kennedy, Post Malone, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Reyna Roberts, Brittney Spencer and Shaboozey.
Click here to see Sarah Paulson’s Instagram story.
The newest Carly Pearce music — “My Place,” a track released April 5 to tease a forthcoming album — is an unsettling experience.
The melody is slow and languid, filled with lengthy notes that highlight her smoky vocal tone. But the defining instrument is a relentless resonator guitar. Ilya Toshinskiy plays a dark parade of 16th notes, a foreboding part that casts a gloomy melancholy over the whole proceeding. It appropriately backs a post-breakup piece in which a woman sifts through the emotional clouds that still linger and pricks at the difficult sense of incompletion that dogs her as she obsesses, momentarily anyway, about an ex.
“It’s hard to pick favorites on records,” Pearce says, “but I do think that this is my favorite.”
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That evaluation is easy to understand. The song is personal, its sound is unique, and its story has plenty of depth while still drawing from familiar country precedents. It does what the most successful commercial country songs do, ferreting out its own space in the genre while sounding like it fits instantly within a segment of the existing format.
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“In country music,” co-writer Jordan Reynolds says (“Speechless,” “10,000 Hours”), “you can use a similar feeling and a similar device over and over again, because it’s just true.”
Reynolds hosted the writing session for “My Place” at his place, a studio in East Nashville, on Feb. 21, 2023. Pearce was scheduled to play the Grand Ole Opry that night, and the appointment started late, putting a certain amount of pressure on the writing trio, which included Concord Music Publishing signee Lauren Hungate. Fortunately, Hungate was ready for any worst-case scenario.
“I’m like a song doomsday prepper — I prep sometimes a month before the session,” she says. “I had prepped a bunch of ideas for her and sent them to my publisher, and my publisher picked ‘My Place.’ She was like, ‘I think this is your best one for it.’ And so that was the one I led with when I went in there. But I was so nervous that I had, like, five other ideas just in case.”
Hungate’s “My Place” idea emanated from her husband, who she characterizes as “super-super country.” She recalls a conversation when he took issue with something — “You know, baby, that ain’t your place” — and she thought “It ain’t my place” had song potential if it used a bit of wordplay.
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Pearce, meanwhile, arrived at the appointment having recently dreamed that she had split with the man she was dating. As they talked about the breakup in the dream, Hungate presented her “My Place” idea, which included the hook and half the lyric for the first verse. Reynolds began playing a haunting passage, and Pearce came up with a syncopated verse melody.
Lyrically, that stanza walked a line between Rhett Akins’ “That Ain’t My Truck” and Toby Keith’s “Who’s That Man,” noting a series of items on the outside of her ex’s house with a “that ain’t my…” lead-in, while recognizing that someone else has taken her place. The melody took a turn at the chorus with the phrases landing more on the beat.
“It ain’t my place/ To question if there’s someone filling my space,” it went, with that second line leading the listener to think of the social media site Myspace, which is an “ex” in its own way. “Trust me,” Pearce says, “we were like, ‘Well, we just got to say it. We got to do it.’ ”
In verse two, the singer’s drive-by goes inside — first imagining a few items inside the house, then projecting into her ex’s mind.
“You’re questioning, you’re battling these insecurities of all the ‘what ifs’ and the realization that this person has moved on,” Pearce says. “Does he ever think of you? And what does she look like? And what do they talk about? It’s just kind of that laundry list of all these really vulnerable insecurities that go along with somebody moving on.”
After the second chorus, they slipped in a bridge, pondering whether the new woman is enough to erase the singer entirely from the guy’s memory. “I think we wanted one more angle to twist it [and] dig the knife in just a little bit deeper,” Hungate says. “That’s another question that you don’t get to answer, just another painful thing.”
It speaks to the deepest pain of rejection. Making a difference is one of the strongest motivations most people experience. To disappear from his mind is to make zero impact. “You don’t want to be forgotten,” Pearce says. “You do want to matter.”
Reynolds built a significant part of the demo before the two women left, and he came up with 16th notes on a resonator guitar as a means of creating some movement in the song. But the effect also created a contrast with the legato melody. “You’re still thinking about the voice, but it keeps the verse really interesting,” Reynolds says. “There’s space in it, but it’s like there’s two voices kind of talking to each other.”
When Pearce met with co-producers Shane McAnally (Old Dominion, Kacey Musgraves) and Josh Osborne (Midland) for preproduction, she insisted on framing the final recording around the arrangement that Reynolds had developed.
“It reminded me of Lee Ann Womack-y type of stuff, and I was like, ‘Nobody ruin this, because this is such an interesting time signature and interesting thing that we’ve got going on,’ ” Pearce remembers. “I didn’t want it to get too big. I wanted it to live in the world that it lives in.”
Dobro player Josh Matheny and fiddler Jenee Fleenor shaded the track primarily with long notes, many suspended at the end of phrases without resolution. Other instruments pop out with a note here or there, lending more color to the sound without creating further weight. Osborne provided harmony during overdubs, enhancing the bite and lonesomeness in the lyrics.
“He covered such a special part,” Pearce says. “It felt almost like what Don Henley did for Trisha Yearwood on ‘Walkaway Joe.’ It’s not overcomplicated.”
Pearce’s collaboration with Chris Stapleton, “We Don’t Fight Anymore,” remains the radio-focused single and is ranked at No. 17 on the Country Airplay chart. But “My place” provides an extra hint at the quality of her next Big Machine album, hummingbird, due June 14. And after seeing the reaction from the handful of times she has played it live, “My Place” is considered a potential future single as well.
“I think it has that kind of universal appeal — we’ve all been there,” Pearce says of “My Place.” “As a songwriter, there’s nothing I could possibly hope for more than to give people a song and watch them react so positively. This is such a special song, and I am just so excited to have it out and see where it goes.”
Maren Morris visited The Late Show on Tuesday night (April 9) to promote her new children’s book and sit on the couch to chat with host Stephen Colbert for the first time after several earlier performances on the show. But the “Circles Around This Town” singer ended up singing anyway after she told Colbert about one of the weirdest gigs she had as a child star.
Considering the 34-year-old has been performing since she was 10, Morris said she has definitely had a “few weirdo ones,” including a number of chili cook-off shows and a weekly Saturday gig during high school singing the National Anthem at amateur wrestling bouts for $100 a shot. “That takes about 90 seconds, so the rest of the night my friends in high school would watch and cheer on these wrestlers,” she said.
“I had the most fun and it was a fun way to make money and be patriotic,” she added. After Morris explained that she did the Anthem a cappella, Colbert asked if they could perform an impromptu duet on the notoriously hard-to-sing “Star-Spangled Banner” sometime. Morris agreed to the request, even as Colbert admitted he only knows the bassline of the song, but cannot sing the melody.
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“I think you and I could rock it,” he assured her. Morris was up to the challenge, offering Colbert the sage advice that you need to “start low” or else your voice will run out of road by the sky-high ending. Morris then began singing, with Colbert adding the low notes as they sang directly to each other, with the host leaning into the rumbly bass part as the singer’s voice jumped up during the “rockets’ red glare” portion and Colbert holding a killer from-the-bottom note that made her crack up.
With some gentle acoustic guitar accompaniment from the house band, the pair made it to the end impressively as Morris asked in wonder, “Where did that come from?” Colbert loved it so much he proposed that they do it again at an amateur wrestling match some day, suggesting they could split the $100 fee.
South Carolina-bred Colbert also couldn’t resist talking Southern cuisine with Texas-born Morris, asking the singer if she misses the tastes and smells of home after living in Nashville for 11 years. “That’s South, but they have not figured out Tex-Mex food,” Morris lamented about her adopted home town, saying Music City has great food and culture, but not a hint of her favorite Lone Star flavors.
Morris joked that opening a Tex-Mex joint in Nashville could be next move, though her dream has always been to have her own bar in town called “My Church,” which would, of course, be housed in an old church. The singer also stuck around to promote her new children’s book, Addie Ant Goes on an Adventure, which she co-wrote wit her best friend, Karina Argow.
Watch Morris on The Late Show below.
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Morgan Wallen‘s ex-fiancée KT Smith is speaking out following reports that the country superstar launched a chair off of a Nashville bar after finding out that she married Luke Scornavacco just days after getting engaged. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news “Although it may seem like it […]