genre country
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Opry Entertainment Group (OEG) has named Tim Jorgensen as vp of operations on its Austin team. In the new role, Jorgensen will lead OEG’s Block 21 businesses in the city, including ACL Live, 3TEN and W Austin. In addition to leading strategic direction for the Block 21 complex, he will oversee day-to-day operations at ACL […]
Kendrick Lamar and Drake go head-to-head for No. 1 on the Hot 100. Tetris Kelly:This is the Billboard Hot 100 top 10 for the week dated April 19. “Beautiful Things” is at 10. Morgan Wallen is still at nine. “Lose Control” slips to eight. Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” joins the top 10. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” […]
Tale as old as time, true as it can be. Like countless parents every spring, Jelly Roll got emotional as he sent his daughter, Bailee Ann, off to her very first prom, with the teenager looking gorgeous in a yellow dress mirroring Disney’s Princess Belle from Beauty and the Beast.
In a sweet clip set to Cody Johnson’s nostalgia-ridden track “Dirt Cheap” that Bailee posted to TikTok over the weekend, the “Son of a Sinner” singer looks choked up as he walks toward the camera with a bouquet of roses. It then cuts to Jelly and his firstborn standing side by side as the musician flashes a huge smile before spinning Bailee around.
“my built in best friend,” Bailee wrote of her dad in the caption.
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Jelly’s wife, podcaster Bunnie XO, also shared footage from the day, starting with Bailee’s getting-ready process. “You’re going to look like a little princess tonight!” Bunnie gushes as her stepdaughter — over whom she shares full custody with the country star — gets her hair done. “It’s your first prom, I’m so excited, oh my god.”
“I call her the Prom Pimp,” Jelly jokes right after. “That’s what I’m calling her: the Prom Pimp.”
Later, as Bailee and her friends take photos in their fancy outfits, Bunnie films her famous husband hugging a family friend with tears in his eyes. “Are you motherf–kers crying? You’re supposed to be the men of the family!” the Dumb Blonde host jokes as Jelly laughs. “What is happening?”
Bailee’s prom comes just a couple of weeks ahead of Jelly’s April 29 kickoff show in Salt Lake City with Post Malone on the Big Ass Stadium Tour. The trek follows the October release of the “Need a Favor” artist’s album, Beautifully Broken, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
But even with everything going on career-wise, Jelly — who is also Dad to a son named Noah — and Bunnie are currently in the process of trying to expand their family through IVF. The latter has been open about her journey with the treatments in recent months, telling listeners on a March podcast episode, “It’s very lonely … It’s just you and these hormones and the waiting and the egg retrieval. And like, you’re the only person who can go through that, you know? So it’s a lot to bear.”
Jelly has also been open about how far he’s come as a parent to Bailee, telling Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett on the trio’s Smartless podcast in March that he had to fight for his chance to have a relationship with the now-teenager as he was incarcerated on drug charges at the time of her birth. “Her mother, at the time … rightfully so [because I was] a f–king criminal, wouldn’t let me see her,” the “Save Me” musician recalled.
“So I had to go to court,” he added at the time. “I had to get supervised visits through the courtroom … I just had to keep going to the court every six months and going, ‘Look, I’m continuing to prove I’m changing.’ Music, being famous, wasn’t even a thought then. I just wanted to be a good dad.”
Watch Jelly and Bunnie see Bailee off to her first prom below.
Country music songwriter Larry Bastian, known for penning songs including Garth Brooks’ “Unanswered Prayers” and “Rodeo,” died on Sunday (April 6) at age 90, Billboard has confirmed. Bastian’s passing was previously reported by the Porterville Recorder.
Bastian, a longtime writer for Major Bob Music, was born Sept. 1, 1934, in Porterville, Calif. He was born into a family who farmed in California’s San Joaquin Valley. After graduating from Porterville High School in 1952, he went on to work as a biologist for 15 years at the Department of Agriculture in Kern and Tulare counties. He also harbored a love for music and songwriting.
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He launched his songwriting career in the 1970s, when he connected with Bonnie Owens and other musicians forging the Bakersfield Sound. He soon became friends and cowriters with Jim Shaw, and together they wrote a song called “This Ain’t Tennessee and He Ain’t You,” that was recorded by Janie Fricke and released in 1980 (Eddy Arnold and Tom Jones would later also record the song).
He has written songs recorded by Merle Haggard and David Frizzell (“Lefty”), Tammy Wynette (“Back to the Wall”), Conway Twitty (“Saturday Night Special”), Tracy Byrd (“Why”) Sammy Kershaw (“If You’re Gonna Walk, I’m Gonna Crawl,” “Yard Sale”), Reba McEntire (“The Girl Who Has Everything”), Rhett Akins (“Somebody Knew”), Moe Bandy (“Nobody Gets Off in This Town”), George Jones (“Forever’s Here to Stay”) and Craig Morgan (“Look at Us”).
Some of his biggest country chart successes came in the 1990s as a writer on Brooks’ “Unanswered Prayers” and “Rodeo.” Bastian solo wrote the latter, which, according to Garth Brooks: The Anthology Part 1, was originally titled “Miss Rodeo” and written for a female artist.
“This was a song I had written probably six or seven years before I met Garth … it was about a gal lamenting the fact that her guy was in love with the rodeo rather than her,” Bastian wrote in the Brooks anthology. “Finally, Garth said to me, ‘I’m going to record it.’ I said, ‘You can’t record it. It’s a girl’s song.’ He said, ‘Just watch me.’” The song became a top five Billboard Country Airplay hit in 1991.
Garth Brooks: The Anthology Part 1 also notes Bastian provided a key lyrical hook for “Unanswered Prayers” (co-written by Brooks and Pat Alger), which became a two-week Country Airplay chart No. 1 in 1991. Beyond those hits, Bastian also wrote and/or cowrote other songs recorded by Brooks, including “I’ve Got a Good Thing Going,” “The Old Man’s Back in Town,” “Cowboy Bill,” “Nobody Gets Off in This Town” and “Man Against the Machine.”
“That type of drive, first off you have to know that you can do it,” Bastian said during an interview on The Paul Leslie Hour in 2020. “There was no doubt in my mind that I could write a song. I think you have to be that driven to succeed, and then there’s a lot of luck. They have a saying, ‘You can’t get out of the way of a hit song,’ and that’s so right.”
A celebration of life is pending.
“I’m terrified,” says Post Malone while kicking back in an Indio, Calif., villa. He’s at an intimate but rowdy party hosted by Poppi, the fast-growing prebiotic soda he was an early investor in, and is speaking about his upcoming Coachella 2025 headlining gig that will close out both weekends of the festival on Sunday night April 13 and 20).
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“They want me to do something crazy, and I’m terrified to do it,” he teases, not saying much more. Even so, Posty says he gets nervous before every show. Except for, maybe, the first time he played Coachella in 2018 at the Sahara tent. “I wasn’t as nervous back then… I’m just old now. Everything hurts.”
Getting older is, in part, why Post was so eager to support Poppi from the jump. “I remember kicking soda was a hard thing,” he says, speaking of a few years back when he decided to swap in some healthier day-to-day choices. He says his manager, Austin Rosen, told him about the then-new option, which Post tried and declared, “This is f—ing banging.”
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Other than stopping by to hang and support Poppi (which in March celebrated a nearly $2 billion acquisition by Pepsi Co), Post has stayed tucked away for most of Coachella weekend one. And the day after his set, he reveals, he’s right back to work cutting vocals for his upcoming album.
And yes, he’s cooking up another country set.
While speaking about how kind the Nashville community has been since he had started working on his chart-topping 2024 album, F-1 Trillion, he says that every time he gets together with his crew out there — which includes buddies and fellow artists like Ernest, Hardy, Thomas Rhett and many more — “we just have fun. We just sit and f—ing talk and make songs. And so I’m pretty excited for the new record already.”
Posty says he’s already done two trips to Nashville for the project and has “made probably 35 songs; it’s just a matter of which one’s rock, and which one’s sock,” he says. (As for whether or not he’ll perform any new music during his headlining set, he says with a laugh: “Absolutely not.”)
Malone is currently working with scratch vocals, but shares that the band has already cut a bunch of songs “and they’re f—ing killing it… I sit there and listen to these songs, and I usually hate listening to my music, but listening to the band play, I get so excited.”
That excitement Post feels for the country music genre is evident — plus it works. F-1 Trillion spawned the Hot 100 No. 1 hit “I Had Some Help,” featuring Morgan Wallen, while a total of 18 songs off the album charted on the tally. F-1 also debuted atop the Top Country Albums chart. And in May, Post will compete for album of the year at the Academy of Country Music Awards.
While country music has been the vehicle to help launch Post into this stratosphere of success, his hits-filled catalog that spans hip-hop, pop and even rock will be on full display during his headlining set, he assures.
“You put a twist on the instrumentation and the musicianship of it,” he says of crafting a cohesive show. “We have Lillie [Mae] playing the fiddle and Cheese [Chandler Walters] playing the steel [guitar] and incorporating that into the old songs and then transitioning into the new s—… that’s always been the thing about me, is it’s all just f—ing music. And I think that’s a really neat thing that we actually got booked to play Coachella; I think it’s special that even if you don’t like country music or if you don’t necessarily like pop or hip-hop music, everybody can come together.”
And thanks to F-1, not only is Post headlining Coachella, but right after will head out on his first stadium tour, the Big Ass World Tour, alongside new pal Jelly Roll. While the correlation between Post’s foray into country music and his global superstardom is clear, he sees his current path as the only one that felt right.
Post has released an album every year since 2022 — “some better than others,” he says softly — starting with Twelve Carat Toothache, then his pop-country-stepping-stone project Austin, and then last year’s F-1.
“[They weren’t] really, I don’t want to say not well received, but, you know, it was something that I had to do,” he says of Toothache and Austin. “We just slowed everything down and that’s kind of what I was going through at that point. And [F-1] was just f—ing bitching. It was so fun to make. And I said in an interview a while ago, ‘When I’m 30 years old, I’m gonna make a country record.’ And I made it at 29, so I wasn’t too far off. But you know, it just happened naturally. I was like, ‘F— it, let’s go to Nashville. Let’s give it a go.’ I think finally bringing the fun back into what I was doing really showed on the record. And I think a lot of folks had fun listening to it. And we’re going to attempt to do it again. I’m excited to keep going.”
So does that mean he will continue his trend of releasing an album a year? “Hopefully,” he says, “we’ll have some music releasing very, very soon.”
Lana Del Rey has some bad news to share with her fans, but she added some good news to ease the blow. The superstar took to Instagram on Friday (April 11) to thank fans for their support and her collaborators for their work on her freshly released single, “Henry, Come On.” The country-tinged ballad is […]
Jason Aldean rings up his milestone 40th top 10 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart as he hoists “Whiskey Drink” three spots to No. 8 on the list dated April 19. The song rose by 8% to 18.6 million audience impressions April 4-10, according to Luminate.
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The single, which Kurt Allison, Jonathan Edwards, Tully Kennedy and John Morgan co-wrote, is from Aldean’s LP Highway Desperado. In November 2023, the set arrived as his 12th top 10 on Top Country Albums.
Aldean has the eighth-most Country Airplay top 10s since the chart launched in 1990. Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw and George Strait are tied for first with 61 each. He also scores simultaneous Country Airplay top 10s for the first time. He’s featured on Morgan’s “Friends Like That,” which pushes 5-4 for a new best (24.3 million, up 10%).
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Aldean’s run of Country Airplay top 10s began in 2005 when “Hicktown” reached No. 10 that October. “Why” followed, becoming his first of 25 No. 1s in May 2006.
Moroney Is A-‘Okay’
Megan Moroney earns her second Country Airplay top 10 as “Am I Okay?” hops 13-10 (16.5 million, up 9%). The Savannah, Ga., native wrote the song with Jessie Jo Dillon and Luke Laird, and Kristian Bush produced it. The single is from Moroney’s same-named LP, which entered Top Country Albums at its No. 3 peak last July, marking her second top 10. Her Lucky hit No. 10 in May 2023.
Moroney notched her first Country Airplay top 10 with her rookie single, “Tennessee Orange” (No. 4, June 2023). She then added two top 20 hits: “Can’t Break Up Now,” with Old Dominion (No. 19, May 2024), and “I’m Not Pretty” (No. 14, July 2024).
Making Themselves at ‘Home’
LOCASH, the duo of Preston Brust and Chris Lucas, tops Country Airplay for a career-high second week with “Hometown Home” (29.9 million, down 1%). The act previously led with “I Know Somebody” for a week in October 2016.
The first track on Jon Pardi’s new album may be called “Boots Off,” but don’t expect the project to simply be a repeat of songs similar to his signature hits “Dirt on My Boots” and “Head Over Boots.”
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Each of his previous four albums reached at least the top 5 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart, with his 2016 album California Sunrise debuting at the listing’s pinnacle. He’s lodged several songs in the upper echelons of the Country Airplay chart, with five No. 1s — such as “Heartache Medication” and “Last Night Lonely.”
On his fifth studio album Honkytonk Hollywood, out on UMG Nashville today (April 11), Pardi continues paying homage to his California roots and penchant for rock-infused, neo-traditional country, but he also crafted an album that showcases both the 39-year-old’s maturity as a person (he’s now a father to two young daughters) — and how, more than a decade into his career, he continues eschewing any creative confines.
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With the new project, the Red Light-managed singer-songwriter leaned into the influences of classic rock artists such as the Eagles, Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac.
“The ‘70s country of the West Coast was Hollywood; when I say rock ‘n’ roll, that’s what I’m thinking about. Sonically, it’s there in the snare drums and the grit of the guitar and the grit of the whole recording itself. Classic rock, it blends so well with traditional country music, ’cause it doesn’t sound too crazy or modern. I feel like this record has good soul to it.”
Key to that sonic shift was Pardi’s choice to switch up producers and work with Jay Joyce, known for his no-boundaries, music-forward approach to making records. Grammy winner Joyce has fashioned enduring albums for Eric Church and Cage the Elephant, with Pardi crediting Church’s Carolina as a factor that drew him to working with Joyce.
“Some people call him a mad scientist. I call him a professor,” Pardi says of Joyce. “He always had an edge, something different about him. He’s a respectful music guy and I’ve been a big fan of his. I felt more than ever this was the time to reach out and he doesn’t work with everybody.”
They holed up at Joyce’s east Nashville church-turned-recording studio for the better part of a month, recording and piecing together the album’s 17 songs. Pardi also welcomed in his touring band to play on the album, placing the band’s tight-knit musicianship at the album’s fore.
“He took me and my band to school and we became even better players,” Pardi says of Joyce. “I remember him telling my guitar player, ‘Why are you f–king playing so much? You played so much on every song.’ It was just funny and we were learning. We had time on our side and that really helped this record be what it is. I’m not saying anything bad about the Nashville way. It’s a machine, it’s fast, it’s great, but it was nice to slow down. We were always in the studio, focusing on music. I wasn’t out bush-hogging or feeding cows.”
Honkytonk Hollywood builds upon and broadens the country-leaning, tough-minded sounds he forged on songs such as “Dirt on My Boots.” That rock influence is threaded through songs such as the slinky groove of “Hey California” and hard-charging “Friday Night Heartbreaker.”
The album isn’t all night-out party anthems. “He Went to Work” pays tribute to a father’s dogged determination to provide for his loved ones. Alongside “Hard Knocks,” it offers a double set of songs that inspired by his family and his father.
“Looking back as a grown man, he had a lot on his plate,” Pardi says. “He had ran a big construction business and just a lot of hustle and bustle. We learned so much. We were always out in the country, either on big construction sites developing land or in agriculture. His side of the family is all farmers. And he could fix anything.”
Meanwhile, “She Drives Away” finds Pardi looking to the future and the kind of days that are ahead of him as a parent to his daughters Presley Fawn and Sierra Grace. Though Pardi wrote eight of the album’s 17 songs, he couldn’t resist recording this song, penned by Seth Ennis, Jordan Minton, Zach Abend and Jimi Bell.
“I wanted to write a Presley song, but that song showed up in the inbox and how are you not going to record that? You hear that song and you’re like, ‘I’m not going to write a better one. That one’s great.’ So I got my dad and daughter song, and I feel like the universal aspect of that song touches so many people. I was like, ‘This is going to be a father-daughter dance song all day… that is the pure emotion of songwriting, and that is why we write songs.”
It’s not lost on Pardi that his new album comes at a time when country music’s impact — both domestically and globally — has been surging, with artists including Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan, Luke Combs and Kane Brown doing headlining large international tours in areas including the U.K. and Australia, while continuing to headline arenas and/or football stadiums stateside.
“It’s not just one artist. There’s a handful. We’ve now entered the level where there is the football [stadium] level [of performers] and multiple artists are doing it,” Pardi says. “It’s always been like one guy— Garth, and Kenny Chesney — now it’s a bunch of people. It’s crazy.”
Though artists such as Jelly Roll and Morgan Wallen have released elongated, 30-something track albums, Pardi says he won’t be following suit anytime soon.
“I mean, I thought [long albums] were going away,” Pardi says, “Then Morgan came out and was like, ‘I’m doing another 37.’ I’m like, ‘D–n it, I thought my 17 was a lot.’ That’s 20 more songs. I don’t think I’d ever go that many. I think 20 is a good amount of songs. I don’t think I would go more than 20.”
Pardi has seen the country music genre’s progressive-to-traditional ebbs and flows, and takes a “rising tide lifts all boats” perspective.
“Traditional country will always come back and save country music when it’s gone too far,” he says. “I compare Zach Top to when Randy Travis came out with songs [in the 1980s] and it’s like just a stone-cold country comeback. I’m always on everybody’s team. Country’s going to be poppy and popular, but you’re going to get all these new artists coming out with more of a rootsy-country song, or [a] traditional song that starts picking up steam.
“But all that pop, hip-hop and all the super-popular songs — that helps everybody, and it’s good for a traditional artist. It sucks sometimes — I mean, I’m on the Pardi train and I’ve been a steam engine since 2012. I’m never going to get a rocket ship, but I’m fine on the train tracks. Still chugging along, but you stay your path and you do what makes you feel good.”
The highs, lows and secrets within the Judd family will be explored in the upcoming Lifetime four-part documentary series The Judd Family: Truth Be Told, which will air on Mother’s Day weekend, May 10-11, at 8 p.m. ET.
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The documentary delves into the nuanced relationship between The Judds matriarch Naomi Judd and her daughters Ashley and Wynonna. According to an announcement regarding the Alexandra Dean-directed and executive-produced documentary, the series seeks to explore “the complex mother-daughter dynamics and intergenerational trauma as seen through the eyes of the Judd family.”
Naomi and Wynonna Judd formed the successful mother-daughter country music duo The Judds, garnering 14 No. 1s on Billboard‘s Hot Country Songs chart in 1980s. Meanwhile, Ashley Judd went on to become a successful actress, known for roles including Double Jeopardy and Heat.
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The trailer for the documentary shows Naomi and Wynonna together in the early days of The Judds’ career. Naomi smiles at Wynonna and says, “You love me?” as Wynonna nods. “Are you ever going to leave me?” Naomi asks, as Wynonna grins and shakes her head no.
“I was so proud of their success,” Ashley Judd later says in the trailer, which also features comments from The Judds’ fellow country star Reba McEntire. From there, the trailer quickly shifts, alluding to family secrets and struggles, with Ashley saying of Naomi at one point, “She had no idea what I went through as a child.”
Later Wynonna says, “It’s a blessing and a curse to be that close to your mother.”
The Judds led headlining tours and notched hits including “Love Can Build a Bridge” and “Why Not Me.” They won five Grammy Awards and nine CMA Awards during their career, before Naomi’s battle with hepatitis C brought the duo’s career to a halt. Wynonna then forged a successful solo career on the strength of songs including “No One Else on Earth” and “Tell Me Why.”
In April 2022, tragedy struck when Naomi died by suicide at age 76, one day prior to The Judds’ induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame. At the time, a statement from Wynonna and Ashley Judd said, “Today we sisters experienced a tragedy. We lost our beautiful mother to the disease of mental illness. We are shattered. We are navigating profound grief and know that as we loved her, she was loved by her public. We are in unknown territory.”
The documentary series is produced by Propagate Content for Lifetime, with Ben Silverman, Howard T. Owens, Isabel San Vargas and Jonathan Schaerf acting as executive producers. Elaine Frontain Bryant and Brad Abramson are executive producers for Lifetime.
Watch the trailer below:
Shaboozey still hasn’t gotten where he’s going. The “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” hitmaker announced an expanded version of his breakthrough album on Friday (April 11), dubbed Where I’ve Been, It’s Where I’m Going: The Complete Edition, which will add six new tracks to the original 12-track LP Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going.
The revamp due out on April 25 via Empire will feature the just-released Myles Smith collaboration “Blink Twice,” as well as “Amen” featuring Jelly Roll, the Sierra Ferrell team-up “Hail Mary” and the fresh tracks “Fire and Gasoline” and “Chrome,” as well as previously released single “Good News.”
Shaboozey’s big year will roll on this weekend when performs on Sunday (April 13) at the Coachella Festival and then returns to Indio, CA on April 26 for night two of this year’s Stagecoach Festival, where he’ll share the stage with Jelly Roll, Sturgill Simpson, Nelly, Ashley McBryde and Koe Wetzel.
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He kicked off the year with “Blink Twice,” following a jam-packed 2024 in which he appeared on Beyoncé‘s three-time Grammy-winning Cowboy Carter LP and also scored the longest-running solo Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single of all time with “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”; the track spent an eye-popping 17 weeks at the top of the tally. Nearly a year into its run, “A Bar Song” continues to tear it up, dropping to No. 4 from No. 3 in the most recent chart frame dated April 12, while “Good News” is hanging out at No. 51 after previously peaking at No. 47.
Check out the full track listing for Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going: Complete Edition below:
1. “Horses & Hellcats”
2. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”
3. “Last Of My Kind” (feat. Paul Cauthen)
4. “Anabelle”
5. “East Of The Massanutten”
6. “Highway”
7. “Let It Burn”
8. “My Fault” (feat. Noah Cyrus)
9. “Vegas”
10. “Drink Don’t Need No Mix” (feat. BigXthaPlug)
11. “Steal Her From Me”
12. “Finally Over”
13. “Amen” (feat. Jelly Roll)
14. “Hail Mary” (feat. Sierra Ferrell)
15. “Fire And Gasoline”
16. “Blink Twice” (feat. Myles Smith)
17. “Good News”
18. “Chrome”