Old Dominion / Happy Endings
A Conversation with Old Dominion’s Matthew Ramsey
Mike Ragogna: Matt, Old Dominion’s new single topped the country singles chart. Your latest album Happy Endings also topped the charts. Why are you muscling out everyone else for those spots? Can’t you share and share alike?
Matthew Ramsey: Ha! Unbelievable right? Those moments don't happen often if ever for most people, so you gotta grab 'em while you can!
Mike R: Seriously though, it must feel good to be enjoying this level of success by only your second album, Happy Endings. Plus you’ve received two CMA nominations, for New Artist and Vocal Group of the Year. How is success spoiling you guys so far?
Matt R: It is most definitely changing our lives. Lately, we've been allowing ourselves to take it all in. We've been "go go go" for so long that its been hard to take a minute to breathe and be proud. No one is going crazy buying all kinds of toys or anything though. The clothes are nicer. The hotels are swanky. We just hired someone to help us eat better and keep us in shape. For the most part we are the same dudes.
Mike R: From the artist’s perspective, can you take us on a tour of the album’s material?
Matt R: Sure. Our goal with this album was to show a little of a wider range as far as our songwriting is concerned. We've grown a lot as a band since the first album, so Happy Endings is a nice snapshot of where we are right now. It starts off with “No Such Thing As A Broken Heart,” which is a great example of who we are now. We have something more to say now, and yet we try to deliver that message in a way that makes you want to dance. The album ends with a live cut of a rock song thats part of our set called “Can't Get You.” As for the middle of the album, there is just a roller coaster of styles and emotions that take place in-between the first and last song.
Mike R: I noticed you co-wrote all but one of the songs, “New York At Night,” on this project. What was the songwriting process like? Where did some of the topics come from?
Matt R: The writing process for us is different with every song. Sometimes they come from our lives, or someone else we know may be going through something that we choose to write about. We've learned to be open to inspiration from anywhere, because it’s everywhere. Ideas can come from conversations, or books, or movies, or paintings...wherever.
Mike R: What's it like working with producer Shane McAnally? What do you think he brings to your recordings that perhaps other producers couldn’t?
Matt R: Shane has been our friend since we were all broke and busting ass trying to make it. We've come up through this business together. He knows the ins and outs of who we are and how to get the best performances out of us. Plus he's such a creative force. He knows to trust his instincts and he knows that we will trust them too.
Mike R: Was anyone you know or loved affected by Hurricanes Harvey or Irma? Have you or do you intend to participate in any relief programs involved in the cleanup or aftermath?
Matt R: We participated in the Hand in Hand telethon that was aired the other night, answering phones and speaking to people who donated. None of us had family that were affected but we've donated and will help in any way we can if asked.
Mike R: Matt, what advice do you have for new artists?
Matt R: Two simple things I can say. The first would be to surround yourself with positive people. Negativity can suck you in and really hurt your progress. The most important thing I can say is to make music that moves you. Don't try and chase what’s on the radio or what you think people want to hear. They want to hear what you have to say. If it excites you, then chances are it will excite other people too. Also, have fun!
Mike R: So it looks like Happy Endings will be having one. What’s next for Old Dominion?
Matt R: Hopefully, we continue to follow our own advice. We are constantly writing and playing and growing as artists and as people as this gets bigger. We are truly grateful for the platform we've been given, so we plan to ride this wave as long as we can.
**********
MORNING JOE 10TH ANNIVERSARY SWEEPSTAKES!
It’s a bit of a habit now, interviewing Joe Scarborough about his latest monthly EP releases, discussing my two favorite topics in the universe—music and politics. Today’s “Joe Post” is a link to contest information MSNBC and his gang are throwing to celebrate Morning Joe’s tenth anniversary. All details can be found here and though this info comes a little late because of my posting schedule—all apologies—and there’s only one drawing day left, Monday, definitely go for it and good luck! And, of course, Happy Tenth, Morning Joe.
**********
COUSTEAUX’S “SEASONS OF YOU” EXCLUSIVE/PREMIERE
CousteauX’s Davey Ray Moor & Liam McKahey
The new CousteauX album is released today with today’s exclusive/premiere, “Seasons Of You,” being one of its many highlights. According to CousteauX’s Davey Ray Moor...
"‘Seasons of You’ was one of the first moments I heard Liam singing my songs again, years after our messy divorce. It's the sound of Liam and I discovering who we are at this point in time, and reconnecting with our strengths and musical chemistry. “I consider it a sideways love song that accepts the rough with the smooth, folding the good days into the bad knowing they're all part of the deal. The singer is content in witnessing the world's routine cruelties and kindnesses, knowing it all cycles around. It's a song about the weather of love. The flugelhorns and cinematic guitars are classic CousteauX. It sounds like a sunny day with a distant threat of rain."
**********
Big & Rich / Did It For The Party
A Conversation with Big & Rich’s Big Kenny
Mike Ragogna: Kenny, let’s jump into your latest single, “California,” and how it’s nicely climbing the charts.
Kenny: Yeah, man! It’s so cool to have our first song off the album climbing up the charts right now, I mean, this song’s got a great vibe and you know out there already seeing people singing it back. It doesn’t get much better than that.
MR: The song, the video, the story... Can you give us a little background on all of that?
Kenny: Yeah, you know, this is a song that kind of comes from a unique angle, especially when you think about all of the people and all of the thousands and thousands of creators and artists that come to towns like Nashville or go to towns like Los Angeles. In this case, it’s a girl who’s leaving her life behind and being told from the story of the guy that she’s leaving behind not for another guy but for a dream. So this is kind of the song about taking off and going through all that craziness and hesitance you might go through for this person. I love this person.This is a great relationship but if I don’t leave this little town—LA in her case—I’ll never pursue my dream. And 90% of the people that you meet in our business have probably been through something like that. John [Rich] wrote it in such a cool vibe that we decided that we had to record it and everyone loved it. It was one of the first things that we recorded for Big & Rich and everyone loved it, so it was the first single off the new album. Did it for the par-tay!
MR: How do you and John personally relate to that story?
Kenny: Well, the way I look at it, I left the small town of Culpepper, Virginia, to come to Nashville not knowing anybody, not really having any knowledge whatsoever of the music business or how I was going to do it. I was a carpenter and was raised on a farm up there. I came here a little later in life too. I was pushing 30 years old and I just never even knew that it was something you could do, something you could make a living off of music. I was framing this wall one day with another carpenter I was working with right beside me, and this guy says to me as I’m singing along to the radio, “Kenny, you’re always singing along to the radio and let me tell you, you sing pretty good. You know, you ought to go to Nashville. I hear they pay people to make music down there.” I remember standing up and I had this checker base frame and hammer and I laid it down and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me! People get paid to make music?” Lo and behold, over that next year of my life, people were encouraging me, saying, “Man, you sing pretty good. You ought to go try that!” So I guess it just kind of got in me enough that I would finish the job stuff that I had and go try it.
John came from Amarillo, Texas. His father was a preacher and he lived in a trailer park down there. That’s where he grew up and they moved when he was a teenager. His family moved up here. Turns out he always loved country music. His father played music. By the way, my mother played piano. She actually had us singing stuff when I was just a little kid in the little country church. That’s how I guess I learned how to sing. Anyway, we both came from backgrounds like that. His family moved up here and his father taught him guitar. He was always playing and he got up here and the next thing you know, they have tryouts for Opryland and he ended up getting on one of the OpryLand shows as a teenager. Being in that, he and a bunch of guys he met there started a band, Lonestar, where he had his first number one song. Then he left that band and me and him met up in 1999. It was through a mutual friend of ours. It was Cindy Simmons who worked for Fender Guitars at the time. She knew both of us individually and just kept saying, “You both kind of have the same style. Kenny, you’re writing for a country publishing house, you have a four piece rock band going, and John is in a country band but he can sit and play Nirvana. Y’all ought to get together and write!” She kept at it for months and we finally got together and wrote and it was so good that we decided that’d we do it again. That year, we wrote 100 songs together.
MR: What’s amazing is after all the success you’ve had with major labels, you decided to release music through your own with Big & Rich Records. Now you’re associated with the Thirty Tigers label. How did you end up there?
Kenny: This team that we have together now is under the umbrella of Big & Rich records. They are all people who passionately have always wanted to work together and work with us. The crazy thing is that we’re looking to add to our team. In the last year, we worked on the sidelines, kind of with Sony Red before. Sony Red wanted to work with us on our last album as a distribution partner so they came back again when we finished our album Gravity. They knew we were going to be working on another. They came back to us again. Lane says, “I’d really like for y’all to offer or at least talk to our friends here at Thirty Tigers because there are a lot of folks over there that love y’all.” I’m like, “Well, I know most all of them too!” Bob Goldstone, who was one of their original partners, used to put my records up in the Bennet Power Records in 1999 when it was hard to get your music out there as an independent artist. We were always friends. Then one of the artists who we supported back in the day for the MuzikMafia in the early 2000s, this gal called ‘Spoken-Word Jen’—Jennifer Bane—is working for Thirty Tigers. We were kind of looking for this collective that could add more of a base that we were learning we still had to put more energy into. So Lane says that y’all have got to meet. We already had a mutual admiration for each other so it just kind of clicked like wow this is a national thing we can bring this to the table, they can bring that to the table. John and I would always realize that even with our talents, we put one and one together and they became four, which makes it even more amazing. And it was the same kind of vibe when we first started doing this together with Thirty Tigers. So it’s just a heck of a team around us and all of our compartments that we’ve either known or wanted to work with when they were at other labels. Now we’re all working together from our promotion teams to our marketing teams, distribution, sales, administration, management, and business management, publicists, and all these people. It’s kind of crazy! You have to be in this town for a while just to get to know them all!
MR: It sounds like you’re all kind of having a party together. Sorry for the pun.
Kenny: Well, what a natural title for this album. It’s like we did it for the party!
MR: But really, did you do all of this for the party?
Kenny: We all do it for the party. John and I came to this great realization we’ve written that song and we started playing it and everyone listening to it said that was what we’ve always been about. The greatest thing that has happened to John and I during our career was when we got together to have some fun or when we got together to get other people together to have some fun—like the MuzikMafia and from those things. Always something great would come from it. I mean, every person that we met and all of these people that are working with us now first started because we probably took the initiative somewhere years ago to just say, “Hey, why don’t we all get together over here one day or let’s drop by the studio.” Next thing you know, people start meeting. Their energies start flowing together and great things start happening. One thing that I know for sure is that time runs out. Looking back, there are no regrets. There are memories I won’t forget like living, loving, laughing loud. Ain’t that what it’s all about? Maybe we have it all figured out when we did it for the party.
MR: And you have some sensitive songs on the album as well, like “My Son,” that John wrote. It seems a bit different from the kind of song you guys are known for, no?
Kenny: Well, it’s not a different kind of song for us when you look over our career as writers. We’ve always kind of put it all together in an album. Probably, the first thing people know us for is “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” or “Comin’ to Your City,” you know, the high energy, lots of fun, party stuff. But then you look back at the biggest meaningful songs of our careers, songs like “Holy Water” or “8th of November,” you know, very serious subject matter that are some of the most powerful songs to this day on our set. That was the vibe we did for our first album. We’re looking forward now to our sixth studio album in over a decade. We were going for the energy and the fun stuff to complete an album, you have to show a little bit of your heart and soul too. My son was born first. I have an eleven-year-old son and a seven-year-old son. John has a seven-year-old son and a five-year-old son. My son Lincoln was born first and when Lincoln was born, I’ll never forget writing a song called “Oh Son of Mine” and it was the same sort of thing. It was very important and poignant to me. But John had not been through that yet so it was not the kind of song to put out yet at that point for us as “Big & Rich.” But now, you move forward to these years and John’s got boys, I have boys, and all of a sudden, something hit him one da. He’s got this melody going and it starts with “my son.” Next thing you know, he’s picking out the bulk of it on a bus and I’m listening to it going, “That’s really cool!” He finished it and I remember telling him, “We haven’t done stuff like this yet on our record but this is something we ought to record and put on this one.” It’s a beautiful song and I think it’s important to have it out there. So we recorded it and John had the idea of putting The Isaacs on it. They came in and sang on it and I don’t know if you’ve heard The Isaacs sing, but they are one of the most beautiful sounds that God put upon this earth when their voices come together. It is an enlightened sound.
MR: I’m also looking at the songwriters on “Freedom Road.” It lists “Phil Vassar.”
Kenny: We have several songs with Phil Vassar on there. We’ve always been big Phil Vassar fans. Phil’s also a Virginia boy. I’m from Virginia. We used to go see Phil play when he was like doing his piano man thing before he had a record deal. John and I used to drive out to Antioch to hear him in his club that he had out there, so we’ve always been fans. He was known as such a big hit songwriter guy and has a big career himself. We’re all out there so busy running 100 mph all the time that it’s hard to find time to make something like that happen. We made a commitment last year that we were going to find some days to get with Phil and we were going to sit down and write a few songs, and behold! Every single one of them ended up on this album. John and I both write from guitar so we thought it would be good to have a piano player in the middle. Phil’s got the right kind of energy to put in-between John and I. He’s got the ideas coming fast and we just wrote these awesome songs. [sings] And then we wrote “Wake Up One Year.” John and I were performing at halftime for a Piston’s game. We were sitting outside waiting to go in and started making up stuff, you know, the title and the vibe, and we pulled that one out. We’ve all got women in our lives. Women are the most important things in the world when you find that perfect connection, so we wrote that and “Freedom Road” was one of those three that we put out at the end of the album to kind of bring it down to the heart and soul.
MR: It’s definitely another touching song.
Kenny: And I think anybody who has been in this business as a musician, you’re definitely going to go through lots of ups and downs and that great realization is that you just keep yourself in the center through it all, through whatever kind of noise is going on. What other people are saying that don’t mean nothing, you just keep it straight out there. There’s hardly no one that’s come from a small town like either one of us did or there aren’t people jumping up and down going, “Hey man, you can make it big time in the music business.” I had those people that encouraged me later in my life but it wasn’t something that we grew up with at school. Like music. It’s just something they make you do to make yourself a more rounded person. It’s not something our schools were teaching, at least where I came from. So I think “Freedom Roads” is definitely a very poignant song when it comes from that thought, like this is the place to be and you stay on that road man, and that’s the one that will get you there.
MR: Yeah, I’m watching my 16-year-old son kind of beginning his road right now. He kind of knows what he wants and he’s pushing ahead. So I can relate to that song based on the “stay on target” standpoint. That’s where you get your freedom.
Kenny: Just keep your focus, keep one foot in front of the other and don’t let the noise stop you and if you’re going to get there, it might not be a week, it might be years and years before it ever really happens. You’re the only one that is going to lead that journey and that freedom road is the only one to be on. That’s it.
MR: Kenny, that’s beautiful. That nicely leads us to the question I ask everybody. What is your advice for new artists?
Kenny: Keep your focus, man. Just keep your focus. Don’t let the noise interrupt you from what you want to do, what your heart tells you to do, and just know when it gets to a place of “great,” when it’s great, it’s going to shine and getting there is a journey that can take a little time. You’re one of the greatest people that can give yourself patience. You’re the first person to give yourself grace in any way, shape, or form from all the other turmoils that can be pushed on you in your life. You’re the only one that can stop, breathe, say, “Yeah, I’ll deal with that. I understand that path but hey man, I’m going here. There’s this light out in front of me that is my dream and that’s what I’m going towards no matter what knocks me off, no matter what storms I go through, whatever hurricanes, no matter what Irmas or Harveys or whatever they’re called out there. By God, I’m just going to keep putting one foot in front of the other and pursuing my dream.”
I always say make sure at least once a year to just rebalance and refocus your dreams so that you can look, step back, step back now again, and look at the whole hemisphere of your life and say, “Okay, I see that maybe I should change this over here a little bit, I can do a little better here,” or “This is on point, I like that I am going to put more focus there.” Depending on what life throws at you, you have got to change your focus a little bit. That doesn’t mean you don’t still seek out the same point you’re walking towards. It just means you might have to walk a little bit of a different way to get to it. Just be great, focus on being great, don’t let the noise mess with you because greatness is the only thing that lets the cream float to the top and when it gets to the top, there’s an audience there. And there’s always an audience there. People are dying to hear great talent, great entertainment, and I know more artists are out there playing, performing around this world, than I think ever before. I’m a big supporter of that. Live entertainment is one of the greatest things that gets people out of the faces of all the other turmoils going on in their lives. It’s one of the greatest gifts we can give to our fans. And the experience. I don’t know how it can be replicated yet. That’s the one that technology has not changed. Even if we get to a virtual situation where you can step into the middle of it, it’s still not the energy of being in the middle of 20,000 or 50,000 people all singing along and you just feel them and smell them and the base kicking in around you, you know?
MR: Garth Brooks had his iconic hit, “I’ve Got Friends In Low Places,” and he’ll always be remembered for it no matter how many hits he had. And he had a ton of hits. Big & Rich has a similar situation with “Save A Horse, Ride A Cowboy.”
Kenny: This song is our “Stairway to Heaven,” it’s our “Sweet Home Alabama,” and it’s our “Friends In Low Places.” God bless that song. I love that song. We still love performing it to this day, as much as we ever did. We always change it up. There are so many places we can go with it. It’s almost like an explosion of fun energy, it’s almost like it lights people up. I guess it’s just hard to describe, the magic to that song. It is a gem.
MR: It’s wonderful to have one of those. But how do you kick its ass? Even Garth couldn’t do that.
Kenny: You just keep trying, man. You just keep trying. I don’t know if we will ever kick its ass. And you don’t worry about kicking its ass. You just always try to do your next greatest and biggest thing. You know, it could be a song on this album like “Congratulations” that could end up being something like that. When we recorded “Save A Horse,” I can remember people at the label telling us to record it but they’d probably never put that out as a single. But then John and I started playing the song for our friends or give a copy of it to somebody and they’re playing it a parties. We went on tour in 2004 and played it in front of a fresh audience. By the end of the song, we had the whole place screaming it. We had one half of the audience saying, “Save a horse,” while the other half was saying, “Ride a cowboy.” Sometimes songs just have that magic. We don’t worry if we ever out-do that one, we’re just always doing the next greatest thing we come up with and it just might be on this album. You might ask about “Coming To Your City,” how do we write that one again. We’re going on ten years of college gameday football with “Coming To Your City” and it’s on a national Chevy commercial. People just know us with that song.
And speaking of “Friends In Low Places,” I think we’ve got one on this album too—“Lie, Cheat, or Steal.” Every time we play that, I can immediately get everyone singing along with it. [sings] “Promise me if you’re ever going to lie, cheat, or steal just steal a kiss, cheat on death, and lie with the one you love.” So, who knows? We might have it right here on this album.