Country, july

Country, July 2017

Blastocyst.org.uk @CountryWOL

COUNTRY A 64-page publication from Blastocyst.org.uk Part of the series

A Country Way of Life @CountryWOL July 2017 Featuring: Dexeter

Katy Hurt

Raintown

American Young

Amy Westney

Phil Vassar

Kevin McGuire Brandy Clark

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Country, July 2017

Blastocyst.org.uk @CountryWOL

Contents 3 Well, Howdy: A Note from the Editor 4 What Country Means to Me, by the Editor 6 Country Way of Life Playlist: Hannah Rose Platt – Chanel & Cigarettes 7 Country Way of Life Playlist: Gary Quinn – He Don’t Show Her Anymore 8 Country Way of Life Playlist: RaeLynn – Love Triangle 9 Country Way of Life Playlist: Nicolle Galyon - Automatic 10 Buckle and Boots: What Happens Offstage, and On the Merch Table 14 Dexeter: On the Cusp 15 FSA Fest: Bring Your Own Tent 16 Keith Urban + Ed Sheeran = Morgan Evans 18 Does Country Music Have a Woman Problem? by Laura Cooney 20 Ten Reasons to go to a UK Country Gig, by Nick Cantwell 21 Orfila: Five Years and Still Rocking 22 American Young: From Their Point of View 26 Morganway: Musical Hurricane 28 Country Jukebox 29 Nashville Meets London Eight-Page Preview, featuring Raintown and Sam Outlaw 37 Why is Country so popular in the UK Right Now?, by James Daykin 40 The Best Venues for Country Music in Britain: Scotland and the North 42 CountryLine’s Nathalie Cox: Application Welcome 44 Brandy Clark: Small Town, Big Influence, by Lesley Hastings 48 Nashville Treasures – Lady Antebellum: Still Looking Good 52 Katy Hurt: Pieces of Her 54 Phil Vassar: American Soul Summer 56 Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: The Nashville Sound 58 Amy Westney: Love Shouldn’t Hurt EP 59 Carolynne: Coming Back to Me EP 60 Country Party Classics 62 A Honkytonk Quiz: Songwriters 64 Still Sounds Country to Me 2

Country, July 2017

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Well Howdy: A Note from the Editor, Jonny Brick (@CountryWOL) Well howdy, and welcome to COUNTRY, July 2017 edition.

All kinds of goodness await, but I thought I would use my page to put forward a theory about, naturally, the rise of country music. James Daykin has his say on that on page 37, after eight pages on a free festival of country put on with the help of ten Transatlantic acts. Four of these are profiled at length, and they include a former British pop starlet and songwriter who has married one of the most promising guitarists of his generation. Blame the country on the girl, blame the girl on the country…

Anyway, the theory. Music is culture, and culture is a reflection of the times. 400 years ago it was Hamlet and Macbeth, 200 years ago it was Austen, Dickens and Bronte. 100 years ago it was Cole Porter, Noel Coward and George Gershwin. 50 years ago it was the Fab Four and the Rolling Stones.

20 years ago it was the Gallaghers and Blur. 10 years ago it was the seventh Harry Potter book.

As we all work through the time history will call the ‘Brexit-and-Trump’ era, I think people are gravitating towards country music for cultural reasons. Just as in the 1960s Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan gained mass acceptance in the coffee houses for their guitar-assisted take on the times, so in 2017 people are looking to great voices for the truth. In Britain we have a guy called Frank Turner, a former metalhead whose folk-rock is idiosyncratic and has found a vast audience; in the States, singers like Ryan Adams, Father John Misty and Conor Oberst use guitars to back their acerbity and stories on the human condition. Jason Isbell, who had a number one album this month in country music with zero airplay on country radio’s traditional outposts, is another such example. A more commercially successful act was profiled in the last magazine: Chris Stapleton sounds country, certainly more country than many acts driving profits to the major labels or clogging up the country charts.

A Rubicon moment was reached this month when a song called God, Your Mama and Me topped the airplay charts. The Backstreet Boys were a featured artist, an act who had never touched the country genre and who had recently premiered a documentary about their pop career at London’s Dominion Theatre. The era they represented is over: manufactured vocal harmony groups like New Kids on the Block, Take That and Boyzone put together by a Svengali like Simon Fuller or the late, disgraced Lou Pearlman have no place on the landscape unless Simon Cowell put them together on a show with Idol or Factor in their name. (Carrie Underwood is a solo female, and ushered in the new era.)

To be sure there are still great voices found on TV shows: Morgan Wallen is driving The Way I Talk to the top of the charts this year, while Lauren Duski may have a career to follow the likes of Lauren Alaina, Scotty McCreery and Gwen Sebastian, who these days sings with Miranda Lambert.

My theory is that in the 1990s Garth Brooks represented rock and Shania Twain represented pop. In a way, Florida Georgia Line represent hiphop (Steve Earle called their type of music ‘hip-hop for people who are afraid of black people’). Though I have been assured that Brian and Tyler are really representing their personalities with their music, it always seemed to me that Garth and Shania used the artifice of pop and rock to crack the country market which, by 1990, was in search of new heroes.

The likes of Isbell, Stapleton and Sturgill Simpson are themselves, like it or not, marketable products: they represent a preconceived truth in how music can tell stories that cut through any artifice. It’s what made Hank Williams, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn such pillars of the genre, and future generations will always seek their albums as a way into the genre, which I suppose is the ultimate compliment.

Enjoy the review of The Nashville Sound on page 56, enjoy the rest of the magazine and, above all else, keep it country!!

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Country, July 2017

Blastocyst.org.uk @CountryWOL

What Country Means To Me, by the Editor I like this part of the website Think Country (ThinkCountryMusic.com) and I was moved to attempt my own.

Country means possibility to me. I sat down at my machine eighteen months ago, looking at the chart history of country music, and a few hours later had the outline for a book. With any luck (and a bit of money), A Country Way of Life will emerge in early 2019, in time for what could be the biggest Country2Country Festival yet. Garth? Shania? Alabama? An unknown superstar plugging away behind the scenes in Nashville that will be unleashed some time in 2018?

Who can say, except that there is no shortage of contenders for the next superstar. Garth and Shania will probably keep their records for units sold; sales of No Fences and Come On Over climbed above ten million, and came out before mp3s existed, when you had to go to a shop and hand over some money. Simpler times…

Today, with the music business having both contracted at the top and placed a very low barrier for entry (you have a song, you upload it online, you publicise it relentlessly and play it live), it has never been easier to be heard. Country has a better hit rate than other genres, and invariably there are fewer duds that reach big saturation.

Country is also niche enough to be important to the wider cultural landscape when a song or act breaks through. I used to listen to America’s Greatest Hits, a show which played music from a variety of charts, on BBC Radio 2. For some weeks one of Need You Now, Our Song, Cruise and Take Your Time occupied the top country slot. The songs grew in my estimation with every week, and I even understood (eventually) what Sam Hunt was doing to the format.

Bobby Bones, whose show is syndicated in the States and available via podcast after broadcast, also reaches beyond fiddles and pedal steels thanks to his background in Top 40, or ‘chart’, radio; Bobby is currently trying to get more female voices heard on a male-dominated playlist that sidelines women deliberately.

Since then, Body Like a Back Road and (in the UK) Nashville Grey Skies have all pulled people into country. I’ve been banging on about Maren Morris ever since I heard My Church; had a pop artist put that out and referenced Whitney and Mariah it would have been a game-changer. It does sit comfortably on Radio 2, having been playlisted earlier in 2017. Now she’s on it with Thomas Rhett, and it’s great to see the station supporting US country.

As I write this on Independence Day weekend LeAnn Rimes and Shania Twain are both on the A List (the latter has been the station’s Record of the Week); Darius Rucker is on the B List along with the UK act Wildwood Kin, sharing airtime with Paul Weller, Radiohead and TLC. For the sophisticated audience who pay for music and buy concert tickets, these acts benefit greatly. Darius was particularly brilliant at Country2Country this year, where he played No Diggity, a ‘great song’. Country means great songs, like many Radio 2 playlist additions. It means community, passion, love, loss, diminished chords and southern accents. But as The Shires have proven, it means well-structured pop songs with no artifice and not much post-production.

As the charts become clogged up with songs written by Ed Sheeran (no bad thing in moderation), country provides an alternative soundtrack to those bored of familiar rock-sounding songs, scrappy indie bands who are famous online and popstars who are younger than me, a 29-year-old listener.

Country contains Chris Stapleton, Brad Paisley, Jason Isbell, Lauren Alaina (whose voice deserves to be heard in the UK) and the old stars: Dolly, Willie, Reba, Shania and all the rest. There is a heritage 4

Country, July 2017

Blastocyst.org.uk @CountryWOL

industry in country and it’s up to the genre to perpetuate figures like Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton who will move up into the slots vacated by the ageing heroes.

Country music is built on dreams, much like pop. Once developed, a star stays powerful until, for instance, they insult the state of Texas or are cruel to country radio. Nashville, the ‘little big town’, can spit out stars as easily as it can make them. Carrie Underwood, who seems beige in comparison with Miranda Lambert, and Garth Brooks, slick and professional, are two beneficiaries of a star system which reminds me of Hollywood before the studios were shattered.

I suppose I like the business element of country music, as well as the fact that you can have songs about real life that can’t be written about in pop, where it’s all baby this and baby that. You have a third dimension in country music, which goes back to the songwriting traditions of the pre-rock era, and the musicianship that propelled so many acts to stardom and the stage. It’s good-time music mixed with thinky-think music, and if people criticise some acts for namechecking big brands and making formulaic music, let’s hope that that ‘cheap music’ pays for the more adventurous artists to go out and tour internationally.

This is the key. It seems that country music is embarking on a long, successful relationship with the UK, one which is mutually beneficial. More country coming to the UK means more UK folk going over to see country in its natural habitat: the American South, and particularly Nashville, whose main business is music. More positive reviews send more tourists over, which increases the appetite for US country in the UK, which means more visits on their international tours for the likes of Brad Paisley, Zac Brown Band, Lady Antebellum and Thomas Rhett, who all have huge fanbases thanks to previous UK visits. It’s the circle of a country way of life.

Country Music Week and Country2Country are umbrella terms for the expansion of the Country Music Association, which can afford to send American acts over for a working holiday; in October it’s Randy Houser, newcomer Michael Tyler, old-timers Kip Moore and Marty Stuart and guitarist-songwriter Lindsay Ell. Next year for C2C who knows which acts will come over to play the O2 Arena?

The fact that demand means they can fill the venue is good news for fans of country and it is hoped that UK acts – twenty of whom I can name as brilliant and worth your time – have some residual success of the back of this. Nashville Nights and Buck’n’Bull Saloon will satisfy the demand for those fans who like drinking, music and staying up after midnight.

Sundry songwriting evenings, put on by the likes of Katy Hurt, Amy Westney and Two Ways Home, provide a sense of Nashville in places like London, Manchester and Kelvedon in Essex. All those venues that usually host rock music nights are accommodating UK and US acts who can get feet through the door. At these nights, people are friendly, dress up in country costume and bellow along to songs to which they thought they were the only ones who bellowed along.

The Internet has sped up the pace of country being exported to the UK, and attracts those acts who would plod from arena to stadium to arena again. In the UK, they can look into the eyes of small crowds, who know all their songs (even the album tracks) and respect them as they perform. Seeing Charlie Worsham and Drake White, I felt a connection with real artists who really appreciate being listened to across an ocean. Can UK acts do the same thing and feel the love from American crowds?

Country is about potential, about going somewhere, either in bed or on the road. It’s something that draws me to the history of the genre through A Country Way of Life, seeing if I can come up with a way of living that is reflected in the songs written by people who make a career out of conveying feelings in music.

Their music helps me feel things, and that’s what country means to me: meaning.

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Country, July 2017

Blastocyst.org.uk @CountryWOL

Country Way of Life Playlist: Hannah Rose Platt – Chanel & Cigarettes Firstly, what a title.

The lead single from the second album by singer-songwriter Hannah Rose Platt is a story with a gentle guitar accompaniment. It takes the spirit of songs like Dancer and 1954 from her 2015 debut album Portraits and adds an extra snarl.

‘It’s the thing that makes me want to get out of bed in the morning!’ Hannah told me backstage at The Sound Lounge in Tooting. A fan of Ryan Adams and Martha Wainwright, Hannah has spoken elsewhere about her love of Gretchen Peters, who wrote the award-winning song Independence Day which was a hit for Martina McBride.

While Hannah told me she had never smoked, she can conjure up the mood of cigarette smoke in song. The song inducted into the Playlist opens in a bar. A man ‘slips off his wedding ring’ and spots a smoking woman who looks like ‘a 1930s movie star…full red lips and oozing class and moving with a slow seductive sway’.

There is character in the vocal which matches the movement of the chords and the reverb on the guitar. What sounds like an accordion or organ enter for the second verse. It’s hard to describe how musical it is without pointing you to the song itself.

The chord used on the last phrase of the chorus is magical, cinematic and elevates the entire song.

Verse two moves the action to the river bank, as the man and woman kiss a little – she kissed him ‘hungrily’ after suggesting ‘”somewhere we can go”’ – but the man realises she is not a young woman, ‘not a trace of youth or beauty left’.

Exacerbated by his ‘infidelities’ and her story of love from long ago, the man sees through the idea of love. She is, to repeat an old phrase, a femme fatale in all but name. Neither character has a name.

There’s much untold mystery hidden within the song, and we don’t know whether the first chap made it home to his wife, and what happened to the ring. It’s great writing, and it makes you want to put it on again as soon as you hear it.

As if to prove Hannah can do it all, she is a quarter of an all-female group The Savannahs, who appeared on the BBC One show Pitch Battle on the July 8 show and are playing live at The Monarch in Camden on July 26.

The final verse, a sort of coda, is set on ‘another night, another bar’ as another man spots the same woman in a bar. The story repeats itself like a card with ‘please turn over’ on both sides, and the song grows with every listen.

When Hannah plays the song live, as she has been doing in 2017 before the autumn release of her second album, the audience listen intently. Such is the power of adjectives and adverbs. Hannah has been teaching students who attend the Songwriting degree course at the ICMP in Kilburn, North-West London (including previous Playlist inductee Kaity Rae) who will surely benefit from her lessons about self-releasing one’s music.

As a Scouser down South, Hannah is brilliantly positioned to entertain the whole of the UK with album two, and this is a great indication of the kind of sounds Hannah Rose Platt makes.

Read more about Hannah Rose Platt in the June edition of COUNTRY, and listen to the Dust Bowl Discs discussion at Mixcloud.com/Blastocast.

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Country, July 2017

Blastocyst.org.uk @CountryWOL

Country Way of Life Playlist: Gary Quinn – He Don’t Show Her Anymore After a strong debut in 2016, Buckle and Boots returned to the British countryside and the British country scene. Gary Quinn is the benevolent mastermind who books all the bands for the festival. He has a Rolodex of contacts: in 2016 he brought over Phil Vassar, and in 2017 he fulfilled a promise given to Nashville-based Morgan Evans and allowed him to make his UK debut on Saturday evening. Pity Dylan Jakobsen, brought over as the nominal headliner, who had to follow.

Gary played two gigs at the festival: a Songwriters in the Round set on Saturday afternoon, and a fullband set on Sunday evening. His duet with Laura Oakes of the country hit Think of You was terrific, and showed that Gary has a voice to impress any country neutrals. He played some fine tunes including one about bums (I Love to Watch You Leave) and breaking up (Shame), but there was no place for the 2013 Song of the Year, according to the British Country Music Association.

He Don’t Show Her Anymore did come up in Dust Bowl Discs, the discussion show which is one of the audio offerings from A Country Way of Life (listen at Mixcloud.com/Blastocast).

‘It’s the one that got everything started for me,’ Gary says, ‘the first one that got us noticed, that opened doors.

‘I’d listened to people about how to write songs, what angles they used. It’s still the one that resonates with a lot of folk when I play it in front of new people. I never tire of playing it!’

It opens with a soft strum of an acoustic guitar, which is soon joined by a full band. The lyric is about a lady and her husband. She calls him at work, but ‘she’s the one doing overtime, lying awake…always last on his list of things to do’. As the man is drawn into work, the woman’s love is ‘headed for redundancy’. Continuing the gentle metaphor, Gary sings that he should ‘invest a little more’ in the relationship, and to make it more than mere words. As the chorus puts it, no more does the man ‘ask about her day, bring her home a little gift’ or ‘listen to her worries, share a bottle of wine’.

He might say he loves her, but he don’t show her any more.

Every male listener in a long relationship would empathise with the story. It’s all fun and games at the beginning, but when one settles into a pattern it’s harder to show someone you care when you’re earning money for the relationship. A happy medium exists, and perhaps Gary will write that song as a sort of sequel.

In any case, I ask Gary, who is the ‘he’? ‘I’m comfortable saying it now. At the time it was anybody; on reflection, it was me. In the song it’s about the office but it’s about my own drive for music.’

Gary’s drive led him to founding Buckle and Boots, which should return in 2018 even bigger than 2017.

Walking onto the site on the Friday of 2017, I was impressed at the number of people who were already there, many in boots or hats. Gary was in a three-piece suit (he would don a leather jacket for the rest of the weekend).

Punters heard music from the likes of The Southern Companion, Jess and the Bandits, Morganway and Kevin McGuire, who should all be heard by many hundreds more ears in the next few years. Gary, a sort of bridge between the UK scene as it is now and the scene as it will be over the next decade, is one of the most important musical figures, and should also put out a second album in the next few years to add to his 2013 debut album and a 2016 EP. With Buckle and Boots, like a sort of Kevin Costner figure, Gary Quinn has built it. They have come.

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Country, July 2017

Blastocyst.org.uk @CountryWOL

Country Way of Life Playlist: RaeLynn – Love Triangle ‘I had never written with Miranda before,’ explained Nicolle Galyon in a conversation with Bobby Bones on his Bobbycast. ‘RaeLynn was playing some songs for her that we had written together.’

RaeLynn and Nicolle met on The Voice, where they were both in the final live shows, in 2012. Cee-Lo called her singing ‘generic’ and Nicolle was knocked out in the ‘battle round’. Nicolle realised her fellow contestant’s vocal talent and pressed her to tell her own stories. As of July 2017 Love Triangle, written by RaeLynn with Nicolle and Jimmy Robbins, has been streamed over twenty million (20m) times on Spotify. Over 8m people have seen the official video on her Youtube channel.

The story of Love Triangle is rich with movement and imagery.

Sitting on the front step, little white suitcase…

Southern Belle statue standing in the screen door Watching her whole world head for an old Ford Those lines are from the first verse, while the second verse is about the perils of joint-custody, the reason why the protagonist is in a car ‘with a man that can’t look her [ie her momma] in the eye’.

Bowling alley burger, fries and a milkshake Headed to the same old two-dollar matinee “Baby how’s your school been and how’s your mom?”

The chorus, with the ‘some mommas and daddies’ hook, is impressive, comparing those who love ‘in a straight line’ with others who ‘let their heartstrings tear and tangle’ (note the emotive alliteration).

The most emotional moment in the song is in the final chorus when the instruments drop out and RaeLynn’s voice emits a curt ‘no more’ in reference to how some parents do not speak to each other.

The protagonist sees her dad leaving ‘and I cry for him out the window’; in the first bridge she had done the same for her mom. (I would love to hear this song from the perspective of the momma and the daddy, so that Love Triangle is part of a triptych.)

‘It’ll be a gateway into who she is now,’ Nicolle said to Bobby Bones. Love Triangle was one of eight songs she had written that was on her chart-topping 2017 LP WildHorse, which Nicolle co-produced as well. That makes her an outlier: a female producer who has also won awards for her songwriting and been a contestant on a national TV show.

After a chat about the hopelessness of female singers getting hits consistently on the radio, Bobby finishes: ‘We couldn’t get enough old, middle-aged white men, aka every program director, to keep playing it.’ To Nicolle’s surprise Bobby thinks if a male singer recorded it, he’d have a huge hit with it.

The ballads, ‘when they do get through, are the Song of the Year,’ Nicolle says. ‘You owe it to the idea and to the artist to make it the best it can be even if radio doesn’t understand.’

In an interview with Billboard magazine, Nicolle spoke about her work campaigning on behalf of songwriters, part of the NSAI, as ‘one of the younger writers’ who visits Washington DC. ‘It’s really eye-opening when you see how few people there are fighting for all of us. Every person that can go up there and tell their story and put a heartbeat and a face behind the songs that these people in suits grew up listening to.’ With young kids benefitting from the work of their parents, it brings things into a sharp focus: ‘We’ve gotten to live our dreams. With the way that things are going right now, with streaming and all the stuff with copyrights, there might be a world where our kids may not ever have the opportunity to be professional songwriters.’ And thus no songs like Love Triangle.

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Country, July 2017

Blastocyst.org.uk @CountryWOL

Country Way of Life Playlist: Nicolle Galyon – Automatic How annoying it is to be a woman. A heavily pregnant Nicolle Galyon could not attend the ceremony when her song Automatic won Single of the Year at the CMA Awards 2014. It went on to win the ACM Award 2015, and was pipped for Best Country Song at the 2015 GRAMMY Awards by Glen Campbell’s song making light of his twilight years.

Automatic topped the country charts in Canada but was never a country number one (shamefully) below the border. It hit number 3 on the radio and number 4 in sales. It also got to number 35 on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100.

Nicolle wrote the song with Miranda and Natalie Hemby, who is one of Nashville’s finest songwriters.

‘I had never heard a song Natalie had written when we met,’ Nicolle told Bobby Bones on his Bobbycast in spring 2017. The two ladies were on a flight together and got talking.

‘I got pulled in to write a month after I had a baby. I swore I was going to take time off, and I hadn’t had a hit. We Were Us [a song Miranda recorded with Keith Urban] hadn’t been a hit yet. For a female writer there are things you can say for a Miranda project that you can say nowhere else in town, especially at the time.’

She spoke at length with Bobby Bones about a song whose first line is inspired by other female singers like the woman who took it to the top. The line ‘quarter in a payphone’ comes from the idea of female singers phoning home. ‘Automatic was going to be a love song,’ said Nicolle, ‘having to work for this love that we had. Then the whole thing shifted to a story Miranda told about Patty Loveless. Patty would carry bags of quarters because in the 1990s, a time before cellphones, acts would have to pull to the side of the road to do phone interviews with radio stations.’

Other images in the first verse alone are indicative of a time before ‘everything became automatic’: ‘pocketwatch telling time’ and putting in ‘a blank cassette’ to ‘record the Country Countdown’. Verse two mentions ‘a Rand McNally’, the big atlas drivers used to have before satellite navigation told them where to get off. Later on Miranda refers to Polaroid pictures, ‘the kind you gotta shake’.

The third verse moves to communication: If you had something to say you’d write in on a piece of paper You’d put a stamp on it and they’d get it three days later Then, moving to love, she sings that boys would be turned down by girls and, arrestingly: ‘Staying married was the only way to work your problems out’.

I love the drums in the song, by Matt Chamberlain, who has played with the likes of Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Tori Amos, but the three-chord guitar line that runs through the song is the key ingredient of the track. The electric guitar solo is by Jay Joyce, who produced Brothers Osborne and Eric Church, while the backing harmonic layers from Gene Miller and Carolyn Dawn Johnson are divine.

Nicolle is married to fellow writer Rodney Clawson. She told the broadcaster Bobby Bones that she thinks of herself as Rodney thinks of himself: a sort of farmer-songwriter.

‘My husband used to be a farmer. Every day we plant seeds and then you look back and have this whole field of songs. They have a whole life of their own beyond what happens in the room.

‘Certain songs go all the way around the world to get cut. It’s really humbling.’

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Country, July 2017

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Buckle and Boots: What Happens Offstage Friday Tent pitched, undersheet smoothed down, time to party!

A brief waltz around the refreshment area, full of foodstuff: Streatza pizza, curry, Aberdeen Angus burgers, ice creams and an independent food van with chocolate bars, Pringles and 80p Danish pastries. I buy one.

A man holds a plastic pint in the aperture between the waistcoat and the shirt. This man is also wearing a cowboy hat and a leather jacket, going full-on ‘country cosplay’. (It may be that he is actually a sheriff, in which case it is the correct mandated uniform.)

The w21Music ‘merch tent’, stage left, fills up during the evening with band merchandise and CDs. A screen flickers with the lineup, which today includes: Kris Barras, who plays guitar with his teeth in a cover of All Along the Watchtower; Jenn Bostic, who leads the crowd in a singalong on her tune Hollywood; and Southern Companion, who deliver one of the finest versions of Tennessee Whiskey this side of Stapleton.

At the start of the evening, festival MD-turned-MC Gary Quinn throws a ball from the stage which is caught by a young lad. The lad is asked up to the stage, where Gary asks him who his favourite act is: ‘Garth Brooks.’ ‘Try again,’ says Gary correctly.

The moment of the night is Pete Woodhouse’s face lighting up when Sonia Leigh and Katy Hurt are playing Sweet Annie, a Zac Brown Band song co-written by Sonia. Pete puts his arms in the air, leads a singalong then grabs his phone, presumably to send some video to his friend Zac. It’s life-affirming and releases all my tiredness brought on my manflu.

Saturday It’s not just white people here!! I hope they don’t mind me mentioning it, but a family of South Asian extraction were, when they weren’t chucking a rugby ball around, bopping along. This is a genre of music that has three black people in its Hall of Fame. It shouldn’t be significant – country music is still music – but it was notable. Will some of the young kids be the stars of the future?

The stars of the present included Tucker, who sang a song written by a friend who on the Thursday had taken his own life. The crowd were put through the wringer for that set, which started a hopefully lifelong bromance between Tucker and Luke Thomas, who played a mean guitar despite his angelic face. Luke, as he had been at last year’s festival, was a gun for hire, playing with at least five acts.

Katy Hurt’s band featured Ace the Bass with his white guitar, and they tore through some tracks from Katy’s double-EP Pieces of Me. Elsewhere the air filled with the sounds of Fleetwood Mac (Fred’s House doing a version of The Chain) and Lori McKenna (Melanie doing Humble and Kind); a smoke machine filled the Paddock Stage with smoke, squirting out dry ice at random intervals and surprising the audience members who delighted, especially, at performances from Stewart Mac (his song Radio is excellent) and Gasoline & Matches, who filled in at short notice with songs including the fun Never Have I Ever, where they egged on punters to drink from their plastic cups (£1 deposit at the bar).

As the rain sobbed around 9pm, amazed to the point of tears at the UK debut of Morgan Evans, Jess and the Bandits (with Luke Thomas on guitar) played new tracks for a crowd who lapped up the new stuff among the old. The Bullet and White Lies were particularly brilliant. One of many great voices on the main stage over the weekend, Jess Clemmons should go stratospheric with the new LP.

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Country, July 2017

Blastocyst.org.uk @CountryWOL

Sunday Wet ground, sore heads, final day.

The British Country Music Association sign up memberships all weekend, at £20 a pop, imploring people to be part of the future. The lady manning the stall is passionate, especially when it comes to her views (which may or may not represent the BCMA) on Country2Country, which seems to be morphing into an international version of CMA Fest. This may mean that Buckle and Boots becomes Britain’s CMA Fest, with added onsite shower facilities and award-winning loos (pristine all weekend).

Karl Hancock, who owns Whitebottom Farm, says that his Blackthorn festival in July attracts seven thousand people. One day B&B will get similar numbers across the weekend, and more acts will play the farm before other outdoor venues, not least Worthy Farm in Somerset, on a UK tour.

Sunday is, like Saturday, full of other people’s songs done brilliantly by others: Sarah Darling falls into the Ring of Fire; Morganway do justice to Dancing in the Dark; Kevin McGuire does What Hurts the Most in a passable imitation of his hero Gary Le Vox; Laura Oakes takes Shut Up and Dance and turns it into shut up and barndance; and Clara Bond matches Maren Morris note for note on Sugar with her crack band. Speaking with them after their set, they say they are due to spend summer in Devon working on tunes to match Does Your Girlfriend Know You’re Single and Tambourine. Whatever she’s doing, it’s working…

Before Clara is Ags Connolly, a man with beard who will headline B&B one day. He is a sort of Ron Sexsmith-cum-Loudon Wainwright figure, with impeccable songs with chords in all the right places.

He’s got the X Factor, and he can go however far he wants to go, and he can take his steel guitar player Kirk Hamilton with him, who added twang to Ags’ gruff bonhomie.

Over pints I chat to Morganway’s twin guitarists Callum and Kieran Morgan, and commend the wives of both the twins for sticking by them, as well as talking football with their Watford FC-supporting bassist Rory (I imagine it’s spelt Rory and not Ruairi).

Clashes mean that no human can see every minute of every act, but married Glaswegian couple Ashton Lane are particularly gross victims. Their set starts an hour later than planned, but they play effectively and gorgeously, impressing with a wonderful song about their two kids called Little Heartbeat. They will play closer to home in September at the Millport Festival just off the West Coast of Scotland, playing on the same stage as The Shires, who would attract thousands to Buckle and Boots if they chose to preview their third album here in 2018.

Gary Quinn, maestro of the festival, plays forty minutes of perfect country-pop, including the nowclassics I Love to Watch You Leave, Shame and Live Each Day. Vacating the stage, he joins the crowd in admiration of Sarah Darling, who plays for seventy-five minutes. One of the American performers whose UK following is possibly greater than her US fanbase, Sarah shouts out w21Music and Your Life in a Song as two media outlets who have really gotten behind her, and Chris Country Radio is also given acclaim. (Chris himself is in Texas, but Zoe wears the jumper with pride!) Great talent deserves great rewards, and I continue to be inspired by those who promote contemporary country sounds.

I will back Backwoods Creek until they receive the fame their talent deserves; like Ags, they may also headline festivals in future years. Led by a superb front three of vocalist Jamie, guitarist Yannick and party-starting bassist Jack, the band sensibly wait until Sarah Darling finishes her set before a packed tent is treated to their covers of Wagon Wheel and Chicken Fried, new single Keep Off the Grass and the wonderful opener Memory Lane.

Tent packed away, last pint downed, Buckle and Boots 2018 circled on the calendar. Thanks to Gary and Karl, above all, for giving a platform to acts who plug away and get this sort of reward.

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Buckle and Boots 2017: Merch Table Just to the side of the main stage at Buckle and Boots, an array of t-shirts, promotional material and music was available. Here are three sets of songs, all EPs, that are worth hearing from acts who played the festival. Two are from ladies, and one is from a self-confessed ‘redneck hick from Nashville’. All three are very much worth your time and attention…

Clara Bond – Out of Towners EP In 2012 the Telegraph profiled a then-nineteen-year-old Clara Bond, who had only quit education down in Devon two years beforehand. She wanted to help young girls be happy and have a career where she never flaunted her looks above her music. She also outed herself as a Bryan Adams fan (I think I have found my karaoke partner for When You’re Gone…)

In 2016, following two previous EPs – Focus and The Chase – Clara put out a set of songs named after the sweet track Out of Towners, which is awesome on record and live, nailing a poppy sound that reflects her personality. The video has her playing with canisters of coloured smoke!

Having spoken to her very briefly at Buckle and Boots, I am convinced she has the temperament to be Shires-sized in terms of reputation. Her crack band, including a pianist who studies jazz and an effortlessly cool guitarist, are perfect foils, framing a voice than can be equally tender and powerful.

Tambourine (‘you play my heart like a tambourine’) has Clara reminiscing about a past relationship.

Love Can’t Stay looks back on a ‘temporary paradise’, possibly with the same guy, while hanging on the line that ‘it could have been you’. The arrangement is gorgeous, and it would work as an Adelesized torch ballad as well as the poppy EP version. Flashbacks, meanwhile, is a jazzy tune with Clara noting that the boy sees her ‘only in flashbacks and déjà vu’. She thanks him ‘for the dance’ and gives a great vocal performance which brings out the lyric.

With enough on her EPs for a full album, or at least a forty-minute setlist, big stages beckon.

Tucker – #Country EP For Jason Tucker, big stages have already come, albeit with Tucker as a sideman. He has played piano with Lady Antebellum and was in close proximity to Jason Aldean on one of his early tours.

Now two years old, but having gained plenty of airplay on Chris Country Radio, these seven tracks tell us about Tucker the man and the singer. The title track is brilliant, especially thanks to a riff that pops up halfway through and takes the listener by surprise. The verses throw together a list of images including ‘Old Hank, Jim Beam, a tailgate, a six-string’.

Burn is the most poignant track, especially given that in June 2017 the chap who wrote it killed himself.

In triple time, Tucker sings of a relationship gone bad, resulting in his desire to burn everything that reminds him of her. ‘Let the whiskey replace the warmth and the taste of her kiss’ is a devastating line.

Leave begins with a coupled piano part rotating between two notes, as Tucker realises he must depart from a girl ‘burnin’ me down…Treat her like heaven but she’ll drag you through hell’. He seems to be making the right decision. Meanwhile on the tender What I Can Change he pleads devotion, will ‘put those fires out’ and ‘live and learn to let go’. The chorus is great: I can spend less time on the phone and more time face-to-face…

Can’t turn back time, can’t stop the rain But I can change what I can change

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Meant To Be (‘I can finally see now down the road of forever’) is a passionate love song about what happens when you focus on love. It would not be out of place on an early Lady Antebellum album.

Likewise She’s Like That, a contemporary country track which compares her lady to ‘the feeling you get when you turn sixteen’ and first step into the driving seat. Indeed, ‘she’s an open road through the great unknown’ is a pretty accurate description of love, but also of embarking upon a career in music.

Tucker shone at Buckle and Boots, and he’s welcome back to our shores any time…

Jade Helliwell – Forget the Night EP From Batley in Yorkshire, with the right amount of perspiration and luck Jade could play enormous stages. In comparison with the somewhat tender voices of Chrissie Rhodes of The Shires and the girls in Ward Thomas, Jade Helliwell is Shirley Bassey to their Spice Girls.

Currently spending the days as a teaching assistant at a school in Wakefield, Jade put out an EP in 2012 called Urban Life, Country Heart, but it was the 2015’s album Secret which introduced the world to Jade. Yorkshire already knew about her from her time playing the working men’s club circuit as a teenage singer. Her 2016 tour with Thorne Hill and Narn helped spread the word.

2017 has been quite a year so far. Jade was able to perform at Country2Country after winning a contest hosted by Yamaha (pipping Two Ways Home in the national final), but it was a video of her singing Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah with a busker on a night out that brought her headlines in national newspapers and on websites like NME and LadBible.

If you are reading this before July 21, it is worth your while to go to Gullivers in Manchester to hear what all the fuss is about. You might see Jonathan Shalit, a mogul and good friend of Simon Cowell, whose interest was piqued by the national and indeed global coverage of the video. Jade also plays four dates with Emma Moore in late August, and the Christmas Eve gig at Batley Irish Centre sounds fun too.

The songs Jade will be playing should include many from the Forget the Night EP. I Have a Good Life, a toe-tapper, cannot fail to put a smile on your face; Never Learn is a piano-driven stomper with a marvellous chorus; Forget the Night, in which ‘Tall Dark Handsome gives me a wink’, is a proper pop song with a chorus hook of ‘I’m gonna wanna’ as she seeks a drink to forget whatever mess she’s going to get herself into.

Never Loved Another is a message to her former lover that he has given up a good thing, and features a trick of Jade’s: repeating a chorus lyric via anaphora to drive home the hook. Clare Bowen, Scarlett from the TV show Nashville, would kill for this one: she has ‘buried all my tears’, she sings, ‘but part of me will always long to heal’. This track makes the best use of her idiosyncratic vibrato, which tremors in the right places throughout the EP. I wonder if she sold a few at the merch tent at Buckle and Boots.

Ask Me To Stay is a soft song in which Jade looks back on a guy who didn’t want her even though it was not a great thing. Much is left unsaid in that song, and perhaps Jade is willing to open up at the sort of songwriter rounds. She held her own next to American singer-songwriters Jenn Bostic and Sonia Leigh on the Sunday at Buckle and Boots, where the three of them were so good they were allowed an encore; at Katy Hurt’s evening on July 4 she played just one song, called Numb. Her poise and technique was of professional calibre; written in deep despair, it is a song of Adele-like qualities.

Jade will go as far as she wants to go, and it’ll be amazing to see her as she flies.

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Dexeter: On the Cusp As a country fan in the UK, 2017 appears to be an incredible year. Catherine McGrath and Ward Thomas played Hyde Park for fans waiting to hear Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty; The Shires played Wembley Stadium – Wembley. Stadium. – in support of Jeff Lynne’s ELO; there are plentiful songwriting nights and festivals popping up every month, and Buck’n’Bull Saloon has joined Nashville Nights in catering to a party crowd.

For bands who have been knocking around for three or four years, waiting for their moment, releasing their own music and converting fans one by one, 2018 will be a massive year. Jess and the Bandits put out their second album Smoke and Mirrors in September this year; Holloway Road get better with every single they release; Two Ways Home, Laura Oakes and Katy Hurt are just one Radio 2-playlisted single away from stardom.

Bob Harris, saint Bob, has been vocal in championing a band fronted by Dee and Gareth called Dexeter.

They can almost be called the Under the Apple Tree House Band, and played on Bob Harris Country as a rare UK-based act on the show earlier this year.

As a taster for what is to be a busy 2018, the band showcased their new stuff at The Water Rats, a short walk from Kings Cross Station in London, on July 13. Amy Westney warmed the crowd up with songs from her EP, reviewed later in the magazine, and the crowd responded to her covers of Loretta Lynn and Margo Price. The site Amy writes for, Think Country, has been hugely supportive of Dexeter, and those who have been loyal to the band turned out to see their ‘industry showcase’.

The five-piece band, supported by a very able lead guitarist to Gareth’s right, rattled through seven tracks which showed both a strong grasp of musicality and a great sense of heritage.

The way the band worked Luke Bryan’s Country Girl into their rocker Try was excellent, and the way Dee sang the first line of new single I Hope It Hurts a capella straight out of Try was breathtaking and a great live trick.

Dee, looking and sounding gorgeous, was note-perfect, especially on the opener Weight of the World and the two ballads Meet You There and Not Giving Up Tonight. Like all of the main stars of country music in the UK, the band can do softies and quickies, and Dee has a voice fit for both types of tune.

Their major-label release, on Decca as part of an EP of tunes sung by new country artists, was a song written by Ben Earle called Nashville You and Me. Before playing it Gareth joked that when people used to compliment them without knowing who they were, Dexeter would say that they were The Shires, whom they remember driving ‘a Fiesta’.

Good tidings has come to The Shires, and similar gladness will come to Dexeter. Their old songs sound tight and punchy, while their encore of Lady Antebellum’s song 747 was blissful. Dee, for one, was a match for Hillary Scott, and the sustained applause at the end of the set was justified.

For more information on their future tour dates go to DexeterBand.co.uk.

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FSA Fest 2017: Bring Your Own Tent Fort San Antone, or FSA, is a key date on the UK Country Music calendar, taking place on July 28-30.

For £45 a person, with camping absolutely free, a country fan can lap up some of the best acts in the country. In conversation with the Forever British Country podcast, festival head honcho Wayne Hadlow spoke about his plans for FSA Fest, which he runs. He also DJs and puts on bands at his Tipsy Cow bar in Blackpool, which stays open on Saturday nights until a hen party-friendly 4am!!

Wayne started FSA Presents when the family sold the property in Blackpool. ‘I was there the first time round when CMT came on Sky. People could stumble across it in the middle of a video. Our media didn’t show you current US country music, which is the same problem we’re getting now, and we didn’t have the web then! We had our bands, cover bands in the clubs, and with CMT they could send their own music in. The Cheap Seats had three consecutive number 1s in Europe!

‘It all went pear-shaped when we lost CMT. We lost the only media outlet we had. Magazines were just club magazines: do what line dance to what song. It kind of went underground, because the British country acts couldn’t play the clubs. It was just about dancing, so they went to open mics.’

Wayne echoed these sentiments in another interview, this time with Dan Wharton for Your Life in a Song in 2016 where he used the phrase ‘karaoke cowboys’ to sum up the way some clubs just wanted singers to work to a backing track. ‘I was moaning about the great talent,’ he told Forever British Country, ‘and there being nowhere to book them. We’ve got our own scene now!’

FSA Fest was already happening up in Lytham, in Blackpool, which ‘grew the scene. One act would go on tour and open for another act’ which helped band B gain new fans. It sold out every year, but Wayne took the risk and moved it to a bigger site in 2016. Newark, near Nottingham, is perfectly placed in the middle of England, and the location remains ideal for acts from both ends of Britain.

Friday night, July 28, is headlined by Jess & the Bandits, who are preceded by Laura Oakes, Rosenblume, Caitlin Koch, Thorne Hill and festival opener Holly Rose Webber. After catching Jess playing Buckle and Boots, with Luke Thomas on guitar, I won’t spoil how good the new tunes from the forthcoming Smoke and Mirrors album are. (More will come in the next issue of the magazine…)

Demi Marriner draws the short straw and plays at the brunch-friendly time of 10.30am on Saturday morning. Izzy Walsh, Two Ways Home, Fifth Floor and Kevin McGuire follow, all on the Yamaha Stage.

Gary Quinn, not content with booking the bands for June’s Buckle and Boots and playing at Blackthorn Festival the weekend before, is on the FSA Fest line-up (playing on Saturday at 9pm) as one of several blokes at FSA Fest 2017, including Claydon Connor, Robbie Cavanagh (Saturday, 6.30pm), Simon James (who co-runs UK Country Live and is playing Sunday) and Joe Martin (Saturday, 4.15pm).

The Main Stage entertainment on Saturday also includes (in order of appearance) Journey Home, Most Ugly Child, the American act Kinsey Rose (one of two from the States, the other being Caitlin Koch), Foreign Affairs (who recently supported Morgan Evans), Joe Martin, The Adelaides, Ellie Dibben, the fine Frankie Davies, Clara Bond (profiled earlier in the magazine) and, headlining, the mighty Dexeter.

Jade Helliwell, who pipped Two Ways Home to a slot at Country2Country, will also be playing on the Sunday, and if you have any taste you will catch this rising superstar who is due to have the ‘good life’ about which she sings. Dahlia, Outlander, Blue Genes and Lars Pluto and The Revears are the bands playing at the festival on Sunday, along with the aforementioned The Cheap Seats.

‘There’s scope to grow,’ Wayne said of FSA Fest. ‘The big hall holds 1500 and another second stage for the afterparties hold 350. It’s all about building a scene. Nobody can take for granted it’ll be there next year,’ Wayne told Forever British Country. ‘We’re in our fifth year. We aim to break even.’ If passion were money, Wayne Hadlow would be a billionaire.

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Keith Urban + Ed Sheeran = Morgan Evans Born in Newcastle, Australia, Morgan Evans moved to Nashville in 2015 where he struck up a romance with fellow singer-songwriter Kelsea Ballerini. He is a wonderful musician whose loop pedal-assisted sounds will be on everyone’s radar in 2018.

As a prelude to his success he came to the UK in June 2017, where he wowed crowds who would have seen his name and thought, Morgan who? Hear his music and find out! Jonny Brick spoke to him just before he hit the UK, with one outdoor and four indoor venues.

Morgan, you’ve done two things all country stars want to do – play the Opry and the Bluebird – and you’re working with someone in Chris DeStefano who can start sentences with ‘Oh when I was working with Brad/ Gary LeVox/ Carrie/ Brett/ Luke/ Aldean/ Chase/ Jon Bon Jovi/ Miranda…’ I suppose all that’s left to do now is build a fanbase who can make Chris go, ‘Oh when I was working with Morgan…’

Haha well we sure are working on it! The Opry and the Bluebird are magical places in their own ways and it's an honour to be able to play there whenever I get the chance. I love Nashville.

You have proven yourself adept at turning other people’s songs into one giant one. I really think you’re onto a winner, not just because loop pedals are the new synthesisers…and both M.E. Mashups have been superb…

Well thank you! I got the loop pedal when I moved to the US. My Aussie band stayed in Australia and I missed jamming and writing with sounds other than my acoustic guitar.

I started doing the mash ups because I was going out and playing shows to American crowds who didn't know any of my songs. I wanted to find a way to pay tribute to my influences and songs that I loved that was a little more creative than just playing straight up cover songs.

I once saw KT Tunstall use the loop pedal to build a track. When you sit and compose tunes, do you use loops to build a track or do you write a melody first and put the loop underneath?

Songs start from all kinds of places, musical, lyrical, feels, noises. You can start with any element that makes you feel something!

I think a lot of people in the next decade will want depth in their superstars. Sam Hunt and Luke Bryan may be top of the pops, but they wouldn’t’ve got there without the musical abilities on piano and guitar.

Absolutely. Those guys are the real deal!

You’ve said your life changed when you watched Keith Urban play a gig. Which song of his do you wish you’d written and, if and when you have come across Keith in Nashville, has he given you any useful hints on tips on how to handle the global adulation which will come your way in the next few years?

Somebody Like You is my favourite, but there are so many great ones! He hasn't given me advice exactly but he's a proper great dude. I look up to him not only musically but also in the way he carries himself as a person in his career and his personal life.

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Having started a band at 13 you’ve been plugging away for many years. What did you learn from other young musicians, not least the girl who moved to Nashville and reinvented country music, the one named Taylor?

She just knows how to talk to people. Her people. She's incredible as an artist and as a person. Really.

You did well in Australia in 2014 with the self-titled debut album. Your song Tornado is very of the moment, with a great melody. In the UK on Spotify we have If I Didn’t Love You, which has a great rhythm to it and some killer chords in the chorus. It sounds like a great lost Keith Urban song. Which tracks from that 2014 record will be dusted off on tour, and will you be at the merch table to sign and pose and do all the things country acts do?

If I Didn't Love You was actually a song I recorded as part of a tribute album for a legendary Australian artist Tina Arena. It's one of her songs, and it was an honor to sing it.

I'll be playing a whole bunch of new stuff this week including my first single for the US & the UK [Kiss Somebody]! You'll hear it here first before it's released next month [July 21]! And yes, of course, I'll be hanging to see everyone after the show!

You’re played Glasgow’s Oran Mor venue on your four-date UK tour that took you to Bristol and London’s Borderline too. The size of audience would be similar to the one Kelsea may have told you about her gig in May – I couldn’t go but I saw her collapse into gasps during Dibs! You realise potentially you will start something enormous with these four gigs, especially with the 'whites of the eyes' intimacy of the crowd.

I love it! It's the perfect way to come and introduce myself, in person, to all of you guys! I'm so stoked.

And Gary Quinn, whom you know from way back, has invited you to Buckle and Boots. As soon as I saw the loop pedal video I knew I would never think ‘Morgan who?’ again!

Gary is a really good fella. We first met a while ago but we've stayed in touch here and there. I'm looking forward to having a beer with him this weekend.

Finally, country music seems to be halfway along a road: Sam and Luke have pushed it one way, Taylor and your fiancée have pushed it further and to a much younger, savvier crowd. I imagine you have a foot on both sides, in that your tunes appeal to a Keith Urban-type audience and a young audience who’ll see a guy with technology and think, Ooh I wanna do that…

I have just been trying to make the best music I possibly can. I figure that's all I can really do and hopefully it'll find a home in people's playlists, memories and hearts.

Further to that, you spoke as a bStreetSmart Ambassador, telling your story to a crowd in a clip on Youtube. I know Kelsea knows, but the connection with your audience today is such that you are as a musician no longer distant from them but a paradigm for how they can live their life. Whose life do you look towards?

I think it's important for anyone that has any sort of public personality to try and represent something positive and give back where they can. I look up to anyone in the community/industry/world that does that on whatever scale they're able to.

Morgan Evans’ debut single Kiss Somebody is out now on Warner Nashville. Find him @Morgan_Evans.

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Does country music have a woman problem? by Laura Cooney Ask the average person on the street who they think of as a country musician, and chances are they’ll pick one of the female legends of the genre – Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Bobbie Gentry or Patsy Cline.

Country also has a long of history of being empowering for female performers – think of Tammy Wynette singing about D.I.V.O.R.C.E., Loretta Lynn extolling the virtues of the pill or the countless tales of women scorned which populate the country songbook.

Women drove the pop-country revolution of the 80s and 90s too, with Shania Twain’s Come On Over holding the record for the longest-running Billboard number one country album. She was joined by the likes of Martina McBride, Faith Hill and Reba McEntire among others, many of whom are still playing to packed houses around the world on a nightly basis.

Meanwhile, many of modern-day country’s brightest and leading stars are women. Miranda Lambert and Carrie Underwood were both catapulted from finding fame on reality television to dominating the country charts, while Taylor Swift got her start in country and is now amongst the biggest musical stars on the planet.

Bringing up the rear is a new wave of critically and commercially acclaimed female performers such as Maren Morris, Lauren Alaina, Kelsea Ballerini and Cam. Here in the UK, it’s the likes of twin sisters Ward Thomas and Chrissie Rhodes of The Shires who are leading the charge. So on the surface it seems like the women of country are doing just fine and dandy. But incidents in recent years suggest that all may not be rosy, certainly when it comes to radio – and that’s where the problems begin.

The Problem of Airplay It all started last month when up-and-coming star Lindsay Ell tweeted that a Sacramento radio station had cancelled a planned appearance to promote her new single Waiting On You ‘because of my personal life’. Ell is currently dating Bobby Bones, a radio DJ whose syndicated morning show is broadcast across the US (most US country radio stations are owned by one of three large syndicates).

Bones responded by going on a rant on his radio show claiming that this situation would not have happened if the genders were reversed and threatening to reveal details of a dozen stations who had refused to play Ell’s music for similar reasons.

This created flashbacks to 2015’s now-infamous ‘Tomatogate’ scandal, when a male radio executive claimed that DJs were instructed not to play female artists more than 15% of the time, referring to male acts as ‘the lettuce in our salad…Women are the tomatoes’. The implication was that, as country music radio listeners are mostly female, they want to hear mostly male artists. Whether that’s the case is up for debate: certainly from my experience at gigs and club nights, women are just as enthusiastic about Carrie and Miranda as they are about the likes of Keith Urban and Blake Shelton.

But there is evidence to suggest that women are under-represented on country radio. In the latest Billboard Country Airplay chart (dated July 8), just eight of the top 60 songs feature women – five as solo artists (Maren Morris, Carly Pearce, Miranda Lambert, Kelsea Ballerini and Brooke Eden), one as part of a group (Lady Antebellum’s Hillary Scott), and three as featured artists on male performers’ songs: Carrie Underwood duetting with Keith Urban on The Fighter, Lauren Alaina teaming up with Kane Brown for What Ifs and Morris, relegated to a bit part, on Thomas Rhett’s Craving You. The highest charting solo woman is Maren…at number 27.

The diversity of Spotify playlists tells a similar story. The Hot Country playlist, as updated on June 30 2017, features 12 women on its 53 songs – Maren Morris (as a solo artist and with Rhett), Carrie Underwoood (with Keith Urban), Jillian Jacqueline (twice, both as a solo artist), Brooke Eden, Miranda 18

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Lambert, Lauren Alaina (with Kane Brown), Kelsea Ballerini, Hillary Scott, Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild and Kimberley Schlapmann, and Shania Twain.

Now not all of us are getting our music from country radio and Spotify, but they are still a significant source of new country music for many people. Spotify is particularly useful for country fans in the UK, where the genre still struggles to get airplay outside of specialist stations and Bob Harris Country on BBC Radio 2. So it follows that if this is what people are listening to then these are the types of songs that radio stations will keep playing and the types of artists in which record labels will invest.

Where It All Began There’s an argument that the under-representation of women can be traced back to the advent of ‘bro-country’ in the early 2010s. With a wave of swaggering new male artists clad in muscle vests and baseball caps whilst singing about trucks and beer, women took a back seat – figuratively and literally.

Girls were relegated to blonde bikini-wearing simpering sex goddesses, an image brilliantly skewered

by Maddie & Tae in their debut hit Girl In A Country Song.

An aside: Incidentally, when Big Machine closed down Dot Records, Maddie & Tae were the only act who were not immediately re-signed; Drake White, as one example, was reabsorbed into Big Machine straight away. Thankfully the story ends happily – Maddie & Tae have found a new home at Universal – but it does suggest that, for whatever reason, retaining a female duo with a number one under their belt wasn’t seen as being as profitable as two newer male solo artists. Make of that what you will.

Thankfully in the last few years the tide has turned. There is a move back to more traditionallyinfluenced country, with even the worst bro-country offenders mostly shifting to a more grown-up, soulful style. With that has come the rise of younger female artists, many of whom are seeing success with midtempo ballads that simply wouldn’t have landed two or three years ago. RaeLynn, with Love Triangle, and Cam, with Burning House, are two recent beneficiaries.

Coming Full Circle So is this a new dawn for female country musicians? Read an interview with any new female country act and chances are, if she gets asked the question, Who are your influences?, she’ll cite those stars who were front and centre of country music in the 1990s. The little girls who sang Dixie Chicks songs into their hairbrushes in their bedrooms are now the young women taking country music by storm.

Many of them are only on their first or second albums, but they’re already showing the chops to potentially be just as big as Miranda and Carrie within a few years…provided they get the support from fans on both sides of the pond, whether that’s encouraging radio stations to play female acts’ songs or persuading promoters to book them for festivals.

And while radio still continues to drive the country music market in the US, female acts are increasingly showing it isn’t the be-all and end-all. The likes of Kacey Musgraves, Brandy Clark and Margo Price have all experienced critical success with their albums, despite having little or no support from radio.

Ultimately, this proves that the best music will find its way through to the listener by word of mouth.

But the world of country music can be crueller to newer female acts than their male counterparts. If a woman doesn’t have a hit with her first or second single (and ideally with both) then it seems like she won’t get a third chance in the way a man might have.

So until great songs get the support they need, regardless of the performers’ genre, there may be more Lindsay Ell-esque controversies in the future.

Laura Cooney (@cherrysodablog on Twitter and Instagram) blogs about country music at CherrySodaBlog.com and is also a writer for Entertainment Focus.

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Ten Reasons to go to a UK Country Gig, by Nick Cantwell 1 You’ll find a real-life cowboy at every gig. When I say real life cowboy, it’s actually a guy with a Brummie accent who bought a Stetson on eBay for a tenner and has watched The Good, The Bad and the Ugly 56 times and thinks he is Clint Eastwood.

2 The prices are damn cheap. You can get a train ticket, your gig ticket, a T-shirt, a signed CD, a round of drinks, grab a bite to eat, another round of drinks and a cab home from the station and still have change from that £3 you took out with you.

3 Stood in the right spot you’ll get to hear some great vocal performances from the brilliant array of talent on the UK country music scene. Stood in the wrong spot, this might be drowned out by that lady who knows every word to every song and makes sure that anyone within a 10-yard circumference knows it.

4 You’ll have the chance to watch a gig close to the stage. Of course you won’t have a chance to get right to the front, as these spots are filled by the same 11 people at every gig you’ll ever go to. Don’t try to beat them! Even if you join the queue at 9am when the doors are 7pm, you’ll still be twelfth!

5 You might see some spontaneous line dancing. This will only start after the sixth round of Jack Daniels and will contain some great additional party pieces: the ‘I didn’t really fall over it was part of the dance’ move and the ‘why am I moving in the opposite direction to all the others’ step. All line dancing is completed by crowding around the Brummie cowboy (see 1), who will now proceed to wave his non-existent lasso in the air.

6 You’ll regularly get to see Guinness World Record attempts in the ‘Most People and Band Equipment Crammed onto a Small Stage’ category, as the headliners, all of the support acts plus bands, the soundman, the lighting man, the bar staff and three random members of the audience (one with a bike) all head up onto the stage at the end of the night for a singalong.

7 You’ll get to meet some new and interesting people. Such as the pair you think are twins who are wearing the matching jeans and check shirt attire, until you get closer and realise that they are husband and wife. Or the guy who is a walking encyclopaedia on every country gig in the UK since 1968 and proceeds to list them all (including the playlists).

8 You’ll enjoy some of those amazing moments when the entire crowd are clapping along in unison. I say the entire crowd, but you’ll probably be stood next to that one guy who, although intelligent in every other aspect of his life, doesn’t possess the ability to clap with any sort of rhythm.

9 If you have to miss a gig, you’ll have many opportunities to watch it live on Periscope/Facebook instead. At your average UK country gig, there is one stream for every three people in the audience.

You actually get fined if you attend more than five gigs and don’t stream any.

10 If there are no gigs on, you can always head to an open mic night. These can be fantastic, as they can feature a nice variety of artists including some great up and coming talent. You’ll also have many opportunities to head to the bar and go to the toilet when the rubbish ones are on.

Nick Cantwell is the founding editor of BellesAndGals.com, the place to go to read about females in country.

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Orfila: Five Years and Still Rocking This summer Matt, Louise and Abi Orfila (going from oldest to youngest) are in a celebratory mood.

2017 marks five years since the trio played their first gig together, and on July 7 they held a hootenanny in Canterbury for friends, fans and family. The week before the gig, and following a set at Buckle and Boots the previous weekend, Matt and Abi opened up about their summer.

‘We’re gonna have a band behind us, which we very rarely do, so there’ll be a bigger sound,’ says Matt of the celebration gig, which is useful for tracks like Raise a Glass, which has a harmonica on the studio version, and When You Look at Me, which has a pedal steel.

Abi had started the band in 2012, asking Matt to accompany her on guitar and then suggesting that Louise, ‘who had a solo career going when she was thirteen, fourteen’, joins her on backing vocals. ‘I don’t regret anything,’ she says of asking the elder siblings to help kickstart her own career, informed by hearing Taylor Swift and Lady Antebellum while on a family trip to Florida. They have since covered songs by Little Big Town, Zac Brown Band and Striking Matches, which can all be found on Youtube.

‘When we started people put us in the poppy-folk genre,’ Abi says. ‘As we progressed we didn’t decide to be a country band; we naturally went towards that genre. We had elements with country on the first album, and we wanted to bring that out a bit more.

The songs on their first album Writing on the Wall, from 2014 (and bizarrely carrying the same title as the last Raintown album!), were all original tunes written between the three of them. ‘There’s four or five songs from that album we play at every gig.’

They would have played several at their Country2Country set on the Big Entrance stage in March 2017 after also playing in 2016. ‘For the sheer fact of looking at the posters and seeing your name in the same line-up as Brad Paisley, Zac Brown Band and Ward Thomas is surreal. It was amazing,’ says Matt, who loved their own Buckle and Boots debut too (‘it was such a community feel, it was so cool).

Never Slowin’ Down, the album which came out in 2016, is to Abi ‘probably more of a rocky country.

Fine Tooth Comb and Hit the Ground Running are quite energetic songs; When You Look at Me and Raise a Glass, where the harmonica goes to town, that brings you back to traditional country.’ The latter is inspired by the siblings’ late grandfather, and was playing live for the first time at C2C 2017.

‘It sounds morbid,’ admits Matt, ‘but it was after our grandpa’s funeral. We joke about it because the funeral was in the church, so it’s our take on a hymn. The “God bless” at the end was from a speech he wrote to be read at the funeral with that line at the end. We were cracking up as we were recording it: are we in church??’

Orfila are big fans of another band with siblings in them. Ward Thomas ‘are one of the best live acts.

We saw them at Shepherd’s Bush,’ Matt says of a band who provide a realistic pathway to success for an act working in the country genre in the UK. ‘It would be great to make a living from music,’ says Matt. ‘It’s incredibly difficult but that’s definitely an aim. It’s such great fun to do.’

Never Slowin’ Down is available for streaming or purchase. Read an extended version of this piece, including Orfila’s entry into the Country Way of Life Playlist, at Blastocyst.org.uk.

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American Young: From Their Point of View Kristy and Jon are, even after all their time together, American Young. She’s from British Columbia in Cananda via Idaho, and he’s from Eugene, Oregon. She rides horses, while he rode bulls. She plays fiddle, while he plays guitar and wrote some hits for big artists.

In their recent two-week jaunt to Europe, the pair played festivals in Switzerland, Norway and Holland, and stopped off at two big UK-based festivals and a country club night. They kept pulses racing at Maverick, Buckle and Boots and Nashville Nights, gaining new fans with their take on Avicii’s Wake Me Up (Youtube provides evidence).

The obvious comparisons to make are other ‘mixed’ duos: Kristian & Jennifer, Charles & Hillary and Ben & Chrissie, as well as Two Ways Home and Luke & Mel. The harmonies fit comfortably together, and there is a mix of uptempo tracks and ballads on their 2016 release AY. Heading Abroad Speaking just before they headed to Europe for a fifth time, Kristy and Jon talk about the songs on AY and the genre in which they find themselves, and indeed the continent they were about to hit…

‘We’re in a transitional time in America so that’s why we’re coming over to see you guys!’ exclaims Kristy. ‘When we get to travel we see different cultures. Every time I come over I get to know so much about your political structures, about your parliamentary procedures. You have the Queen…’

‘Who has got awesome hair,’ Jon adds. He only gives his political opinion when he’s ‘being paid for it’, but Kristy is quite happy to elucidate: ‘America is built on its immigrants and its multiculturalism. That’s why we are such a great country!

‘Our President has an amazing economic head, a development head, so our culture will grow fiscally in different directions. In the future I am very excited to see America expand its conversations to include women. It’s an exciting time in history.’ Discussion turns to women on the radio, which will appear in a piece on country radio in a future issue of the magazine; they both have something to say about the lack of women there, with which Laura Cooney deals so brilliantly elsewhere in these pages.

‘I don’t think we had any expectations,’ Jon says of bringing the American Young sound to the UK. ‘We were optimistic that country has turned into something everybody loves it. Everybody’s listening and it’s a wonderful thing. There’s been exponential growth and we’re extremely humbled to have the opportunity to come and share our music with different countries and different cultures. Every time we’ve come over it’s gotten bigger and bigger.’

Baylen Leonard, who has played the band’s music on his show The Front Porch, ‘was over here in Nashville. He’s one of the good ones,’ Jon says, to which Kristy adds: ‘We love Baylen so much. He’s got a room at my house whenever he wants it!’ Baylen booked them at the first Nashville Meets London festival in 2016.

Kristy emphasises the love of performing. ‘You have to be passionate about your music. It takes a lot of love, a lot of heart. Jon and I have gotten to see a lot of new cultures and new places. You find a piece of yourself that you never knew you were missing. My dad is coming over to travel with us after this tour, and we’re gonna go over to Russia. I’m so excited!! One of my dreams is to get Jon and his

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mom to see The Vatican, which was the first place I got to sing outside the States at 5 o’clock mass.

Now what?! Everything else is incomparable.’

‘It’s the only way we can make money too!’ adds Jon, who has written hits for the likes of Kenny Chesney (Seven Days), Rascal Flatts (Me and My Gang) and Blake Shelton (Kiss My Country Ass). ‘You gotta keep focussed on the horizon,’ agrees Kristy when asked how similar songwriting is to riding an animal. Jon’s first hit was A Woman Like You for his pal Lee Brice. ‘It was number one across all charts.

It’s one of the better songs, I like to think. The stars were aligned for me that day when I wrote it, when we recorded it. It’s a lot of luck and preparation,’ which is a theme to which he will return.

Kristy says that between Lee, Jon and herself, ‘we put so much of our life into this record. We make albums. The sequencing, we spent days over that. Our vision was for inspiring the right conversation.’

Kristy told Maverick Magazine that Lee is ‘greatest country singer of our time, R&B and soul and country’ all in one voice. His own song Boy is outstanding, and his presence on 18, the new single from American Young, is welcome. It was written with Shane McAnally and was, to Jon, ‘a fun song to write, a fun song to record, a couple of friends getting back together about leaving town, just reliving some memories.

‘I’m staring at Lee right now, he’s got his metal detector on his farm!’ Jon finishes, and Lee joins in the conversation towards the end. The song is about drinking at eighteen, which is legal in the UK…‘We were legally getting drunk!’ Jon says reassuringly.

Kristy adds to this: ‘One of the first songs I performed in Nashville was about being “not old enough to drink but old enough to die”. You can enlist at 18 but can’t drink a beer till you’re 21. I find that confusing. I never actually thought about it!’ she says to Jon’s audible consternation. ‘I think it was 16 in Canada when I used to go there to get into bars!

As to whether the record is age-appropriate, Kristy says while Jon chuckles beside her: ‘I don’t like to swear on record, but I swear all the time in person! There’s time for a drinking song, for a weedsmoking song, but we’re both very congnizant. Jon has a young daughter. I’m very aware of little eyes.’

‘Good thing our demographic isn’t zero to ten!’ adds Jon, to which Kristy notes: ‘Our first merchandise shirt that we printed up, there’s a tiny logo on the shirt and they were high-quality cotton. We made all these large sizes, but our concert t-shirt is something people can sleep in.

‘All my friends were using them as a pusher when they were having babies. When you’re in labour you want the most comfortable thing. I’ve been told that when you play our record in utero the baby goes right to sleep. So it calms down both mommies and babies.’

Point of View Indeed, Hometown Girl is all about babies, with the line ‘one on the hip, one on the way’ particularly excellent. The “Hometown Girl”, explains Jon, ‘was a girl named Haley Georgia, who is on Warners, She came in with the idea. She was 19 or 20, talking about her move straight to Nashville.’

‘Both of us had a trip down memory lane,’ Kristy adds. ‘How terrifying it is to pack up that truck and go across the country and be here. I didn’t know anybody, I was falling in love with all the wrong kinds of people and figuring it out.

‘The industry is full of people who are trying to get you to your last dollar. You have to learn your own grit and a lot of it was put into my soul from those incredible songs by Vince Gill, Amy Grant – there’s 23

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so much integrity in the country music heritage. We are in a transitional time right now, and it’s interesting to watch.

‘It’s really important for peace of mind to be really rooted in your values and what’s around you. The women of the 90s were talking about things that were so important. As American Young we have three points of view – Lee, Jon and me – and all these other writers were coming in…’

Aside from songs about reminiscing, the album AY is full of uptempo tunes like American Dream, with its Mumford thump, and Party in the Dark. To paraphrase the great comedian David Spade, I liked Body Like a Back Road by Sam Hunt better when it was called Slow Ride.

The album’s hit has been Love is War, which leapt out from their set on the Town Square stage at Country2Country 2016 with its ‘sometimes love’ refrain. ‘It’s a great song all the way round. Great songs don’t have an expiration date,’ says Jon of the tune Kristy heard at a pitch meeting (the pair had no hand in creating the song). Closing in on five million streams on Spotify, it’s the big track on AY. The most fun song on the album is Point of View, a brilliant and lovely song where both voices contain palpable joy. The pair trade voices and emphasise each other’s personalities. Kristy reckons that ‘there’s been a missing conversation element between a man and a woman in country music. That’s how healthy relationships are built to get a deeper understanding.

‘We had a couple get engaged to it onstage around that song! We haven’t yet played it for a wedding but you never know.’

The Business of Music ‘Jon is one of the best songwriters and producers I’ve ever worked with,’ gushed Kristy to Maverick Magazine. ‘He’s intelligent, witty, and just fun to be around.’ Jon returned the compliments: ‘Kristy is an entertainer and a voice of an angel. She plays one of the most difficult instruments on earth by ear and has an unbelievable talent in creating music.’

Aside from their personal characters, Jon talks about the business relationship he has formed with Kristy and other writers.

‘I write with Ashley Gorley as much as I can, he’s a great songwriter. Once you write a lot of songs you develop a style. I enjoy writing with a small group of people, who I’ve been writing with for years.

Everybody has their own style, and the magical co-writes are when a couple of guys do a thing that’s unique, that you can’t do with somebody else.

‘The best songs are written when people listen to other people,’ he goes on. ‘You could pick up a rock in the middle of the road and write a great song about it, with some emotional attachment. You can write a song about anything, but who’s gonna play it? What label is gonna get behind a certain song that will be easy to get up the charts?’

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We now come to the business end of the chat. In a chat with Your Life in a Song, Jon was visibly itching to set the record straight on who writes what hit song and how few pure songwriters there are in town; that is, not artist-songwriters but just backroom boys and girls.

‘The business of music is not interested to cut your soul and make you feel something.’ (It’s about ‘selling advertising,’ adds Kristy when radio is mentioned.) ‘The artists want to move everybody and that’s where the disconnect it. It’s an oxymoron, “Music business”. Take Ashley Gorley, go through his catalogue. He writes about every human emotion. Some of the songs you’re never heard. He writes 200 songs a year.’ Ashley wrote four number 1 hits which featured on Luke Bryan’s album Crash My Party, which are united in being melodic and about love or dancing.

‘Songs that are really deep, emotional songs can get exhausting,’ Jon notes, ‘if you hear a lot of them over and over. There’s room for all of it all the time. We’re just going through a fad right now, like we do in all types of music. The 80s were very pop influenced for country. Even with Kenny Rogers, Islands in the Stream was the biggest pop song on the radio!’

Jon offers advice to songwriters using his deep experience in the game: ‘I will tell you this. I’ve had songs recorded by almost every major country artist, and I’ve been in this business twenty years. You show up prepared with great ideas and ready to write the best song I can write that day, without any predetermined idea of where it’s gonna go, the tempo or any of the stuff I can’t control, you win every time.’

Winners on the album AY include the love song Something To You (‘I wanna be something that means something to you’) and a track Jon co-wrote called Soldier’s Wife, which is from the perspective of the lady who, like Penelope after Odysseus, pines for their husband who is off fighting.

The Business of Living The rhythm of God Sends a Train gives the song the quality of an old railroad song. To Jon it is ‘the most unique song on the record.’ He picks it as the American Young entry into the Country Way of Life Playlist. ‘That song would stand up against any song ever written.’

Speaking with Kristy is illuminating, especially given the events that led to her writing the song: her mum survived being hit by a train. How is she now?

‘I spent six days out with her. She’s good. It’s a miraculous story. I come from a family of faith healers, in medicine and they’re free spirits and teachers. I was taught to wake up and be grateful, say a prayer, for what we have and where we’re at. The miracles every day that I see, that was one of a thousand and it just happened to my mother. It was a faith healing, so many prayers and blessings going her way. She was studying and put herself in the healthiest environment that she could get into.

Kristy advised people to have self-responsibility, raise your own food, keep your eyes on what’s around you. ‘We are just amazing machines. When we heal ourselves, the world heals itself around us. Being rooted in the reality of the actual systems that you are in is valuable,’ she says. ‘I’m a dreamer, I spent my day writing songs and then researching the solar planes that they flew around the world, Elon Musk…This massive technological advancement of the human civilization is so exciting! I’m also growing my own tomatoes which are next to me! I have a lemon tree I’m getting ready to plant…’

Just like her music, Kristy seems self-sufficient, and Jon shines a little light in her life.

AY is out now on Curb Records.

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Morganway: Musical Hurricane It’s odd to play Teiresias, a sort of prophet able to see into the future. Writing a review of the second Morganway EP The Hurricane, I predicted that if Bob Harris heard it he would send for them to record an Under the Apple Tree Session. The very day my review went live on Your Life in a Song, the band were in a minivan heading to Bob’s house to do just that.

Catching Callum Morgan, the older Morgan twin ‘by thirteen minutes’, a few hours before their spellbinding half-hour set on the BCMA Horizon Stage at Buckle and Boots, we both marvelled at the synchronicity.

‘Spooky! That was the most amazing coincidence – I don’t believe in them, it’s just a sign of things working in the right way. Life has a habit of doing that sometimes. It was too good to be true!’

‘We hadn’t really processed what a big deal it was until the moment we stepped inside the house, with all this amazing stuff that Bob has done in his life. There as an overwhelming feeling, but they were all very welcoming. We had a cup of tea and a chat, then we went into the studio.

‘It was an intense experience but a great one,’ Callum says of the session, which can be viewed on Youtube at the WhisperingBobTV channel. ‘You realise when you meet Bob how familiar his voice is.

They’re a really great family and Miles, who is so enthusiastic, records live. The sound that Miles records there is pretty much it, there’s not much control afterwards and he got a raw, lovely sound from it.’

‘We won a competition not long after we started, so we played on a big stage in front of a couple of thousand people, but it’s much scarier with Miles, Trudie and Bob a few feet away watching us. When you’re playing for a big crowd, you can’t see anyone!’

Since that session, they have played at Silverstone as part of the musical line-up brought to the F1 village by Bob. Even better for the Morganway guys – Simon on drums, Matt on keys, the younger Morgan twin Kieran and singer Yve Mary B – they are due to open for The Shires at Taverham Hall in Norwich on July 30, where their ‘Norfolkana’ (‘that’s Yve’s word, she champions that’) will go down well with picnicking families and Shires fans.

‘We’re currently recording our album and we realised how important it is to do as much live tracking as we could.’ The album may make it out into the world by the end of 2017, but one can wait for quality. ‘It’ll go out as soon as possible when it’s ready’ is all Callum can say.

Their first EP, No Tomorrows from 2015, included the great Hearts of Fire. The four tracks on The Hurricane EP were recorded in a home studio, with Callum and Yve Mary B doing the vocals without the rest of the band in the room, ‘just the two of us in a child’s room with lava lamps to make it very moody,’ says Callum.

‘Kieran and I started the band, we’re the leaders, as much as democracy can work to an extent! If Morganway is a baby, we’re the parents. We never really set out to become a country band. Fans of country music seem to like what we’re doing.’

The twins met the only female in the band in Cambridge. ‘We were on with our previous band. We’ve always played in bands but more indie rock.

‘I saw Yve play Bob Dylan’s song Buckets of Rain in a pub. She introduced us to a lot of country and Americana music. She’s got such an amazing voice and a similar taste in music to us.’ Yve, who joined the interview later, has given an amazing set of responses to one interview with her for a publication called Female First.

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A sample answer, to a question about what to expect from their live shows, was this: ‘A fun, full, impacting and melodious set, with some extra-terrestrial friendly humans on the other side of the instruments just oozing to find out about these folks' lives, there to share the sound. We'll be spreading the love and having a damn good time of it.’

Callum was less lyrical in his responses, but no less passionate. ‘I write the bulk of the songs, which originate on an acoustic guitar, and then gradually the band starts ruining it!

‘A song like Hurricane, we knew we had something special going for it because every gig we did it in, crowds seem to respond to it. We’re keen to capture that raw energy we create on stage with it.’

The song takes a left turn halfway through, changing keys and allowing Kieran to wig out. No wonder it became the title track of the EP. Elsewhere, the terrific London Life has at least two great lines: You promised the world and she gave you a son…

People judge you for all the things you like.

‘London Life found its home live,’ Callum says of the track, which has been re-recorded for the album.

‘When I was writing it I wasn’t taking it seriously, because it wasn’t like other songs I’d written. It had this Irish folk feel to it, and I wasn’t sure what it was. It became a nice little story of a guy that doesn’t know where he’s going in his life and gets lost in the noise of it all. I’m really pleased with it.

The whole band can sing and play, which gives depth to songs like My Love Ain’t Gonna Save You, which includes a great guitar lick from Kieran. The rootsy sounds of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Fleetwood Mac are a vast influence on the band. Indeed, the Morgan twins were going to see Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty in Hyde Park in July, and one of the tracks Callum picked as a Dust Bowl Disc is Insider.

‘It’s an album track from Hard Promises, and it’s an amazing track. Tom wrote it for Stevie Nicks, then decided he didn’t want to give it to her!’ The song, with great harmonies and a great melodic shape, is a key influence on the Morganway sound. Hear other tracks selected by the band, including those

by Willie Nelson and Dr Dre featuring Eminem, on the discussion later this year.

The band played a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing In the Dark, giving it a smoother, softer arrangement with harmonica provided by Yve Mary. It twists the song into a new shape (although Bruce has also performed a solo acoustic version which inspired their own cover of the song), and has been expertly recorded and edited by Miles.

‘We saw Bruce at Coventry,’ Callum says, ‘and about an hour and a half into the set he said: “I’m gonna play Born To Run start to finish.”’ The band also admire Willie Nelson, especially Yve Mary. There is no reason Morganway cannot be many people’s new favourite band, whether or not their debut album is as striking as Born To Run. Morganway play Taverham Hall, Norwich on July 30 supporting The Shires. The Hurricane EP is out now. The band are on Twitter @MorganwayUK and their website is Morganway.co.uk.

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Country Jukebox As part of the Country Way of Life project, Jonny Brick is recording original songs and covers. You can hear his attempts at singing in tune and playing in the correct rhythm on an acoustic guitar at Soundcloud.com/Jonny_Brick.

Country Covers The first set came out in April, and includes songs which have hit the country charts in the last few years. Interpretations of Sam Hunt’s Body Like a Back Road, Jason Aldean’s Any Ol Barstool and Brett Eldredge’s Somethin’ I’m Good At have all been listened to hundreds of times.

Songs by The Shires (A Thousand Hallelujahs), Maren Morris (My Church) and Tim McGraw (Something Like That) can all be found on the album. Chase Bryant (A Little Bit of You), Sam Outlaw (Hole Down in My Heart) and Old Dominion (Break Up With Him) all fly the flag for songs to do with girls, which should not stop girls from appreciating the covers.

Singalongs by Brad Paisley (Mona Lisa) and Lady Antebellum (Downtown) are present and correct, while Charlie Worsham’s slacker’s anthem Lawn Chair Don’t Care is another highlight. Eric Paslay’s tender Angels in This Town is a song many people may not know, but it deserves its place on the album.

Play It Again, one of the decade’s finest country songs, opens the set, while the Brooks & Dunn hit Put a Girl In It flies the flag for the 2000s!

Give the fifteen tracks a listen, for no cost except some wear and tear on your boots!

British Invasion The second set, which went online on July 4, contains versions of songs by twelve of the finest British artists, and one original song.

The Shires are represented by Beats to Your Rhythm, and their fellow friends in the UK album chart Ward Thomas have Way Back When interpreted by Jonny. Exciting bands The Southern Companion (Wrong Side of the 70s), Thorne Hill (Rhythm and Booze), Morganway (London Life) and Dexeter (I Hope It Hurts) are here, as are Raintown, whose song Nineteen Again contains a brilliant chorus.

Solo blokes Gary Quinn, Kevin McGuire and Jake Morrell make the album, respectively with Shame, 3AM and Wire and Thorns.

The great new single by Two Ways Home, Best Part of Me, opens the album, with Jonny taking both Lewis and Isi’s parts; the song Roots by their mates Holloway Road also makes the album.

Excitingly, and with some trepidation, Jonny includes one of his own tunes on the album as a bonus track. Dance Party was written at the Buck’n’Bull Saloon when Jonny spotted a girl in pigtails dancing to tunes on the dancefloor. The line ‘cowgirl pigtails’ hit him, and fifteen minutes later he had a song with the chorus ‘Let’s have a dance party all over this land’!

Maybe one day the song, when it is beefed up by contemporary production, will help people dance just like Holloway Road and Luke Bryan do.

Have a listen to the two sets of covers at Soundcloud.com/Jonny_Brick and keep it country!! Jonny hopes in the future to bring Country Jukebox to the stage. Get in touch @CountryWOL if you would like to inquire about potential entertainment for your party or jamboree!

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Eight-page Pullout: Nashville Meets London, Canary Wharf Weegie Country: Raintown and Kevin McGuire Weegies are what people from Glasgow affectionately call themselves. There is a thriving country scene up there with acts like Ashton Lane and Alan West, and two of them, Raintown and Kevin McGuire are performing at Nashville Meets London in fashionable Canary Wharf.

Country2Country added a Glasgow leg in 2015, so the likes of Lady Antebellum, Miranda Lambert and Thomas Rhett have all enjoyed Scottish hospitality. As someone who lived up there for five years, Scotland is one of the nicest places on earth, and it extends to its country acts.

Kevin McGuire – The Weegie Gary Le Vox Kevin McGuire is the future sound of British pop. He looks like a star, and when he was interviewed for Dust Bowl Discs podcast (released through Mixcloud.com/Blastocast on July 28 2017), he sounded like a man with a plan. KevinMcGuire.co.uk is another URL to visit if you have the inclination to do so.

‘Country music in the UK just needs a little more mainstream support,’ Kevin wisely says. ‘It just needs some exposure and it’ll get out to a wider audience. So many people would love it. I’m lucky enough that some BBC Scotland guys are championing me and we’ll get some success from that.

‘I played a lot of little shows but Buckle and Boots was my first proper country one,’ Kevin says of his debut at Buckle and Boots in 2016. He returned in 2017 to promote his new single Alright Tonight, which is a pop anthem in waiting thanks to the double chorus and a really confident vocal.

For about a year Kevin’s hit song 3AM has been a constant on Chris Country Radio (‘he’s always been very supportive’). Kevin wrote the song a few years ago, and it is a wonderful pop-country recording.

‘It was exactly what I wanted, a country song with banjos and lap steels but underneath it was a really current, r’n’b, in-your-face pop vibe that I love. It might not be a lot of people’s cup of tea but that’s what I love and I’m so glad people have said that they enjoy it.’

3AM is about a guy who is ‘getting over’ a girl but when ‘the hurricane comes back around’ he is forced to deal with late-night phone calls from a girl who has ‘got nobody left, lonely I guess’. For such a sad lyric, the music is groovy and upbeat, which creates a great pop moment.

‘There’s an underlying theme in the song,’ Kevin says. ‘It’s a girl’s booty call but a lot of people don’t know guys can go through just as much pain in a breakup as girls do. It affects guys just as much so it can go either way. The song’s about having that really bad breakup and splitting up. Then just when you’re trying to move on, they’re calling you and getting back into your life. “I’m just starting to get over you! The last thing I need is for this to come back round again.”’

Baylen Leonard, who has played Kevin’s stuff on his own radio show The Front Porch, now on Chris Country, has been ‘huge. He’s so well-known in this scene and he’s been championing my stuff.’

‘Kevin is great,’ Baylen himself tells me. ‘He sounds like he could be from anywhere, even though there are references that identify him as Scottish. I like artists who sound like where they are from, but you can hear him on an FM station driving through the South in the States and he could belong there as well. I think he’s got huge crossover appeal.’

Kevin’s Foreign Country EP contains five great tracks which will be played, along with sundry covers, as part of Kevin’s 75-minute set at Nashville Meets London.

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Blastocyst.org.uk @CountryWOL Fans of country heading to Canary Wharf will delight in Kevin’s set. He will surely play What Hurts the Most by his heroes, Rascal Flatts, which he brought out at Buckle and Boots.

‘I have all their albums. Their new one is a grower, with a few really good singles on it. They’re trying a few different things. I don’t think it had the impact they thought it would have.’

As for his fellow Weegies, Kevin admires that Raintown ‘have done a lot for the country scene up in Scotland. It’s nice to have the both of us doing something. There’s only been a handful of British artists who have been picked to play this festival, so I’m so thankful to Baylen for picking me and liking the modern country style that I like to do.’

Raintown – Parental Figures of UK Country Raintown open the weekend at 2pm on Saturday July 22, with Kevin following at 5pm. Wildwood Kin are the meat in a Weegie sandwich, and will prove how enticing a proposition they are in front of fans who have never heard of them. This is part of the appeal of Nashville Meets London, which has a further benefit: it costs £0.00 to get in. Country cosplay outfits are optional.

Raintown were missed at Buckle and Boots this year; they headlined in 2016, where they were joined onstage by a foetus inside Claire. Happily Alba Rose entered the world in October and so she must be babbling words and starting to toddle. The rest of their Scottish dates in 2017 include Belladrum (August 4) and Glasgow’s East Kilbride Arts Centre (October 6, now sold out). They’re heading down to Shoreham to play 12, and will be at SeptemberFest in Derbyshire at 4pm on September 23.

The band are continuing their tour cycle for Writing on the Wall. They’ve played their own gig at King Tut’s in Glasgow, then supported Runrig last year at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. In previous years they played to over eight thousand people supporting Wet Wet Wet. Paul and Claire told Zoe at Best British Country Music that they decided to work together after a period in Gran Canaria. The first album emerged in 2010, with the second album following in 2015. Funded with PledgeMusic, and recorded in Liverpool with producer Justin Johnson, Writing on the Wall is a great summation of that sound.

The pair told Nick of Belles and Gals that ‘country music inadvertently chose us’; years of listening to the stories and singing magical melodies contribute to the Raintown sound. With traditional Scottish stubbornness, they ignored many people who told them to avoid country. Instead, Raintown are one of the founding parents of country in Britain. Along with Gary Quinn, who booked them as the headliners for last year’s Buckle and Boots, they will remain an important band in the scene. Their two British Country Music Awards (Duo of the Year 2013, Group of the Year 2015) support their cause.

‘There’s some infrastructure starting to happen,’ Paul told Dan Wharton of Your Life in a Song in 2016.

The first C2C ‘sparked something’ but radio, websites and fans who support the artists. ‘We played C2C Glasgow at the pop-up stage in 2016,’ Paul told me from Glasgow a week before the festival. ‘It’s that opportunity for people to give a chance on Raintown, even at half eleven on a Saturday morning.

It was phenomenal, and it builds confidence within the whole team.’ Talking with Paul and Claire (mostly with Paul, whose enthusiasm is bottleable), the most common words are build, grow and 30

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drive. Any bands attempting the country sound should sit down with the pair of them and learn how to succeed, one fan at a time.

‘We have a growing genre with an infrastructure that is starting to take place,’ continues Paul. ‘The reality is not quite the way the perception is but that will change. We’ll have a much stronger base even 12 months from now. It comes down to the people within the genre who are passionate, who want to see a strong UK country scene. There’s a lot of very determined people who want that. We’re grateful to be part of it and glad to continue down that road some seven or eight years ago.’

Strangely, both Raintown and Kevin have not had massive support from Ricky Ross, whose BBC Radio Scotland show Another Country emphasises the noise coming out of Nashville and Austin. Both, of course, are played often on The Front Porch, the two-hour weekly jamboree hosted by Baylen. ‘What Baylen has done for the whole setup,’ notes Paul, ‘is bring a real passion to it, an enthusiasm that boils over and you can see it when he’s intro-ing bands. And he’s just as comfortable talking to Dolly Parton as he is to Raintown. He’s out there promoting country music, with the fans in mind. They’re gonna get beautiful harmonies, up-and-coming acts, proper Americana and the Nashville glitziness.’

The DJ himself says that Raintown are ‘fun, loud, great. It’s a poppy mainstream country sound.’ The production on the album is incredible and very current, especially on the track Living the Same Old Song. ‘We wanted to capture what we do live,’ says Claire. I love how tastefully mixed the pedal steel guitar is mixed in, thanks to Billy Decker who mixes a lot of big acts over in Nashville.

Raintown have their own sound. They don’t sound like anyone, which the pair are really proud about. Their live act is just as brilliant, with a real joy of being onstage. Claire says: ‘We do an acoustic section with two or three in the middle of the set which are really down. You have to make a call on at the time.’

Listen out for See You Again, Better Beautiful and Missing You, all tender numbers. Shut the Front Door is about the ills of social media and so-called ‘keyboard gangstas’ with extra woahs. It has a (Brad) Paisley feel, and is a sort of cousin to Online.

Paul says: ‘Our Buckle and Boots set [in 2016] had some variety, but it was the first night and we wanted it to be up so people could talk about the performance. We want to give our fans our very best, they are hugely important to us. You’ll be in front of people who have never heard of you at Nashville Meets London so you have to give people the full spectrum of what you can do. And we play to our strengths: we have one of the best voices in the country. The opportunities that we’re getting are so far beyond four years ago. It drives us to get out of perform. We are super lucky.

‘We’re grateful to be there,’ Paul says, ‘to be amongst an immense pool of talent and to see what’s new. And also to see what’s happening in our peer group, and to show people what we’re up to. For something to be free at this level is pretty extraordinary.’

His wife adds: ‘We’d do it if we were performing to twenty people. If we can convince another couple to people to come on the Raintown journey we’re all for it.’ Visit RaintownMusic.com if you join!

The festival has a variety of different acts that all fit in within the festival. It’s something for everybody.

When we did it in the East Winter Garden it was at night, with round tables. There was much more of a cabaret-type setting.’ The event was Country Collective, and the next year they returned to open for Ward Thomas. ‘Now we’re back with a full band,’ marvels Paul. It’s developed because people want to come. There will never be a hesitation for us to turn up and perform when it celebrates the things we love.’

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Baylen Leonard, DJ and Program Consultant of Nashville Meets London With apologies to Chris ‘Country’ Stevens and ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris, Baylen Leonard is the authentic voice of country broadcasting in the UK. ‘I’ve been excited about it for a year, so now I’m getting really excited about it!’ Baylen said a week before the weekend. Helped by the ‘top-notch security’ at Canary Wharf, Nashville Meets London (or, as some call it, Baylenfest) brings cowboy hats and tassels to the bland squares of London’s financial district for two whole days. The first band on Saturday are Raintown at 2pm, with Russell Dickerson’s headline set lasting until 10pm; Angaleena Presley and Lucie Silvas bookend Sunday’s festivities, with Lucie done by a sensible-for-Sunday time of 9pm.

Baylen’s show The Front Porch is essential listening on Chris Country Radio. It airs on Saturdays at 4pm, and is repeated on Wednesdays at 8pm, at ChrisCountry.co.uk. The festival is a sort of live-in-3D version of the radio show.

The show to be broadcast on July 29 (repeated August 2) will contain interviews with all the Nashville Meets London acts. There may be highlights from some performances, but if not Youtube will be the place to go for the best bits, something Baylen does not discourage ‘as long as somebody’s not blocking someone’s view!’

Last year’s Nashville Meets London line-up, including British acts Yola Carter, Pauper Kings and Megan O’Neill and American acts Logan Brill and American Young among others, helped make the first year such a smash hit. For British acts, Baylen advises, ‘it takes more exposure and graft, going out and playing all the time, any time, anywhere. In the next two to three years we’ll have a quite wide selection of people on a level with The Shires and Ward Thomas.’

Two of those have just been profiled in this pullout, while Baylen is excited about putting on Flats & Sharps, a bluegrass band from Cornwall and the hot-right-now Wildwood Kin. ‘Wildwood Kin are kind of my Yola this year,’ Baylen says. ‘I always want to have someone in the lineup that challenges traditional country fans with their sound. I can never describe why something fits into the country world, it just feels like it fits in, that there’s a connection. The root at what they are doing is the same as any of the country artists.

‘Some stadium country fans didn’t understand how Yola was country, but I believed in it. She was the type of artist who wouldn’t get a lot of play in traditional country circles, but she belonged there.

People need to hear her and see what she does. And for all the accolades they’ve been receiving, deservedly so, Wildwood Kin don’t traditionally fit in the genre of country. It’s not the first place a lot of people would put them in.

‘They’re just freaking good!’ Baylen sort of says (he used another f-word!). ‘We had them at the Americana-UK Awards in February. They stand completely on their own. Their stage show is just electric. When we were putting the line-up together for Nashville Meets London I had to fight my corner to get them.

‘A joy of doing a festival like this is that unlike a radio show, where you have to think more carefully about what follows, you can be a bit freer, you can switch gears a little bit quicker. It’s good to do things that are a little unexpected and help each artist stand out on their own. I wouldn’t have any artist on the line-up that I feel that I’d have to sell and convince people to like. I want them to be up there on their own merit.’

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The first festival in August 2016 ‘was better than I thought it would be. You never really know how many people are gonna come. I remember when I got to the site, maybe about an hour, two hours before the first act was due on, as I rounded the corner, I thought: “Dear God, let there be people there!!” There were already loads of people. It made me feel it was going to be ok.

‘People got their spot. They may not know everybody on the bill but they are open and eager. I was so pleased with how it went last year.’ Now, only forty-nine weekends later, thousands are anticipating a great (and sunny) weekend. Though who cares if it’s soggy and damp?

‘I’ve been in this country seventeen years,’ Baylen says, having moved over here from Bristol, Tennessee to work on BBC stations including Radio 2 and BBC London, where he was Danny Baker’s sidekick for over a decade. ‘The one thing that we know is that we can’t count on the weather.

Whenever in the year we’d do the festival it could rain, it could be freezing, it could be blazing hot!’

Pshaw to the poncho! ‘To worry about the weather would be a hiding to nothing. We’re a hardy British audience and we’ll get through it,’ he adds confidently. Away from the music itself, there will be tshirts on sale and Waitrose offers picnic material.

‘Every artist comes out to the merch stand to take photos and sign autographs,’ he says. ‘In the underground mall, the shops are getting involved and we’ve got some busking performances going down there of up-and-coming UK artists, who will be performing in the mall and around the site.

‘Around the site there’s quite a few bars and restaurants. There’ll be food trucks. We built a bar at the back of the space this year that has outdoor seating and room for people to sit if they don’t want to be on the grass.’ This will please fans who attended last year, and had to deal with a central bar.

Above all, Baylen has been humbled by folk in the UK taking his kind of music to heart. ‘The whole goal for me is to bring as many people into country music in the UK as possible, into what country can be.

‘The more variety I can show means that there is something on that day that someone can latch on to, then they find their way into country music. It’s really fun to bring people over and give a platform to UK artists.

‘I kind of take this thing quite personally being a Tennessee boy in a foreign land. It’s really lovely for me how supportive UK country fans are. They are so passionate, so supportive, and they go to as many gigs as they can. Let’s be honest it can be quite expensive: tickets, travel, hotels, people take they day off work.

‘When I have the opportunity to put on a festival that is totally free and do it at a level that we can get artists I know people would enjoy, it’s great.’

Better still, the festival could bring people to country subliminally. ‘I guarantee there will be moments where people will walk on by, not know what it is and be listening for a while before figuring out that it’s a country festival!

‘People have a strict idea of what country music is, particularly people who think they don’t like it. I am interested in people walking by who hear something that they like, sit down for a minute and realise they have had the best time of their life…at a country music festival!’

‘It’s my thank-you to UK country music fans for supporting it and making it what it is now. This is a party to celebrate how well it’s doing!’

Reach Baylen on Twitter @HeyBaylen. He’ll also be DJing the Buck’n’Bull Saloon night at Islington Metal Works in London on August 5. BuckNBullSaloon.com offers more information.

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Lucie Silvas, Sunday Headliner, and the Nashville Contingent Baylen Leonard has invited six artists from the States to entertain the crowd and add some authentic twang to the two-day festival. Of the six, the likeliest to come over again is Lucie Silvas. That’s because she was born in Surrey, just to the south-west of London.

Yet Lucie has made a home in Nashville, and may well be getting the plane home with Angaleena Presley, Ashley Campbell, Jo Smith and Russell Dickerson. These American acts, who are the real deal (one is the daughter of Glenn Campbell, the Rhinestone Cowboy!), would be worth every penny if the gig cost even one penny!!

Kevin McGuire, profiled earlier in this pullout, is excited to see Lucie perform. ‘I listened to Lucie Silvas growing up,’ he says. ‘She’s had songs that have been on mainstream radio, and seeing a name you’ve listened to for such a long time will be amazing.’

‘I think Lucie Silvas is phenomenal,’ agrees Baylen Leonard. ‘She’s been in the game for a long time and she’s done different types of music. She’s found her home, where her voice sits. Country music is where she belongs. She works so well with the sound, and it’ll be interesting to watch how she grows.

‘I have a little bit of a kinship with her because we both have this weird mongrel accent. When we met earlier this year we bonded over the fact that nobody can quite understand where we’re from. Lucie is from here but she lived in Australia and now she lives in Nashville.’

Lucie has just announced four British dates for November, supported by Charlie Worsham.

For those not in the know, Lucie’s husband is John Osborne, the killer, bearded guitarist from Brothers Osborne.

Lucie is actually on country radio regularly this summer; listen closely to the female harmonies on It Ain’t My Fault and you will hear Lucie putting her hands up and testifying.

‘I don’t know if Mr Lucie SIlvas is coming over, but we’ll see. Why not treat it as a holiday?! A lot of the people that we bring over it’s for the first time ever performing in the UK. Last year it was Logan Brill; here it’s Jo Smith.’

Jo Smith was interviewed by Laura Cooney for Entertainment Focus. Readers found out that Jo writes with Shane McAnally and is produced by Jesse Frasure, who wrote The Road Less Traveled with Lauren Alaina and produced Thomas Rhett’s big number one hits (co-writing Crash and Burn). Having toured with TR, who is now an A-list megastar, Jo will bring impeccable stagecraft to London. Her genre is less country than ‘Jotown’, as heard in her sweet single Old School Groove, which has the line ‘give me that 1960s déjà vu’. Very ‘countrypolitan’…

Russell Dickerson is headlining on Saturday night, with a set featuring his smash hit Yours, which he has performed on primetime TV in the States. Like Kevin McGuire, Russell is photogenic and has a great voice; the complete package, he will win some fans on Saturday night. ‘I’ve been following Russell Dickerson’s career from afar for a couple of years,’ Baylen says. ‘I’ve never met him and I knew he was gonna be a Big Deal.

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‘It worked out both ways. He’s perfect for us: a great sound and a great show to end a Saturday party night. And he’s not been here before, so it’s a great shop window for him to come over and do what he can do. And it’s two thousand people. It’s not a small gig.

‘When US artists come over to make their entry into the UK market they’ll play some of the venues that fit a couple hundred people do smaller gigs around the country but this is an opportunity to play in front of quite a hefty number of people. There’s no risk. People are country fans and it’s free. Luckily, because last year was such a success, the word has spread in Nashville that this is a good thing to play.

‘We don’t have to worry about selling tickets here, making a profit. I can say these guys are great.

Punters who are coming may know some people on the bill but because it’s free it’ll be a great day out and see people who are there at other gigs. So they can kind of take a punt on guys they haven’t heard of.

For Sam Outlaw, who has attracted more and more punters to his UK shows over the last two years, it will be his biggest-ever London crowd. Baylen has been a fan ‘for two or three years, since Angeleno.

‘When we booked Sam it was early on, among one of the first and it was just as Tenderheart had come out. It’s great that everybody else has cottoned on that it’s a fantastic album, which has taken him to a whole other level. And we got him before all that critical acclaim!’

Six American acts are coming over, and like a buffet with chicken wings, pork rinds and slaw, it a true musical buffet. ‘Ideally I try to run the gamut of country music.

‘Look at the difference between the sounds: Jo Smith and her Motown thing, Lucie Silvas and her thing, Angaleena Presley and her Outlaw thing. She’s such a great storyteller and a talented musician, and I just knew she’s a kick-ass performer and really fun. Doing things her own way is why people are throwing accolades at her.’

Those who read the review of her recent album Wrangled in the June issue of this magazine, or who have read her remarkable Rolling Stone Country interview, can attest to an amazing character, and Baylen cannot wait to introduce her to an open-minded UK audience.

‘She’s been over here loads and knows the UK. Her and I get on like a house on fire, and I was so excited to get her and a full band. Usually she’s played with a pick-up band [of musicians based in the UK] or played solo.

‘To have her opening on the Sunday is a super coup. You want people to get there really early and nobody wants to miss Angaleena Presley.

‘We got her in and that was the only spot left. None of the artists have any egos; the line-up isn’t done from the most unknown to the best known. All of these people will make new fans and grow their UK audience more. The more they play gigs like this, the more they go back to the States and talk about it to their contemporaries, so it just builds on itself, a self-fulfilling prophecy.’

Sam Outlaw is profiled on the next page…

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Sam Outlaw: One Fan at a Time There are worse places to meet Dan Wharton, founding editor of the country news’n’views website Your Life in a Song, than in East London as Sam Outlaw is bringing SoCal Country to the UK at the end of March 2017. Dan was seeing him for the fifth time, and sat down with him before this gig to chat a little; you can view the video, as always, on the Youtube channel Your Life in a Song.

Sam, whose mum’s maiden name really is Outlaw, has been one of YLiaS’s top artists since he put out Angeleno in the UK at the start of 2016. He first came to the UK in summer of that year, then returned a couple of times in early 2017 to roadtest songs from Tenderheart. His visit to Nashville Meets London, where he plays on Sunday at 6.15pm one beneath the headliner Lucie Silvas.

Dan wrote of Angeleno: ‘This is how country really should be.’ Album two takes the themes of album one, Angeleno, and runs with them. Dan stated in his Tenderheart review that Sam is ‘the most underrated artist in country music’. Of the tracks on Tenderheart, many were immediate and a few have grown on Dan, such as Say It To Me: ‘Lyrically when I first heard it I thought it was a little bit repetitive, but it’s quite clever, quirky and very catchy as well.’

Sam has a way with a title, not least She’s Playing Hard to Get (Rid Of) and Jesus Take the Wheel (And Drive Me to A Bar). This, to Dan, matches his stage presence, which is as funny and wry as that of Brad Paisley. ‘He’s so quick and witty. It’s half comedy, half music when you see Sam.’ Dan has been in the audience as Sam played a pub in Sheffield, as an opening act for Aaron Watson in Birmingham, at the Tunnels in Bristol and at Oslo in Hackney. Clashing schedules means he has to send another member of the YLiaS team to London, but there are other chances to see him on the July visit to Europe which has already taken in Norway, Sweden and Holland. Oxford, Nottingham, Perth, Manchester and Gateshead are stops on this tour, and he returns to Denmark, Leeds, Sheffield, Brighton and Birmingham (though alas not London) the last week of August.

Sam’s new single, released to radio this month, is Trouble, which has a similar groove to Ghost Town, one of the highlights of Angeleno. Bob Harris has played them both on his Radio 2 show, and is the song Dan Wharton would play to introduce a non-country or non-Sam acolyte to Sam Outlaw.

‘Sam introduced me to the Americana world,’ Dan adds in conversation a week before his third visit of the year. ‘He knows his type of music is not going to appeal to the masses.’ The mariachi trumpets, added by Ry Cooder on the album Angeleno, have not yet appeared on UK stages; perhaps the longterm goal is to bring Tex-Mex music to Britain!

One fan at a time, one gig at a time, Sam is building a European fanbase, of which Dan is part.

‘He’s very appreciate of the praise,’ he said having spoken to Sam. ‘He’s very humble. He’s doing music cos he knows nothing else, it’s what he wants to do for the rest of his life.

‘He doesn’t realise his quality. I was talking to him about Angeleno, and I said it’s the only album me [aged 20] and my 81-year-old nan can listen to at the same time. He was blown away by that.’

As a Watford fan, I appreciate Troy Deeney, the club captain, who took an unconventional route to the top, not coming through a recognised Academy which trains young players but reaching the top nonetheless. It is not fatuous (especially to those small number of people who respect both Troy and Sam) to call Sam Outlaw the Troy Deeney of the Americana movement.

Tenderheart is out now. SamOutlaw.com/tour lists the tour dates for both legs of Sam’s summer tour.

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Why is Country so Popular in the UK Right Now? by James Daykin Country music is wildly popular in the UK right now, with both homegrown and imported acts touring at unprecedented levels. In fact if any more tours or shows are announced for the October/November 2017 season we may well reach ‘critical overload’ status!

My own association with country began in the 90s after trips to USA saw me coming home with CDs (remember them?) from artists such as Garth Brooks, Tim McGraw, Mindy McCready and Faith Hill.

Keith Urban and Sugarland saw me through the early part of the millennium, but it wasn’t until a trip to California about 6 years ago that I began to really fall in love with the genre. Three songs were on constant radio repeat: Kip Moore’s Beer Money; Zac Brown’s Colder Weather; and Jason Aldean’s My Kinda Party. I was hooked and since then I’ve turned my back on my first musical love (hard rock/heavy metal) and become a dyed-in-the-wool country fan.

In this article I want to examine why this has happened not just for me but for countless other British music fans.

The Internet Firstly, as with most things these days, the internet has played a huge part in the change. If you were a country fan back in the 70s, 80s and 90s there was little you could do beside buying an album that would further your interest in any particular artist. A few specialist magazines did exist, but the chances of hearing about a musician, or even watching them perform, were few and far between.

The advent of the internet and social media has been a godsend to country music fans. Albums are released here simultaneously with release dates in America. You can now ‘talk’ to the artists themselves on formats such as Twitter, can watch them perform from way out in the back of nowhere on Youtube and can read all about their personal lives on one of many thousands of websites. The accessibility of information is amazing, so there is now little difference in how you can interact with an artist from Baton Rouge to Bromsgrove!

This unprecedented access and availability promotes a dissemination of music and provides unlimited opportunities for fans to ‘bond’ with artists on more levels than just the music. You can watch Kip Moore on his holidays, can engage with Lauren Alaina’s messages on health and have the chance to see inside the studio as Lee Brice makes his new album.

A Broader Church Country music itself has changed. It is a much broader church than it used to be. Mention country music to your average English person and you will still get Dolly Parton and line dancing jibes, but for those of us immersed in the genre it is now a musical treasure trove of diverse sounds from Sam Hunt to Sturgill Simpson. Many artists and writers have flocked to Nashville over the years, widening the parameters of what is deemed acceptable in the country world.

This has ‘blown the bloody doors off’ the country scene. While you can still hear the odd dissenting moan about certain music ‘not being country’, most genre fans seem thrilled with the wider choice.

Dan Huff, one of the most popular producers in Nashville, used to be the focal point of hard rock band Giant. He has brought a rockier edge to the country sound and he is not alone. RnB, Hip Hop and Rap have all been assimilated into the sounds of various artists and bands, to such an extent that the country world of 2017 is a lot more inclusive and accessible to those of us overseas than it was in 1986.

Who would have thought Pharrell Williams would have been working in Country music?

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Arguably the two best songs on Brad Paisley’s Love and War album are Grey Goose Chase and Solar Powered Girl. Both were produced by RnB legend Timbaland. There will always be murmurs of discontent and tutting from traditionalists, but it is an inescapable truth that Country music has diversified; that has been nothing but healthy for the genre.

Revenue Streams The change in the way musicians earn revenue has also benefitted country fans from ‘across the pond’.

Back in the 70s and 8’s an artist would record an album and then tour in support of that album. Album sales drove revenue streams. That model is long dead now.

Today, in 2017, artists record albums so that they can tour because the live arena is where the big money is. I have ticket stubs from gigs in the late 80s where I was paying no more than £8 to see an act live. EIGHT POUNDS!! Nowadays you don’t get much change out of £50 for the big arena acts, and the very top bands can charge three-figure sums and sell out arenas night after night.

Artists need to play live if they are going to build a pension pot of any note which means more live gigs and concerts for the average fan. Country fans from the 80s and 90s must be amazed at how many genre artists now come over to England compared to how sparse visits used to be. I can’t believe how many country artists I’ve seen in the past 5 years that I never dreamed I would ever see live, and it’s seeing a musician in their live habitat that builds loyalty and increased fan attention.

A whole new generation of Country artists are seeing a UK tour as an essential ‘rite of passage’ as they build their fan bases and revenue streams up from nothing. Hunter Hayes and Kacey Musgraves were early adopters. Darius Rucker has always played over here whilst newer acts like Kip Moore, Canaan Smith and Striking Matches are probably more popular in the UK right now than they are back home.

The C2C Festival There is no doubt that another contributing factor towards the popularity of country music in the British Isles has been the success of the Country2Country Festival (C2C), held every March at the O2 arena in London. Starting five years ago as a one-day event, it has blossomed into what I can only describe as ‘my Glastonbury’.

I still haven’t worked out whether there was a whole Kevin Costner-type ‘Field of Dreams’ thing (‘If you build it they will come’) or whether the organisers sniffed a zeitgeist moment for country music in the UK but it has been transformed into a huge three-day event for which tickets for each day easily sell out.

The joy of the event, though, is not just the major American acts that have graced the stage over the four years – Carrie Underwood, Florida Georgia Line, Miranda Lambert, Lady Antebellum, Brad Paisley and the rest – but it is in how the festival is also becoming a showcase for new and emerging talent.

For the 2017 festival over 70 smaller acts, some American and some European, played in various venues around the O2, turning the event into an unmissable feast of folk, country and Americana music.

The festival now has a symbiotic relationship with the genre. Its success has fuelled greater interest in the genre as a whole which has in turn generated more interest in the festival as each year goes by.

Certain acts, like Kip Moore in 2015, have created a fan base for themselves overnight by simply gracing the stage at the C2C festival. Links to the Bluebird Cafe, Radio Two and other ‘big-hitting’ genre organisations have only added to the popularity of the event.

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Nashville (the TV show) Added to the glitz of the C2C festival has been the TV show Nashville, which has brought a dose of Dynasty-style glamour to our TV screens. The heartbreaks and hurt of Deacon, Rayna, Juliette and co have been immensely popular in England. We do Downton Abbey and send it over to the States; in return, we get the trials and tribulations of Music City’s finest.

The show’s music has been great, a real eclectic mix of east and west Nashville with a healthy amount of slick pop thrown in. For a nation addicted to soap operas, Nashville is manna from heaven: Eastenders without the grime, Corrie without the bleak Northern backdrop, Hollyoaks but for grownups who like great music! Nashville hits us right where we want it to, and helps form the jigsaw of events that have come together in a perfect storm of country music-driven popularity.

History and Tradition England is a largely rural country populated by blue collar workers who know what it is like to punch in at 9am on a Monday morning and clock out again at 5pm on Friday. We were the country that created the shipyards, the coal mines and the car factories. We know what it’s like doing a hard week’s work, and this proletarian outlook forms the basis of approximately 35% of all country music songs!!

OK, we might not be tearing it up on John Deere tractors or toiling away on a farm, but a working day is a working day, no matter where in the world you are. And as for songs about drinking? Have you not been in an NHS A&E department at 10pm on a Saturday night? We invented drinking!! I have been to America eight times over the years and still have yet to meet an American who can stay the distance on a boozy night out with your average Englishman. We like a drink. We like a party, so why would we not like songs about drinking and partying?

One of the other reasons that country music has become so popular in the UK is that it is an expression of the fun and the good times that we want to have. Life is hard in 2017 and many people just want to have a bit of fun with their music. Country fits the bill. Most English guitar music is a dreary amalgam of shoe-gazing indie bands like The Smiths or angry mod posers like The Jam. Where’s the joy in that?

The last thing I want to hear about after a hard day at work is how some spotty kid from Manchester is angst ridden because it’s raining again.

Demographics Finally, I’m going to throw age into the mix. The original ravers and rockers of the 60s and 70s have all grown up and got old. However, disposable incomes and healthier lives mean that they still want to hear live music. The breadth of the audience at C2C is amazing. In one row of the arena this year I could see people from the age of 7 to 70 all enjoying the same type of music. Country music knows no age boundaries like other genres do. Can you imagine people in their 60s rocking up at a rap gig?

A lot of the genres spanning the music industry these days are populated solely by young people.

Country music is all-inclusive: age is no boundary to enjoying the music and there are a lot of people out there who want to hear good music, played well by people of all ages with amazing voices. That to me is what the heart and soul of country music is all about and why it is no coincidence that it is so popular in the British Isles and Europe right now. Long may the success continue!

James Daykin writes for several country publications and websites. He is on Twitter @rockjames and his own site is From England to Nashville.

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The Best Venues for Country Music in Britain: Scotland and The North In the June edition of the magazine, two pages laid bare the extraordinary number of venues that country fans could head to within the M25 motorway. Across the rest of the UK, from Scotland to Bristol, non-Londoners are getting their fix too. Here are some of their destinations…

Glasgow SSE Hydro Country2Country hit Scotland for the first time in 2015 and chose this 13,000-seat arena. C2C returns for a fourth year on March 9-11 2018, perhaps with the likes of Luke Bryan returning to greet their Scottish fans. Lady Antebellum stop off here on October 7, enabling support acts Kelsea Ballerini and Brett Young to introduce themselves to some of the world’s best crowds.

ABC Glasgow’s mid-sized venue was also due to host Jason Isbell on October 26 but he has been upgraded to the Academy, which is managed by the same company. Kip Moore and Drake White will be at ABC on October 4, and Maren Morris heads there on November 13.

Oran Mor Even though I lived in Edinburgh for five years, I knew all the big musicians only went to Glasgow. The capital’s Usher Hall, with a newly-restored organ for classical gigs, is an option for the likes of The Shires, but it’s Glasgow that attracts the American acts. I love Oran Mor, a converted church, and I think Marty Stuart and Brandy Clark will love it too when they play on October 9 and 29 respectively.

St Luke’s The Scottish date for the CMA Songwriters Series on October 6 as part of Country Music Week is at this East End church. The organ has been there for two centuries, and it will be a great setting for a wonderful night, perhaps persuading more American performers to book the venue in future.

Manchester Manchester Academy Right in the heart of town by where the BBC used to be on Oxford Road, the Academy’s four spaces have something for every taste, including Belinda Carlisle, Sisqo and Dua Lipa in the space of five nights! As far as country goes, they’re the venue chosen to introduce Thomas Rhett and Old Dominion to Manchester on November 12, and The Cadillac Three and Brothers Osborne stop by the next weekend on November 18 to bring country-rock to the city on a Saturday night! Lady Antebellum, as befits an act playing the O2 Arena, are due to play the Manchester Arena as part of their UK tour, which is due to reopen in September after the horrible events of the spring.

Ritz Manchester Here is where Maddie & Tae play on August 23, Kip Moore and Drake White tear it up on October 3 and Maren Morris does her thing on November 20. It’s a top venue, equivalent to London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire or (below, with similar country acts playing) the Institute in Birmingham.

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Gullivers Manchester A room above a pub in the city’s version of Soho, the Northern Quarter, which can accommodate about a hundred folk, Gullivers is the place to be on July 21 for another UK Country Live event featuring Jade Helliwell. If you’re reading this after the event, then try Jess and the Bandits on September 22, which is the same sort of thing but with an American singing and not a girl from Yorkshire!

Night & Day, Manchester On the same street as Gullivers (Oldham Street), the intimate café Night & Day rolls out the red carpet for Sam Outlaw on July 27. Mo Pitney comes over from the States to play on September 3, with support from the super Frankie Davies. Dan Wharton saw Aaron Watson here, and recommends this as a great, intimate place to see country in Manchester. Elsewhere in autumn, when the weather starts to turn and Christmas decorations invade shelves across the city, Maria Jordan hosts One Night in Nashville on September 21 and Wildwood Kin perform songs from their debut album on October 25.

The Tipsy Cow, Blackpool Just outside Manchester is the seaside town of Blackpool. Recently opened as a hotspot for parties in the stag-and-hen capital of Northern Britain, the Tipsy Cow keeps people dancing till 4am on Saturday nights. DJ Wayne Hadlow, whom we met earlier in the magazine plugging FSA Fest, plays some rock for non-country fans at the weekend but pop in on Sundays and request your favourite country tune.

Birmingham Institute One of many venues around the UK branded with O2 (see also Glasgow ABC and Ritz Manchester), this is the mid-sized venue which hosts rock and pop acts with small followings. There are three spaces: Institute, Institute2 and (can you guess?) Institute3. Little Big Town appear at the first of these on their UK tour, on September 29; Kip Moore and Drake White are turning it up to 11 three nights later (October 2), and this is where Maren Morris has been booked to play on November 17. The next night sees Insane Clown Posse play; one of their fans (or Juggalos) was recently arrested in Boston for demanding a radio station play one of their songs. Not even Kip Moore’s fans are that crazy!!

Kitchen Garden Café There is a video of Dan Wharton, Brum-based Your Life in a Song head honcho, speaking to Sarah Darling in the al fresco part of the Garden Café, which is in the Kings Heath area of the city. It looked marvellous in the sunshine, and is filled with music for many days this summer. Country is one of many genres represented, with Bob Harris favourite Peter Bruntnell playing on September 14 and Worry Dolls rocking up on November 16. It’s the Midlands version of Greennote Camden.

Bristol Colston Hall Bristol’s version of the Royal Albert Hall, this venue has just hosted some of River Town, a weekend of Americana featuring Sarah Darling, Two Ways Home, Jim Lauderdale, My Darling Clementine, Angaleena Presley and Yola Carter. Yola, from Bristol herself, should headline the main space one day, but this time around she played The Lantern, a space within Colston Hall. On July 14 The Shires and Ward Thomas shared billing at the Academy as part of River Town; Trinity, which welcomes Dan + Shay on November 29, is another neat venue in the city.

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CountryLine’s Nathalie Cox: Application Welcome An application for phones to keep country fans in the loop is an excellent idea. Nathalie Cox, who acts as the friendly face of the app, spoke about CountryLine in advance of what was to be a busy second half of 2017…

On the Rise of Country Music Simon [Walker, with Nathalie the app’s co-founder] comes from a digital background, having working at the BBC and EMI. We got together a couple of years ago and realised there was an opening in the market: country music is the second-fastest-growing genre in the UK. Taylor Swift has a lot to do with it, and we went to see Kacey Musgraves at the Royal Albert Hall last year. There was this whole bunch of young teenage girls behind us. They were all there with their tiaras on, and they knew all the words, which shows that country music is a broad genre. It’s got teenage girls who listen to it and my dad. It’s got a huge audience which is helping push it into the mainstream.

Nashville is a great TV show with great music in it. It’s the Glee effect, bringing music back into TV show in a way that’s not cheesy – well it is cheesy, but people don’t mind it. Nashville is the country version of Glee, and that’s why they can do a tour like that, and people want to see them singing the songs and listen to their own stuff. These are really talented musicians!

One of the guys we interviewed at C2C said it was like rock’n’roll in the 60s. America did it amazingly, then England caught on and boys formed a band so they could get girls to be their groupies, so it hit over here. It’s sort of happening a bit like that now – America has had country music for such a long time.

On CountryLine We had a great response at C2C but the festival is so big, from a media point of view, that it’s difficult to get all the interviews because there’s so many bands playing. As a fan it’s the highlight of your calendar, and the only chance to see all those big bands in one place. If you can pitch a tent in the car park it would be great, not schlep home on the Jubilee Line every time!!

The app itself went live at the end of June. We’re populating it with content and tweaking it; all these things take time. We’ve got some backstage interviews from C2C and from other acts who have come over this year.

We are this wonderful cauldron of country. We’re working with Bob and Miles from Whispering Bob TV. We’ve teamed up with Gail’s Kitchen, with the Songwriters Rounds and some acoustic sets. The Round Up is the first Thursday of every month [Holloway Road, Lisa Wright and Frankie Davies played in July]. We’ll have a couple of events at the café too over August!

Plus we’ve teamed up with Boondocks in Old Street – the food is amazing! – and downstairs we’re doing sessions with full bands. As soon as you get a drumkit in Gail’s Kitchen it’s too loud; with the café it’s more intimate like the Bluebird, an evening with the artist. Boondocks is ‘come and party with’ the artist!

September or October it’s really gonna kick off, though we’ll be at Nashville Meets London too, which is brilliant. It’s a free event, and it’s about making music accessible to people and introducing stuff to people that they wouldn’t normally listen to.

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On Country Music in the UK When you say country I think of Johnny Cash, who I grew up with. Country can be anything that you want it to be. It’s so vast and so wonderful. On the app we do Americana and bro-country and country that almost sounds like pop music for people who don’t realise it’s country.

The flow of it coming over from the States is getting stronger and we’re picking it up and running with it. A lot of bands from here are growing. The Shires are lovely, down to earth, and so talented.

Catherine McGrath is amazing, then there’s a lot of smaller bands getting a bit more traction and it’s brilliant for all UK fans who like country music. Holloway Road are one of my favourites.

It’s about the songs, and that’s why we’re excited about the songwriter nights. Country music tells a story and that’s why people like it, so if they can get a glimpse behind the curtain it’s even better for them.

We want to give the artists an opportunity to show their stuff to the fans and let the fans get close to the artists. We’re basically the matchmaker in the middle. We’re excited that we’re there at the beginning. We’re gonna ride this wave and listen to some good music on the way!!

Find the CountryLine app on iTunes and in the Google Play store.

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Brandy Clark: Small Town, Big Influence by Lesley Hastings Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived in a really small town with her parents and her brother. She was exposed to a lot of country music there, thanks largely to her family's love of the genre. When she saw the Patsy Cline biopic Sweet Dreams aged nine, she decided that when she grew up she wanted to sing and write songs just like Patsy did.

Fast forwards: that little girl is today, among her many accolades, a CMA Award winner and a six-time GRAMMY nominee. She was even nominated in the same category, Best Country Album, as one of her biggest influences, Loretta Lynn, at this year's Grammys, and appeared at a tribute concert to her at LA’s iconic Troubadour Theatre the night before the ceremony. She has had songs cut by numerous country artists including Miranda Lambert, Reba McEntire and The Band Perry, and has recorded two critically acclaimed albums of her own: 12 Stories (2013) and Big Day in a Small Town (2016).

But although Brandy Clark’s childhood dreams are finally coming true, no fairy godmother waved a magic wand over her. There have been ups and downs, a lot of hard work and a bit of good fortune along the way for her to get to where she is now. And though she has moved to the bright lights of Music City, her heart has never strayed far from her family and her hometown of Morton, Washington.

In fact she was so homesick when she left initially, to take up a basketball scholarship at university, she quit the course and returned there before too long, buying a guitar on the way back. Since then, music has been her career choice, after she headed to Nashville to study music business at Belmont. Ironically her application for the Songwriting course there was unsuccessful not once but twice!

Characters and situations from her experience of small town living have provided rich pickings for much of her writing over the years, in particular for the songs that feature on her own albums. ‘There’s a grain of truth in all my songs,’ she says. Soap Opera is based around the conversations a hairdresser and a barman have with their clients; the song was inspired by the fact that gossip spreads like wildfire around small towns, and by Brandy’s concern about what locals may think about things that were going on in her life…

She recalls her mother telling her: ‘We’re all the stars of our own daytime drama, in everyone else we’re just bit characters, so no one really cares that much.’ As she sings in the song: If Hollywood was handing out Emmys, we’d all be saying Gimme, gimme, gimme!

The harsh realities of life she has observed aren’t always pretty, and she’s not afraid to feature songs on her albums about alcoholism, smoking weed (at some concerts she dedicates an entire section to 44

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‘substance abuse songs’!), wives cheating on their husbands (and vice versa) and teenage pregnancy.

Brandy has frequently said in interviews that these songs are often the ones other artists wouldn’t record due to their edgy, risqué subject matter. This is quite possibly one reason, sadly, that Brandy receives relatively little play on country music radio stations stateside. (Don’t even get me started on how females in general are under-represented…)

This is a travesty. Part of the beauty of Brandy’s writing is that, whether you are from a small town yourself or from a big city, there is always something that resonates, whether it’s the situation or the larger-than-life characters she describes so well. Brandy has said how she can visualise them really clearly as she writes. It might be the bored, pot-smoking mother and wife she writes about in Get High was based on someone she graduated high school with. Apparently she thought she’d written about something pretty unique as there were only fifty or so students in her year, but whenever she plays it people come up to her afterwards and say: ‘That girl you went to high school with? That’s my sister’ or ‘That’s my mom’ or even, once in a while, ‘That’s me!’

Or it might be the twenty-eight-year-old in Homecoming Queen who ‘loves her husband cause she said she would’ and whose teenage plans of moving away to a better life never materialised. I’m sure a lot of us had dreams and ambitions that sadly never came true and compromises that had to be made.

And wherever you live I bet you know someone like the single mother in her song Three Kids, No Husband, the ‘real-life hero…a mom and a dad and a taxi driver’ who has to stop herself from fantasising about a customer at the dead-end job she works to help ends meet.

As well being able to connect with listeners from all walks of life, another talent in Brandy’s writing is the ability she and her co-writers (many of whom, including frequent collaborator Shane McAnally, have also experienced smalltown life) have of seeing the amusing side of dark situations. Their poignant, heart-wrenching songs are balanced by others that will have you laughing at their witty lyrics and turns of phrase.

A great example of this is the title track to Big Day in a Small Town; like the aforementioned Soap Opera it references seemingly inconsequential events that become a big deal in a small community where there ‘ain’t no mall, no waffle house, but there’s always something to talk about’. These topics include someone going shopping in Walmart ‘in nothing but a nightgown’ and someone shooting a deer.

Broke, also on Big Day in a Small Town, paints a fabulously entertaining picture of a small rural community where everyone is strapped for cash, ‘secretly wishing that grandma would croak’ as they sit on their porches ‘drinking generic coke’. As Brandy says, based on her upbringing there are grains of truth in both of these I’m sure.

I have been fortunate enough to see Brandy play live on several occasions now, on both sides of the Atlantic, including shows in the cities nearest to Morton (Portland and Seattle) where the appreciation and pride the hometown fans have for her mirrors the love she so obviously feels for the area where she grew up and for the people who have believed in her over the years.

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I reviewed her recent Seattle show for the website Belles and Gals and I hope I captured at least part of the incredible atmosphere that evening. You can read the piece on the next page. I’m also pleased to say that the new song I mention in the review, You’re Drunk, which I loved so much, has now been recorded and was announced as her latest single!

I am sure that the reciprocal love I have witnessed at these concerts will be multiplied countless times in August when Brandy returns to Morton itself to play at the annual Loggers Jubilee, a three-day event which is now in its 75th year.

This will be particularly poignant for Brandy and her friends and family, I am sure, as Brandy’s father, like many in the area, was employed in the logging industry. He was tragically killed in a work-related accident.

Having visited Morton myself I can vouch for the fact that it really is a sleepy, small town. The huge logging trucks rolling down its narrow roads seemingly at odds with the rest of it, but every year its population of nine hundred people swells to several thousand to witness its traditional events such as the lawnmower races and logging shows!

Brandy’s concert this year will be the weekend’s finale and she will definitely be ‘Homecoming Queen’, a title which befits the little girl who never gave up on her ‘Sweet Dreams’ and who has done her tiny hometown proud.

Sadly this is one concert I won’t be seeing, but am looking forwards to her UK tour this October for sure.

For all the details on the tour, check out BrandyClarkMusic.com.

On the eve of this year’s GRAMMY ceremony, I remember an interviewer asking Brandy what she would be doing to prepare for the event the next day.

Brandy, as down-to-earth as always, replied that she would be getting her hair done as her roots were showing a little more than she liked!!

Let’s be thankful that her small-town roots are something she’ll never be rid of, and may they result in many more songs from Brandy in the future.

You’re Drunk, Brandy Clark’s new single, is out this summer. Follow her @TheBrandyClark for details.

Her albums 12 Stories and Big Day in a Small Town are available for download and streaming now.

All photos in this piece are © Lesley Hastings.

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Brandy Clark at Tractor Tavern, Seattle, as watched by Lesley Hastings ‘Nothing fills my heart more than knowing my home loves me dearly!’ an emotional Brandy Clark told the crowd at Seattle’s Tractor Tavern at the end of her sold-out show. Indeed, there was love in abundance and deserved appreciation for this Washington native from the nearby (in American terms!) town of Morton throughout this concert.

With its population of just 900, around twice the venue’s capacity, her hometown has famously provided the inspiration for much of her writing, including of course the title track to her latest album, Big Day in a Small Town. The majority of the audience seemed to be connected to Morton and/or Brandy in some way, resulting in a real party atmosphere the entire evening, with particularly huge cheers going out with every mention of Morton during the set.

Brandy got the show underway with the ever-popular Stripes, and everyone was singing along and dancing (as much as was possible in the confined space!) from the start, which was a marked contrast from the hushed reverence at some of her UK shows I’ve attended.

With such a punishing schedule I don’t know how Brandy manages to keep in such good vocal shape, but somehow she does and this concert was no exception, whether on the more amusing, upbeat songs or the slower heart-wrenching ballads. This tour has seen Brandy and her trusty and talented lead guitar player Miles Aubrey joined by bass player Vanessa McGowan, who has really brought a new dimension to the mix not only with her playing (she alternates between guitar and upright bass which she sometimes bows, sometimes plucks) but with her upper range harmonies. With Miles’ lower harmonies and his ability to switch to keyboard, this combination provided a lot of scope for variety in the arrangements, something I loved.

The set was a mix of songs from both Brandy’s albums – none of the many cuts she’s had by other artists made the list on this occasion – with the addition of one new song, You’re Drunk, which Brandy introduced in her own amusing way by saying: ‘I’m sure we’ve all had someone we’ve liked a little more than we should do when we’re drunk, and vice versa! Well that’s what this one’s about!’ It’s a really fun song with a jazzy/blues vibe, so is something a bit different sonically, and it’s about wanting to put a stop to regularly getting visits in the early hours when the other party is drunk and has been dumped: This thing we got’s become so damn dysfunctional You only seem to want me when you’re drunk as a skunk Every time you end up all alone it’s on.

Hopefully this will make it to the album of drinking songs Brandy talks about recording; somehow or other, it needs to be heard by more people for sure!

Ever down to earth, Brandy got to the end of the set and said: ‘I was going off stage now but we’ve all been standing way too long already and I’m not wearing shoes designed for standing in so I’ll play my encore straight away!’ With Miles on keys, Brandy gave us a stunning rendition of You Can Come Over before the fabulous show ended with everyone joining in on Pray to Jesus. As a UK-based fan it was a privilege to be among Brandy’s friends and family at this truly special evening, and of course I can’t wait for her tour over here later this year!

A full version of this review, with material from Charlie Worsham’s support set, can be found at BellesAndGals.com.

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Nashville Treasures – Lady Antebellum: Still Looking Good Jonny Brick’s series on acts which have changed the sound of country music continues at Your Life in a Song with the first band, rather than solo act, to be profiled…

Press release: Thursday July 5 2007.

A trio, Lady Antebellum, signed a record deal with Capitol. The group consists of lead female vocalist Hillary Scott, the daughter of Linda Davis, lead male vocalist Charles Kelley and guitarist Dave Haywood. The trio made their Grand Ole Opry debut last week. Scott, Kelley and Haywood all had their families there to share the event.

As this piece goes online, on July 5 2017, Lady Antebellum have become one of the most cherished and commercially successfully bands to come out of contemporary country. This small article on an industry website presaged ten years of huge acclaim at home and abroad, such that in October 2017 Lady Antebellum, or Lady A to their admirers, will be playing the Greenwich Arena in London as part of their world tour in support of the album of their career, Heart Break.

There has been impressive coverage on TV and online, with the band hitting The Tonight Show, The Late Show, CBS This Morning and Paste Magazine. They played with Earth Wind and Fire at the CMT Music Awards in Nashville, where they kicked off their tour which will also take them to South Africa, Holland, Ireland and the UK. Dates in familiar cities like Boise, Salt Lake City, St Louis, Omaha and Hartford prove that they have fans in the major American cities too, be it blue or red.

But how did three musicians get from that press release to Cape Town? Lady Antebellum, Nashville Treasures, are one of country’s most important acts. They are competent singers and award-winning songwriters, authentic but forward-pushing, pretty but a little stubbled, all-American but able to tour the world.

Early days Spotting a big, tall guy in a bar who was one of her MySpace friends, Hillary Scott wandered over to Charles Kelley and said hello. Charles had come from North Carolina, leaving behind a life on the construction sites to pursue performance. His schoolmate, Dave Haywood, came to Nashville from Georgia, where the pair had gone to school.

Hillary was going to join the family business. Her mum is Linda Davis, a singer who married Lang Scott, also a musician who played in Reba McEntire’s band. Both of them had played the big stages in the 1980s, when baby Hillary was learning how to shape her sounds into musical notes. Linda went out on tour with the big superstars of the 1990s including Reba, Garth Brooks and George Strait, sang on Does He Love You, a chart-topping hit for Reba McEntire which won a GRAMMY. Hillary would later win a GRAMMY to add to the family cabinet, but more on that later.

‘You were on my hip in the studio!’ Linda told Rolling Stone Country on the occasion of Love Remains, an album of spiritual and gospel songs put out in 2016 by the Scott Family. ‘A lot of times I would get songs at the last minute when I did demos and such. I’d have the song in the car on a cassette and be learning it on the way to the studio…You’d be hearing it every time I’d play it, so you knew the song.’

Hillary would even help mom out at work with tricky parts. ‘I should’ve paid you a little bit. Maybe I got you a Happy Meal!’

Yet Hillary was initially reluctant to go into the family business, as she told The Boot in 2008: ‘I was home schooled — I watched school on video tape in the bus while my mom was touring…I wanted to

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be a vet, a nurse, a chef — I mean, anything but the music industry. But once I hit high school, the bug really bit me. You can’t deny where you come from and what’s in your genes.’

Hillary kept singing, and auditioned a couple of times for American Idol. She didn’t make it through the auditions, but having been around Nashville and especially the industry she must have known that she’d make it one day, to become one of many famous kids of famous acts following in the family tradition. After the meeting, the three began writing songs. The first one was All We’d Ever Need, and Hillary knew they were onto a winning formula, telling Acoustic Magazine in 2015: ‘When we put our voices together on that song and heard the three-part vocal blend, it felt really special. Some voices do not match, but for whatever reason the three of ours worked out.’

The name of the band, at least the Antebellum bit, arose from a style of houses built in the American South. It’s distinctive, even though I had trouble initially when I confused them with Little Big Town: both have boys and girls, both start with L, both have had massive hits with both ballads and uptempo tracks. Both are, confusingly, playing the UK in October, though LBT are in the slightly smaller, 5000capacity Royal Albert Hall. The Greenwich Arena can seat 17,000.

This is all in the wildest dreams of the trio, who released their self-titled first album in 2008 the year after guesting on a track called Never Alone, a hit song for Jim Brickman. Their album was still selling well in 2010 off the back of their second album and their GRAMMY Song of the Year, and sounds terrific a decade on. In chart terms it was significant: no group or duo had entered at number one in the country album charts with their first release.

The big radio singles were I Run to You and Love Don’t Live Here (a number 3 hit), both significant as the band wrote them themselves, the latter just the three of them. Promoting her solo album on The Bobby Bones Show, Hillary remembered being ‘so young’ when performing Love Don’t Live Here, their first single. ‘We trusted out gut’ with I Run To You, which the band wrote with Tom Douglas and which became an enormous hit that set the template for the ballad side of Lady A. Slow Down Sister emphasises the boot-scootin’ side, with a poppy beat shared by Lookin’ for a Good Time. That one was co-written with Keith Follese, father of Ryan who wrote Something Like that for Tim McGraw. Keith and his wife, Adrienne, helped Hillary write Long Gone, while Things People Say is a Haywood-Kelley song which uses the strings very well and changes key in exactly the right place. I think they studied the Lonestar and Rascal Flatts songbooks.

The strings-soaked ballads All We’d Ever Need and Can’t Take My Eyes Off You (the latter is a gorgeous waltz sung tenderly by Hillary) were both written by the band, as was the thinky-think ballad Do I, a song from the 2009 release from a then up-and-coming singer named Luke Bryan. Shame he didn’t have as good a career as the guys who wrote Do I for him…

Only one song on the album Lady Antebellum was an ‘outside write’: Love’s Lookin’ Good On You, one of the best cuts on the album, is a poppy tune that is matched by Home is Where the Heart Is (‘it took leaving for me to understand’). That one skips along prettily like Taylor Swift’s finest country songs, and includes a very country-sounding fiddle and lyrics about West Virginia and mama.

Hillary sounds like a Dixie Chick in parts, surely on purpose. She has since become Hillary Scott, a singer to aspire to and one of the finest voices in pop music, let alone country.

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Need You Now Need You Now, the song, is, Hillary told Bobby Bones, ‘bigger than us’. Adele and Darius Rucker played it in 2011, in a broadcast for TV; Cheryl Tweedy and Gary Barlow played it in 2012 at the Diamond Jubilee celebrations for Her Majesty the Queen, which was beamed around the world.

The song just missed out on being crowned the best-selling song in America in all genres, peaking at 2 on the Hot 100, but spent 5 weeks at the top of the country sales chart at the end of 2009. It was also a top 20 hit in the UK, and a top 10 in Norway, Holland and Ireland.

The tracks on the album written by members of the band include Our Kind of Love, a number one in 2010, and Ready to Love Again. Both tracks introduced country music to Mike Busbee. It’s he who plays the piano riff on Need You Now, and indeed plays keys on the whole album, credited as busbee.

More of him in the second part of the piece.

Need You Now the album had three ‘outside writes’, one of which was a number one hit in the US and Canada. American Honey is a typical Lady A track, starting with a twelve-string guitar tuned down to D-flat, Hillary comes in with the first line of a story, setting the mood by describing a girl who grew up in a church. A vintage pop beat comes in for the second part of the verse, which is joined by Charles Kelley’s harmonies.

There’s a wild, wild whisper blowing in the wind Calling out my name like a long-lost friend Oh I miss those days as the years go by Oh nothing’s sweeter than summertime, and American honey It’s a nostalgic song that may endure longer even than Need You Now (but the band do not get the songwriting royalties from it).

Love This Pain is an up-tempo song taken by Charles, with a great contemporary country instrumentation. Hello World, still a live favourite, was single number four, and like Love This Pain is an outside write. Big hitmakers who help the band in the writer’s room are Craig Wiseman (Something Bout a Woman), Rivers Rutherford (When You Got a Good Thing) and Jerry Flowers, who helped them write the buoyant Perfect Day, proving that the band still had the knack of writing a song like Lookin for a Good Time, which is also found on Need You Now. The Difficult Third Album: Own the Night And so, after a year of touring and promotion, Lady A put out album number three. Own the Night was a number one in the States and in fact one of the top 25 albums by sales in both 2011 (number 25) and 2012 (number 12). Significantly, it hit number four in the UK and number five in Australia.

Outside writes on Own the Night include Friday Night, a fun song written by Eric Paslay among others, and Heart of the World, by the band’s old collaborator Tom Douglas and the brilliantly-named Scooter Carusoe. ‘Love is the heart of the world’ may be one of the guiding credos of Lady Antebellum.

The other ten tracks were written by the band with a slew of collaborators. In May 2011, the group released the first single from the album, titled Just a Kiss, which used a wonderful piano motif and brilliantly blends the voices of the band. It was a top 10 hit in the all-genre charts, charting at 7 in the Hot 100, and of course became a country number one, their fifth.

Number one number six was the contemporary country sound of We Owned the Night, also a number one in Canada, which was written by the boys of the band with Dallas Davidson, who also wrote Just a Kiss. Singing Me Home was written by the boys with Rivers Rutherford. Patrick Davis contributed on Love I’ve Found In You, while Monty Powell is credited on both As You Turn Away and Somewhere Love Remains; he also wrote Stars Tonight, a song on Need You Now with one of Lady A’s weakest choruses (‘yeah! yeah! yeah!’)

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Dancin' Away with My Heart, another contemporary country tune, was from the team who brought you Need You Now (Haywood-Kear-Kelley-Scott) and was a number two country hit. The moon is ‘really a disco ball’ as Charles and Hillary trade lines in the first verse and unite in the chorus: ‘Sometimes I find myself wondering where you are,’ they sing as they ‘dance’, as if they’re whispering into each other’s ears as they sing.

When You Were Mine was another busbee special about love and loss. Hillary Lindsey helped the band write Cold as Stone, about a character whose part is sung by Hillary departing to New Orleans leaving poor Charles heartbroken. Both wish they lacked all power to feel, which is at odds with the orchestral passage which closes the track.

As a sign of their place in pop culture, in October 2011 they performed on Saturday Night Live. Earlier in the year the New York Times gave Jon Caramanica a thousand words to opine on Own the Night. I love his opening paragraph so much that I will quote it in full: No act in contemporary pop is more careful than the bionic country trio Lady Antebellum, which never leaves a note out of place, which never lets a feeling spill outside the lines. It takes basic components — male-female harmony, sturdy pop arrangements with light brushes of country, an unerring sense of when to shift a song from desperate to redemptive — and arranges them in several different ways, with mostly similar results. These are plain and obvious tricks, shopworn from years of deployment.

Lady Antebellum songs don’t try to hide anything. It’s infuriating. And brilliant.

Cold as Stone is praised as offering a ‘robust future direction for the group if it can continue to harness the same sense of darkness without sacrificing its penchant for the hopelessly pretty.’ Elsewhere, Will Hermes was harsh but fair in his review for Rolling Stone.

No band makes sketchy hookups sound as magnificently wholesome as this country pop juggernaut…Pumping up country's boy-girl duet tradition in a trio format, but largely minus grit or wit, Lady Antebellum's follow-up to their Grammy-gobbling Need You Now is a set of heart-squishing power ballads and airbrushed twang rockers ready to woo Walmart shoppers…They make you miss the Dixie Chicks.

Jon Caramanica, meanwhile, wrote that Own the Night ‘elevates this group’s fecklessness to high art. It makes no apologies for its blunt-force tactics. It owns its shamelessness.

That cocksure stance helps to make it one of the most convincing albums of the year, a huge leap forward for a group that threatened to become famous without leaving a true mark.’

The review is worth reading in full, if you can get past the paywall, but selected highlights include Jon describing Charles as ‘a blue-eyed soul man shoehorned into country’, Hillary as ‘thrilled to be singing even the darkest lyrics’ and the songs themselves as ‘foolproof…expertly executed.’

Are the band, Jon asked, ‘a pillow-soft country act or a country-tinged soft-rock group’ whose songs fit snugly with the likes of Separate Lives, Baby Come to Me, Secret Lovers and Tonight I Celebrate My Love?

Does it matter when the LP still made number 1 in the Billboard Top 200 of all genres?

Read the second and third parts of this piece at Your Life in a Song. Type ‘Nashville Treasure – Lady Antebellum’ into Spotify to enjoy a 41-track playlist of tunes mentioned in the piece.

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Katy Hurt: Pieces of Her Katy Hurt grew up with an intense love of singing country songs. She chose to start writing and recording as a teenager and, having just turned 20, is already working on her debut album.

Her new release is Pieces of Me, a set of eight tracks about love and life; the new single, however, is not on the ‘double EP’ and may make the debut album. Dust and the EP, both released in March 2017 to coincide with Katy’s appearance on the Big Entrance stage at Country2Country, was preceded by two singles, Part-Time Girlfriend and Love You More.

Those of you who were at the festival or caught Katy and Sonia at the Freedom Bar in Soho on July 4 know that Katy can rock it like Sonia can. Katy can do ballads as well as rockouts, making her one of the UK scene’s standout performers. As you can tell from her appearance on Dust Bowl Discs, she is also a very nice lady. Here are some edited highlights transcribed for this magazine.

KatyHurt.com is the site to find out more. If you are anywhere near Kelvedon, which is a village in Essex, you can hear Katy and others at the Bluebird Sessions presented by Amy Westney. If you are more city-based, then August 2 at The Bedford theatre in Balham, South-West London, is where you can be. Entry is free and if you go to LiveAmp.com/Bedford you can watch the webcast too.

Perhaps more thrillingly for Katy is that she shares a poster with some quite enormous names as she gears up for Country Music Week. Alongside Twinnie and Andy Brown, Katy will play the majestic Bush Hall in West London as part of the UK New Country Night on October 4. Whoever is unable to secure tickets to see Lindsay Ell or Marty Stuart that night should head on over and hear whichever new tunes Katy has written in the months between now and then.

As part of the Dust Bowl Discs series, Katy spoke about the new ‘double EP’. Her favourite of the eight songs on it is I Don’t Want to Love You, a ballad which ‘captures everything about that feeling’ of being, as per the opening line of the song, ‘taken for a reason I’m too dumb to comprehend’.

‘Six of the eight we wrote together, me and my band. My single Love You More had come out, and my next single Dust wasn’t planned to come out until this year. I didn’t want to wait, I get too impatient.

I had all this music, playing it at all these festivals and nobody could hear it.

‘We got a studio overnight from 10pm till 3am. I wrapped fairy lights around all the mic stands, and we played each song twice, apart from Light which we played only once. It has its own story but I woke up one morning at 6am, really early for no reason and I was in a panic state, thinking I was really late for something. I realised it was Saturday! I couldn’t go back to sleep so I picked up my guitar and was trying to be really quiet. My curtain was open and I saw a shaft of light come through the window.

That’s a song.

‘I recorded it in one go. The more that I play that song, the more it’s about my opinions of country music: “How many times can I call on you to save me?” In life, I had quite a difficult time in school. I’m grateful but at the time it was really tough and I would just focus on music. It kind of saved me.’

Small Town, the most immediate track, is about where Katy lives at the moment in Surrey, a town ‘too small to be a small town’, as the lyrics go. ‘We have a reptile shop, six pubs and two hairdressers!’ she expands, referencing the Brandy Clark album Big Day in a Small Town. Fire, written the same day as Small Town, is good enough for Miranda Lambert to cut. Katy was inspired to release an eight-track EP because Miranda put out a double album in 2016. Katy’s love of current acts including Kacey Musgraves and Maren Morris is evident.

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Katy’s single, released separately from the EP, centres on the lyric: ‘Use me up till one of both of us is dust’. ‘That song has the best story behind it but noone’s figure it out yet. People can keep guessing!’

Katy was born in the UK with a father whose surname really is Hurt. She spent the first few years of her life in upstate New York, where her dad worked, and moved back to Britain just before her seventh birthday.

‘As a baby I didn’t sleep very much. If my parents put Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline on, I’d go to sleep. It got to the point where I’d like the song so much I wouldn’t go to sleep! Then I started singing at four years old, all Patsy Cline stuff and the voices that captured the emotion in songs, which drew me into country music. They have such an incredible way of telling stories.’

Katy picks the majestic Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray as one of her discs, one of many Patsy classics.

‘I love the voices, when it was just the voice and the song. The songs stood on their own.

‘Country music can be anything with a strong enough narrative. People talk about genres being specific things or on Facebook they say, “It’s not country”, and when you start to apply genres you take away from the actual song. But you need to look at each song individually and see what it’s saying.

‘Living in the States shaped what was going to happen,’ she admits, and talks at length about being there on September 11 2001 in the Dust Bowl Discs interview. The recording includes clips from her live performances with Sonia Leigh and Jose Feliciano. The former is from the 2016 performance of Sweet Annie, which Sonia and Katy reprised at Buckle and Boots in 2017 with no rehearsal.

The latter was in Henley, when the great guitarist heard Love You More and brought her out to play it with him. Having written it in a car park, the song has taken off and gave Katy an initial platform which has since taken her to Country2Country. Youtube houses a great performance of her song Revved Up, which has not yet been recorded and may be on her next album (or triple EP?).

Katy began performing at thirteen, playing in front of audiences at linedancing shows. ‘The scene has exploded and people want to hear songs for songs. People got bored of what was happening in pop, and they’ve realised that good country music now is good music.’

Katy’s confidence is clear in her live performances, which is imitated on the EP. Because I Do, a track where she compares her looks to those of another girl, but she can love the guy much deeper than she ever could. ‘I’d recorded it three times and I wasn’t happy with any of them. Now it makes sense.

‘I went to an all-girls’ school and it’s tough! I was focussing on how people look at others and want what they have and don’t appreciate what they do have, that insecurity. I’m five foot tall! I picked out all the things people would pick out about me but said “I’m still gonna love you more”. Insecurities sometimes make us who we are.’

Part Time Girlfriend, another single, was about Katy being the sounding board for her so-called friend, who told her stories about going out with friends outside Katy’s social circle, although Katy admits that, contrary to the song’s lyrics, she ‘never actually cried on a bathroom floor!’ This grounds Katy in the world she grew up in, with real songs about real emotions, which sounds country to me.

Both Dust, the single, and the Pieces of Me EP are available on iTunes and on streaming services. Hear Katy’s Dust Bowl Discs discussion (or discs-ussion) at Mixcloud.com/Blastocast.

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Phil Vassar – American Soul Summer A songwriter with big hits of his own and for other acts, Phil Vassar has spent most of this decade popping up playing the odd gig in the US and UK. This sixteen-song set, issued for summer 2017 with tracks that were missing from an eleven-track release which emerged in December 2016, is a welcome return to studio recordings.

For those not in the know, Phil plays piano standing up, like Jerry Lee Lewis without the malice. At both his appearance at Buckle and Boots and at Country2Country, Phil proved that he is a musician able to spread joy and magic through a crowd who may not know his pedigree. Old favourites like Carlene, Bye Bye and I’m Alright had huge choruses which played with language and rhythm; his big hit, Just Another Day in Paradise, is still his signature song, about being grateful to be alive even though the kids are screaming and the washing machine is on the blink. With his success from those hits, Phil never has to worry about broken white goods ever again.

The first track is a high-quality checklist song with a wide-open chorus that climaxes with the line ‘all mixed up in a big ole Superbowl of American Soul’. Among the American items that Phil mentions are ‘Silicon Valley, Little Deuce Coupe and Mustang Sally’, ‘Isley Brothers and People Get Ready’, ‘Hollywood and Jesus Saves’ – and that is just the first verse. I like the rhyme in the chorus: ‘Hey Red White and Blue, apple pie and crawfish too’.

The middle eight includes the amazing couplet ‘Dr Pepper, Dr King/ Coalmines and diamond rings’, while the final verse takes the guitars away for a brief moment where Phil and his ‘baby’ watch the sunset. The production on the track is incredible. I guarantee that If a Democrat candidate for 2020’s elections picks this as his campaign song, he or she will win the popular vote and the right to be President.

Voice in My Head is a duet with the mellifluous Sarah Darling. Tim and Faith would kill for this song, which is a lot better than Speak to a Girl. It’s about love conquering any doubts, and is a nice companion to I’ll Meet You There. The latter is a meditation on where the future can take people, with lines like: ‘We’re all on the highway to who knows where…Love while we can and lift each other up.’

It also includes the word ‘elementary’. I’ll Meet You There can easily be a gospel song, and Phil would make a good Jesus in a musical version of Jesus Christ Superstar.

He’d also make a good protagonist of We Will Rock You, all about rock music, judging by the song Big Time. It’s a story song about starting out in the rock’n’roll game, written with Craig Wiseman (whose credits on hit songs are too numerous to mention or count). It’s a personal song for Phil, whose former friends, who played music when they were ‘too young for the bars’, drifted away from music into the family business or dentists or who have passed away. ‘We never made a dime but we had a big time,’ muses Phil in the key of G. Sound of a Million Dreams is about Phil today, writing songs that will ‘bring back an old memory’ in the listener. The second verse is tender, recalling the time when Phil returned to his mum and told her he loved her. The guitar solo is particularly good on this song, and Phil conjures up the sort of mood Coldplay have gone for in their best work.

Phil promises devotion on the lovely song I’m Not Made That Way, perhaps to that girl, and on Stay With Me, which has a magnificent chorus in which he asks the girl to ‘let your inhibitions, superstitions melt away’. Perhaps things went badly with the girl, and so Phil wrote the heartache song Second Avenue; both of the tracks were written with Jeffrey Smith, who plays guitar throughout the album and who co-produced the album alongside Phil.

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Sure Feels Good, with the line ‘she feels at peace when she’s at war’, is a song about a girl who may appear a little unorthodox but is still Phil’s girl. Phil wrote it with Trevor and Matt from Old Dominion, who bring sophisticated lyrics to the country charts much as Phil did back in the early 2000s.

Phil is great at drawing characters, such as the girl in the song Mississippi: she works ‘the late late shift at the Waffle House’ and loves Willie Nelson and, it seems, Phil Vassar; in verse two she’s dancing in the front row to every song he wrote. If you don’t know how to spell the state, Phil sings it after the second chorus. The song is all-out rock, and shows how Phil is an expert at any genre of tune.

The Ballad of Pretty Mae is another story, a four-minute movie full of details. It’s the only track on the album Phil had no hand in writing. Dan, who was sent down for cannabis possession, gets out after a year to be with his girl Mae: ‘There’s never been a love so deep…’ But Ray, with ‘half a bottle of Scotch cradled in his crotch’, has eyes on Mae and the ‘ex-con’ is standing in the way of his love. Seeing Ray with gun in hand, Mae grabs her own pistol and…Well, Phil leaves the ending open, with the trailer Dan and Mae left vacant. The scene fades to black, and the wind cries.

The deluxe ‘summer’ edition contains five tracks all themed around water, or water with hops mixed in: Party People, similarly, is a track to whip up fervour in a live show, opening a capella. ‘I been thinking lately the whole world has gone crazy…I’m on a treadmill with everybody else,’ Phil sings, calling ‘the saints and sinners in every town’ to party on down. He calls farmers, geeks, hippies, doctors and everyone in the vicinity to hear a banjo-assisted track.

Having written a song called Six Pack Summer, beer is still on Phil’s mind on the song I Wish You Were Beer. ‘You wanna be my Bud but I’m not looking for love’ is a great line. This is a proper Nashville song, as Phil explores the idea of person-as-drink.

Boat Song is a gentle track with a steady rhythm about wanting to get away from work and be on the sea. Island Boy’s protagonist ‘got the courage to follow his heart’ and leave a life where ‘stress is the enemy’ to find peace. Waves shares the same desire to ‘find a little beach somewhere and lose a few days; it’s the cure my body craves’; Phil rhymes ‘motion of the ocean’ with ‘suntan lotion’, so this July have a staycation if you can’t go abroad and listen to American Soul Summer.

American Soul Summer is available to download or stream. Phil plays on the East Coast of the USA during the first weekend of August, including Portland, Maine on August 4. Find out more at PhilVassar.com, and follow him on Twitter @PhilVassar.

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Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: The Nashville Sound For those unaware, Chet Atkins was the producer who created the so-called ‘Nashville Sound’ back in the 1960s in RCA Studios, with the help of fellow producer Owen Bradley. That room is the American equivalent of Abbey Road Studio Two, and gave rise to hit after hit before falling into receivership. Its life was saved by record label owner Mike Curb and some other investors in 2014. Ben Folds, incidentally, rents out Studio B, while the ‘A Room’ of the new Chris Stapleton album is Studio A. Like Abbey Road, the RCA Studios could fit an entire orchestra within its walls but by the current era of streams and downloads, and a sort of ‘music crunch’ where orchestras could be replaced by one machine making all the sounds, Studio A was due to be destroyed. It is no exaggeration to say that the studio’s new owners are on a mission to bring back the spirit of Chet to the mainstream.

Just as Chet Atkins’ production for the likes of Charley Pride and Merle Travis changed the sound of what was known as country (yet moved the Big Book of Country Music’s author Richard Carlin to comment that the Nashville Sound served to ‘move country away from its roots towards bland, middle-of-the-road pop’), so Dave Cobb is fast becoming the most important soundscaper in Music City, letting Chris Stapleton fill the space with his voice and guitar and pressing MIC LIVE. Jason Isbell is one of the main benefactors of this upsurge in traditionalism, and has partnered with Cobb for a third record in succession. After all the plaudits for Southeastern (2013) and Something More Than Free (2015), you would expect more of the same: Dylanesque songs expertly sung by a man from Alabama who has kicked his drug and alcohol habits and who has now fathered a child with his partner Amanda Shires, giving his job a focus. ‘They never call it plumber’s block!’ he has said of his job: showing up and writing a song.

This is his third record which credits The 400 Unit explicitly, the first since 2011, though the band played on record and on tour. Sadler Vaden (guitar), Jimbo Hart (bass), Chad Gamble (drums) and Denny deBorja (keys) join Amanda (fiddle and vocals) in framing Jason’s voice and songs. They are all his own work save the album’s seven-minute centrepiece Anxiety, which the couple co-wrote.

That song popped into Jason’s head while driving. It opens in triple time before surprising the listener by switching to four in a bar. It’ll be the live highlight as Jason tours the album, coming to the UK in the fall with gigs in Brighton, Birmingham and at the Camden Roundhouse in London. The lines to sing along to are: ‘How do you always get the best of me? I’m out here living in a fantasy – I can’t enjoy a goddamn thing!!’ If you’re lucky enough to be in the States, there is no excuse not to catch that leg of his tour, which finishes in Los Angeles, California.

Promoting the album in an interview with Men’s Journal, Jason denied he was a country singer who sought to ‘sell out arenas’; making art was his primary concern. He studied creative writing at college, which helps his pen portraits and characters shine, which are given melodies which are inspired by the pop music he listened to as a kid in Alabama: Squeeze, Crowded House and Prince are three influences.

Jason spoke on the hundredth Sodajerker on Songwriting podcast. ‘Most songs I start with a phrase that rolls over and over in my head until I start hearing the musicality of it,’ he revealed, in a country style. ‘Us folk songwriters will use our phrasing to make a melody, then make lyrics, which are the things that wind up being the most important. I’m eating because of my lyrics!’

Jason’s advice to songwriters is: ‘Just tell the truth, write things that make you uncomfortable.’ Randy Newman is one bastion of this, and here are ten examples of Jason following his credo.

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The most daring is White Man’s World. In the first minute alone, he mentions his daughter, cocaine and war. The song is overtly political, and the quivering in his voice reminds the listener of Neil Young.

Jason told Paste Magazine that because he’s listened to by country fans, he is ‘one of the few artists who plays for audiences who don’t necessarily agree with what I’m saying but may be open to hearing it.’ By the end Jason is suggesting ‘the man upstairs musta took a vacation’, having already advised the listener to think beyond his own ‘creature comforts’ to the backing of a rotating two-chord riff.

If We Were Vampires (which may have been one of those phrases) was the lead single of sorts, but was written at the eleventh hour, just as the album was wrapping up. ‘To write a love song,’ Jason told Paste Magazine, ‘you have to write a death song.’ The two voices are accompanied by a dropped-tune picked guitar, with Amanda and Jason harmonising about rather being dead than alive forever. ‘Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone’ reflects a Louis CK gag about love being, at best, burying the dead partner!

Nashville, he told the Sodajerker chaps, ‘could not exist without the revenue of popular country music…I saw Garth Brooks at the State Fair in Tennessee for one dollar in about 1990, right before Friends in Low Places came out!’ There are moments on this album which will impress traditional country fans, as well as country converts who drifted over from rock. Ryan Adams and Elliot Smith are influences on, respectively, Hope The High Road and Chaos and Clothes. The first of these has Jason questioning what a ‘real man’ is, and contains some brilliant guitar parts that work well with the grooves of the verses.

The album’s rockier tracks recall Jason’s first band, Drive-By Truckers, the kind of act that Bob Harris has championed for the last two decades. Loud guitars and great rhythms make a return to Jason’s sound; in his review for Your Life in a Song, James Daykin correctly compared Jason’s lyrics, which are introspective and consider the protagonist’s place in the world, to those of Adam Duritz of Counting Crows. Any CC fans like me will find much to love about Jason’s varied palate of sound and stories.

Cumberland Gap is in the voice of a staunch Republican who can’t get out of his small town: ‘I thought about moving away, but what would my mama say?’ I wonder how this goes down in his home town in Alabama...Jason, meanwhile, prefers to head to Tupelo (‘there ain’t no one from here that’ll follow me there’), birthplace of Elvis Presley.

The closing track, where Jason and Amanda sing ‘I hope you find something to love’, should be on the TV show Nashville for when [redacted redacted] occurs later in Season Five or in Season Six. It’s a sort of A Life That’s Good with a tap to the toe and advice to ‘find what makes you happy and do it till you’re gone’. Sensible parenting, with a lovely melody!

Important for Trigger, the man behind the country views and news site Saving Country Music, is Jason’s status as ‘Southern and enlightened’. With enlightening lyrics come gorgeous framing, such as the guitar on Tupelo or the fiddle from Amanda that is plastered tastefully all over the arrangements.

One might not go so far as Paste Magazine, whose reviewer compared this album, written by one of the world’s best songwriters as they call him, to ‘America pulling up its sleeves’.

Saving Country Music calls Jason ‘one of the most important artists of our time’ and ‘a living, breathing embodiment of the modern-day American experience’. These words in previous eras could have applied to Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle, Dolly Parton or even Woody Guthrie.

If anyone can provide food for thought in this age of disposable opinion, Jason surely can, so give these ten tunes a listen.

The Nashville Sound is out now on Southeastern, Jason’s own label, with distribution though Thirty Tigers. For details on the UK leg of his tour, visit JasonIsbell.com.

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Amy Westney – Love Shouldn’t Hurt EP Loretta and Dolly and Patsy Cline, they’re the reason I’m standing here tonight…

Amy Westney is one of the loveliest cheerleaders for country music in the UK. She’s also one of the most all-round talented: she writes for Think Country (ThinkCountryMusic.com); is regularly seen busking in Central London; appears on Youtube at 8pm on Wednesdays doing a webcast with a new song and a cover by request; has been one of the main photographers of other acts on the scene since 2014; organises Bluebird Café-style events in her home town of Kelvedon, Essex (what is it about Essex, which has brought Holloway Road, Lisa Wright and Amy to the scene?!); and puts out songs like Country Music, from which the line above comes.

I am sure if I set a recording device near Amy and asked her to tell me why she plays country music, she would talk uninterrupted for three hours about her influences, which are distilled into three minutes here with added twang. Amy sings superbly and transfers the character of the song to the listener as she namechecks all those old county classics and indeed the blokes who sang. The song is a cousin of This is Country Music by Brad Paisley, which just names songs in the outro; here Amy overloads the chorus with musical madeleines for the listener to recall, ‘back when country music had something to say’. It is a primer in the genre for any newbies attracted to the genre by The Shires and Taylor Swift.

Don’t Push Me Darlin’ is a superb recording that would fit snugly in the canon of any of the singers Amy mentions in Country Music, even if it has a contemporary drum beat running through it. Amy’s at a bar listening to a cover band and meets a guy, ‘then pretty soon his fingers started walking up my leg!’ Miranda Lambert, for whom Amy is playing a pre-show warm-up gig in August, would agree with the sentiments of the simple message Amy gives to men trying to touch a girl up before touching her heart is simple: ‘Don’t. Don’t.’ So good she said it twice.

This is completely at odds with Numb, the EP’s single, which is not a rootin-scootin’ uptempo track. It is instead a weepie which has ‘something to say’. The vibe is impressive too, with great production from Tommy Harden, who has played drums for Reba McEntire for two decades. The references to ‘telling everybody lies about the bruises that cover me’ can be self-inflicted or come from an evil bloke; whatever it is, Amy trusts the listener to hear her out, and the fourth wall is removed. ‘After all these years,’ she sings, ‘all you’ve made me is numb.’

I saw Amy play solo at The Round Up, organised by Two Ways Home, and was in complete admiration of her natural confidence. Her set at Buckle and Boots in June 2017, with her in a red corset-type costume, was well-received; she filled the stage with a keyboard player to her left and a big drumkit behind her.

Elsewhere on the EP, the title track (‘love shouldn’t hurt so I keep it out of sight’) is an old-fashioned country tune with a bit more twang. Amy wears a dress for church where she prays to the Lord ‘to heal this hurt’; it’s a less gloomy companion to Church Bells by Carrie Underwood.

Bad For Me is an accomplished song that must be a live highlight with the full band due to its amazing guitar solo in the middle of it. The opening line compares a guy to whiskey: ‘Deep down I knew you’d be the death of me,’ sighs Amy, ‘hooked from that first drink’.

BBC Introducing have named her one to watch. Don’t ignore their advice.

Amy Westney presents the Bluebird Sessions on July 30 and August 27 at Kelvedon Institute.

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Carolynne – Coming Back To Me EP Carolynne is ‘avin a baby this year so she’s devoting time to being kicked from the inside, but before she announced the embryonic child she presented the fruits of her musical love earlier in the year.

Coming Back to Me, soaked with strings and in the triumphant key of A-flat, is the title track of her five-track EP. ‘Forever didn’t last that long,’ she sings while a heavily-echoed tambourine chimes in on the off-beat. It is a majestic track which deserves to be heard, and fits in with many of the 00s ballads which came out of Nashville.

Cupid Must Have Been High (‘when he put us together’) opens with a dropped-tune guitar and a dirty riff. A guy sits down next to Carolynne and ‘three shots later’ they’re dancing. Her vocal is very much in the Carrie Underwood bracket, which is an easy comparison considering they both got the Simon Cowell seal of approval; Carolynne is infamous for being voted out of The X Factor as the producers thought viewers would appreciate more of Rylan in that year’s series.

Real Man’s irresistible opening sets the scene of Carolynne again in the club looking for ‘a hot guy, a sexy guy’. ‘All the good ones are taken, all I’m left with is The Walking Dead!’ is a good line, as Carolynne seeks ‘Christian Grey or Justin Timberlake!’ The fiddle part that runs through the track combines brilliantly with the twanging guitar need the end and the post-chorus ‘ah-ha-ha’s that recall the end of Stop by Spice Girls. It’s the best track on the EP and leaps out of the speakers thanks to incredible production.

This continues on Let Me Unlove You, which takes a motif familiar to fans of Jennifer Nettles thanks to the song from her recent album called simply Unlove You. Carolynne wants to do the opposite in a song which contains both of my favourite chords: diminished fourth and diminished fifth (it’s when there is a noticeable change in the music – see if you can spot them!).

Carolynne heads to Motor City on a cover of the Supremes classic Stop (In the Name of Love) in the style of a Memphis soul singer.

Her voice is pure and tremors when it needs to, sort of like Emeli Sande but with a little more control. Like the best covers, the song is reinvented and repurposed, and perhaps could start a trend. Laura Oakes could do Nowhere to Run, Katy Hurt can do Ain’t No Mountain High Enough…

When Carolynne returns after maternity leave, she deserves to headline stages and break through, along with Laura and Katy, as credible voices from the UK countryinspired pantheon.

Coming Back to Me is now available physically, following a digital release earlier in the year.

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Blastocyst.org.uk @CountryWOL

Country Party Classics It’s summer, allegedly, in the UK, and the garden party season is in full effect. Marquees are going up, Pimms is being quaffed, ‘Come on Andy!!’ has given way to the rest of July’s sounds.

But what of the country fan? There are all those outdoor festivals – Buckle and Boots, Maverick, FSA, Baylenfest, Millport, Summertyne – and so many opportunities to put on a tune or ten and dance the afternoon away while you have a spot of Day Drinking.

To this end, which songs should fit on what Dustin Lynch referred to as ‘a hot little playlist of your favourite songs’ in his brilliant tune Hell of a Night?

Kenny Chesney – Summertime. ‘It’s a smile, it’s a kiss, it’s a sip of wine!’ Kenny now lives on the beach in California and he must never tire of hearing this classic summer tune every year.

Little Big Town – Day Drinking. Effortless in its singalongability, with perfect harmonies and an insistent melody. It sounds like mint juleps in the sunshine and everything is ‘alright’.

Holloway Road – Where We Are Tonight. Every time I hear Jack and Rob play this one live, there is mass euphoria in the crowd. It’s a great pop song with a killer chorus about playing on a ‘busted old guitar’, even though the lyric is about a girl who doesn’t feel up for going out.

Florida Georgia Line – Cruise, as chosen by James Daykin (@RockJames). ‘Possibly the best summer song ever written, 'Cruise' does what it says on the tin. There is nothing clever, nothing groundbreaking about it. It's simply summer in a song. An anthem that is deceptively more Country than you think whilst appealing to those of a different musical persuasion as well.’

Lady Antebellum – Lookin for a Good Time and Compass. Again I am attracted by the sound of these songs: the killer guitar riff on the former, about a couple meeting in a bar and Hillary wanting to get a cab out of there; the blissful pop on the latter, about letting the fates take you where they lead.

Zac Brown Band – Chicken Fried and Toes. When the band played this song in the O2 Arena in March, the crowd bellowed the line ‘sweet tea, pecan pie and homemade wine’. Who’da thunk that lyrics about food and drink would get a crowd jumping? Zac’s song Toes, about life being good at the beach, is also eligible for this playlist, though you can surely think of twelve others. The Best of Zac Brown Band would, if included here, shut everyone else out of the playlist, so if you’re having a party, please use Zac Brown Band in moderation.

Backwoods Creek – Drunk. One of my favourite acts working in the UK, led by the marvellous vocals of Jamie Wood, this song is a crowd-pleaser with a chorus that actually sounds built for slurring. The band do an impeccable version of Chicken Fried, so if you need a band for your party, there are few better than Jamie, Yannick and the guys.

Phil Vassar – Six Pack Summer. A live favourite, as shown by his visits to the UK in 2016, this is a great title for a super song with a tropical feel.

Danielle Bradbury – Sway. A popular choice when I pooled social media for party songs, this opens with the line ‘life can really suck sometimes’. Like Kelsea Ballerini, Danielle sounds very current, and provides a convincing argument to turn on the radio and start to get ‘lost in a groove that’ll make you lose your mind’. Deserves to be a big hit, especially on country radio.

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Aaron Watson – Outta Style. The reason this song has cracked the Top 30 of country radio is its ebullience and charm. You’d want to party down the levee with Aaron, king of indie country.

Thorne Hill – What If It’s Just Tonight. ‘We’re here for a good time!’ sings Thorne in the opening line of his new song, which tells the listener to seize the moment and have some fun.

Carrie Underwood – Cowboy Casanova. The sound of this song is incredible – just listen to that guitar!

Carrie tells the story of a boy who is ‘like a disease’ and by the time you get to the chorus you know you’d ‘better run for your life!’…after singing along a bit first.

Sam Hunt – Body Like a Back Road and House Party. I am still not bored of the first of these, and nor are the people who kept it at number one for over five months. 2017 is, after all, the first summer you can dance to the song, since it only came out in March. Simplicity is key in this game-changer of a song, as well as giving advice to people on the road: ‘Fifteen in a thirty’ won’t get you a ticket!

Brad Paisley – Alcohol. It made ‘white people dance’ and the song continues to be a live favourite for Brad, who can write thinky-think songs as well as drinky-drink songs like this.

Frankie Ballard – Young and Crazy. How is anyone ever going to be ‘old and wise’ without getting crazy first? A perfect song which will make you want ‘to kiss don’t-know-how-many lips’.

Shania Twain - Man I Feel Like a Woman. The opening ‘let’s go girls’ is one of the most important lines in country music, I think. Whereas today radio ignores women, back in 1999 Shania was the queen of country thanks to anthems like this one, about getting ‘totally crazy’.

Jake Owen – Barefoot Blue Jean Night and Beachin’. The former is his best song, delivered impeccably and with the right amount of banjo. Keith Urban’s Wasted Time is a very similar song, so can be included too. The latter, as recommended by Dan Wharton (@LifeInASong_UK), is another reason why Jake has been called King of the Beach.

Rascal Flatts – Summer Nights. Dan chose this one too, which addresses the fellas and the ladies, and contains a magical key change.

Luke Bryan – Move. Like the party-startin’ Country Girl (Shake It for Me), his 2015 update rips itself from the speakers and fills every particle of air. Luke watches the girl who formerly had a ‘Yankee strut’ and now moves in a ‘sexy and smooth’ manner down South. Some would argue these two are the same song a half-step apart; put them on one after the other and lose yourself in Luke.

Dolly Parton – 9 to 5, as selected by Laura Cooney (@CherrySodaBlog). ‘It seems to work on all ages, and even people who claim to hate country love Dolly,’ as she proved at Glastonbury. This is her most beloved song, and like Shania’s song it’s a karaoke classic that goes well with ‘a cup of ambition’.

Dierks Bentley – Drunk on a Plane. I would be negligent in the extreme not to include this one. ‘So high I may never come down,’ sings Dierks on his signature hit, which celebrates the end of a relationship. A modern update comes in Luke Combs’ song When It Rains It Pours, where our protagonist goes out with the guys as a newly-single fella.

Brothers Osborne – It Ain’t My Fault. Precision engineered to start a party, there’s chanting, ‘hands up’, woahs and a bumper sticker of a line: ‘Only guilty of a damn good time!’ Song of the summer?

Find this playlist in a Spotify playlist, and suggest your own via Twitter @CountryWOL. 61

Country, July 2017

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Country Music Honkytonk Quiz: Songwriters Welcome to the country music honkytonk (pub) quiz, hosted by me, Jonny Brick!

Here are a series of questions about the genre and its people. There are five rounds. Please bring this out when you’re at a honkytonk (or pub as they are called here)!

Round One: Lyrical Genius. Name that tune from the lyric.

1 ‘First time I seen her walk by, I bout near fell up out my chair.’

2 ‘And if I get scared? I’ll hold you tighter.’

3 ‘That kinda thing makes a man go mm hmmm.’

4 ‘And I hope life treats you kind.’

5 ‘It does a million dollars’ worth of good to you.’

6 ‘I’ve fallen down from grace a few too many times’ 7 ‘I took a Louisville Slugger to both headlights.’

8 ‘Strummed a couple chords and sang from the heart.’

9 ‘You can tell your ma I moved to Arkansas.’

10 ‘Wishing you’d come sweeping in the way you did before.’

Round Two: Name the Songwriter. Two tunes, one writer.

1 Happy People, Humble and Kind.

2 I Met a Girl, House Party.

3 You Look Good, My Church.

4 We Were Us, Automatic.

5 Sweet Annie, Booty Call.

6 I Drive Your Truck, Mine Would Be You. 7 He Don’t Show Her Anymore, Shame.

8 Ring on Every Finger, Die a Happy Man. 9 I Like the Sound of That, Road Less Traveled.

10 Five and Dime, You Belong With Me. Round Three: Singer Writing Out Back. All are performers who have worked behind the curtain too.

1 Previously his merch guy at his gigs, who wrote Luke Bryan’s hit Beer in the Headlights?

2 Which current artist has received seven Songs of the Year awards for radio play, including Swing, Come Back Song and Crash and Burn?

3 Which 90s artist, now part of the Peach Picker songwriting team, has written songs with and for his son including Get Me Some of That and Star of the Show?

4 Which young writer gave Run Away With You to Big & Rich, who had a big hit with it in 2015?

5 Which star, who has had two number ones of his own, wrote the Jo Dee Messina pair of Bye Bye and I’m Alright?

6 Which Canadian musician wrote Leaving Nashville for Charles Kelley, and has since recorded his own version?

7 Which writer of Girl Crush can also be heard providing the backing vocals on the Sam Hunt song Make You Miss Me? 8 Matt, Brad and Trevor are the principal songwriters in which band, who have a song called Save It for a Rainy Day that was a huge hit in 2015 for Kenny Chesney?

9 Which young singer is coming to the UK in October and will surely play his track They Can’t See and one he wrote for Dierks Bentley called Somewhere on a Beach?

10 Just a Phase is the new song from which guy who wrote Close Your Eyes for Parmalee?

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Round Four: Taylor Swift 1 What was the first track on Taylor’s self-titled debut album?

2 Which Little Big Town hit song did Taylor write, allegedly about her former boyfriend Calvin Harris?

3 With which vocal harmony group did Taylor tour back in 2008?

4 Which song has a key change, from D to E, on the line ‘he pulled out a ring and said: “Marry me, Juliet…”’?

5 Which song from Taylor’s first album is about Drew, who causes her to cry?

6 Taylor sang a pre-chorus hook on which Tim McGraw song which had a guitar solo from Keith Urban?

7 Red, Taylor’s fourth album, was her final country album before the all-out pop of 1989. How many singles did she officially release from Red: five, six or seven?

8 Which of those singles from Red begins with the line: ‘Once upon a time…’?

9 With whom has Taylor NOT duetted in the past: Gary Lightbody, Colbie Caillat, Ed Sheeran, Gary Le Vox? 10 1989 recently sold its ten millionth copy, giving Taylor what accolade from the industry body the ARIA to add to its status as six-times platinum according to the RIAA? Round Five/ Tiebreak Round: Chris Stapleton Chris Stapleton has had a hand in many hit songs of the last ten years. Including his own (not including cover versions such as Tennessee Whiskey), going by tracks which he wrote that may only be found on albums and which may not have been released as singles, name as many as you can.

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Blastocyst.org.uk @CountryWOL

Still Sounds Country To Me What’s the matter with your damn belt buckle that’s holding up your pair of jeans?

Maybe you should try some overalls or at least some dungarees!

You been down on the farm milking cattle Where dya get the ten-gun cowboy hattle?

Everybody’s talkin’ bout the new sound – huh!

Well it still sounds country to me!

What’s the matter with your pickup’s tailgate? Can’t you get it to work?

I know that sounds like a euphemism, but untuck your old check shirt Hear the music coming out from the speakers Ain’t got a fiddle but the melody’s a keeper Beer can, new plan, nothing like old Hank It still sounds country to me!

Doesn’t matter if the old fellas say, ‘Well, that ain’t country’, you see Cos there’s a new kind of country, you can hear about it monthly In a kind of magazine – give it to your average teen!

What’s the matter with the naysayers saying, Bring out the old banjo!

Give us something with a boom-chacka boom and a lyric about missing your home!

There’s a time and a place for the classics Just like after hours we’ll be drunk and on our asses singing: ‘Hey bartender, won’t you hand me that Fender’ It’ll still sound country to me…Play that Fender!!

[Guitar solo] What’s the matter with your stubborn resistance to the new-steel country sound Garth and Willie, Dolly, Johnny and Loretta – they were new once, so be proud To raise a tumbler of your favourite whiskey To all the young guns who can really take the biscuit It’s the next wave, drum phase, out the way fogey!!

It still sounds country to me Everybody’s talking bout the new sound – huh – it still sounds country to me.

Yeeeeeeeee-ah baby!!

Thanks for reading this magazine!! New writers are welcome to offer contributions. helloblasto@gmail.com Twitter @CountryWOL

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