Jake Owen is ditching the beach anthems and party lifestyle on his new single, “What We Ain’t Got.” The track leaves the laidback vibes behind for a much more emotional experience. I chatted with him over the summer about the new song, one that he says is career changing.
“It’s a big, big step for me to put out a song that’s a ballad that has a lot of meaning behind it,” Jake told me in July. “It’s a deep song that deals on a lot of levels with everyone looking at their own life. We all work so hard day to day, and we want more and more and more. This is a world of wanting more. It’s a song about looking at where you are and appreciating what you have, ’cause once it’s gone we all want what we don’t have.”
Owen said that it’s important at this time in his career to put out a song with depth and validity.
“That’s what country music was based on, great songs,” he said. Listen to “What We Ain’t Got” below.
Jake went on to explain that while he is happy with his life, family and career, he still wakes up every day to find things that he wants more of.
“That’s why this song really related to me. The main chorus of this song has the meaning of a guy losing his girl and wanting her back after realizing that everything he wanted previous to her leaving is what drew her away or took her away.”
He added: “I haven’t lost…thank goodness, I have the beautiful women in my life. But I don’t ever want my job and lifestyle to get in the way of what’s real back home. I really related to that song a lot, and I have a lot of friends that I’ve watched work their lives away, too, and sometimes you just have to step back from it.”
Read more of my interview with Jake Owen at Radio.com.
It’s no secret that I’ve been a massive fan of Kip Moore for years now. He’s been one of those dream interviews for me. I’ve lived with his excellent debut album Up All Night for two years and in a way, it’s been the soundtrack of my life for the past two years. I caught his tour opening show at New York’s Best Buy Theater back in September and when I realized he’d be playing at Starland Ballroom in New Jersey, I knew I wanted to see him again. Luckily, this time I also got to interview him.
It was home turf for me as throughout college I’d attend shows at Starland Ballroom and even began interviewing a few bands then as well. After his soundcheck, I followed Kip backstage to catering and then to a room with a big screen TV and leather couches where his band was hanging out. In between dinner and watching the news–which was reporting on the massive snowstorm in upstate New York–Kip filled me in on his latest EP Soundcheck and what we can expect from his new album, due out next year.
He released Soundcheck, a five-song live EP featuring four brand new tracks, two days before his tour kickoff in September. The release was aimed at his fans, and he told me that he hopes the new music will hold them over until his sophomore album is released sometime next year.
“We’re pretty passionate about those songs. It was a cool way for giving the fans that have been waiting so long just a taste of what’s coming without actually exposing the record. A live version is not quite the same as a studio album,” he explains. “There definitely will be some of the songs [from the EP] that will make it onto the record.”
While some fans have put fault on his record label for not releasing his project sooner, he explains his record label isn’t to blame—in fact as he describes it, they’re “protecting” him.
“People need to understand this is not my record label’s fault,” he asserts. “To be honest, it all comes back on me. I wrote a song, ‘Dirt Road,’ that I thought was going to get further up on the charts and high enough to release a record around, but my label is protecting me in a lot of ways. In my own stubbornness, I just want to put the record out. They know what they’re doing, and it’s hard to release a record around a song that didn’t get past number 40 [Moore’s first three singles all reached No. 1]. And that’s just the fact of the matter.”
So, adds Moore, “hopefully we can come with something next time with some more traction and we can put a record out around it.”
Read more of my interview with Kip Moore on Radio.com.
I still remember the first time I interviewed Lady Antebellum. It was back in 2010 at City Winery and I spent the entire weekend before my interview watching all of their Webisode Wednesdays, in hopes to find a question or two to ask that they had never been asked before. Though I had only 10 minutes with Lady Antebellum, I managed to succeed. During the height of the popularity of “Need You Now” it was a lofty goal to have, being as they’d done hundreds of interviews before. But I’ll never forget that pause in the interview when I knew I got them thinking.
Nearly four years later to the day, I sat down with the country trio once again to talk about their new album 747. During our chat, Charles Kelley admitted that new single “Freestyle” is the one song he is obsessed with, perhaps as much if not more than “Need You Now.”
He said he was initially hesitant during the writing process (he and his bandmates wrote the track with Shane McAnally) because it was “such a departure” from their previous material. Today, though, it’s one of his favorite tracks to play live.
“The one thing we learned was not to be afraid,” Kelley says. “‘Downtown’ was a good example of a song where at the time when we cut it Hillary was like, ‘I don’t know. This is so different.’ We’ve always found that our biggest and best songs always push us in a different direction. ‘Freestyle’ has this infectious energy to it. [You have to] keep it lighthearted sometimes.”
Watch the video of my chat above and read more of my interview with Lady Antebellum about their new album 747 at Radio.com.
There’s no denying my love for Darius Rucker. A huge reason I fell in love with country music, he was the first artist I ever interviewed in a press conference setting and an experience I’ll never forget. It was 2009 and my first trip to Nashville. At this point in time I was very much a country newbie and a fish out of water in the press room.
Being my first time in the press room, I kept raising my hand in hopes to get my question answered. When the last question was asked and the publicist started to usher him off the stage he pointed in my direction. “You’ve been so patient this whole time,” he said. “What’s your question?”
After looking around and realizing he was talking to me, I was shocked and thankful to be given a second of his time. So, I asked him how his Hootie fans have reacted to his leap into country music and he told me they’ve embraced and supported his career in country music. Still stunned he pointed me out in the crowd I instantly knew country would become my new favorite genre.
Since that moment, I fell deeply in love with country. I’ve been lucky to have interviewed Darius three times since that day in the press room and he’s always been such a nice, friendly guy and great interview. During my most recent interview, he told me the story behind his GRAMMY-nominated song “Wagon Wheel.”
“When I heard ‘Wagon Wheel’ at my daughter’s high school talent contest, I don’t know what it was about the song, because I had heard the song before,” he told me. “When I heard it there I just thought, ‘Man some day I’m going to cut the song for a record.’ It was really one of those lightning bolt things that I can’t even explain.”
I’ve been lucky to have interviewed Colbie Caillat four times over the years, both for my blog and other outlets I write for. Most recently, I met up with Colbie to learn about her forthcoming album, due out later this year.
Currently nominated for a GRAMMY with Gavin DeGraw for their song “We Both Know” from the soundtrack Safe Haven, I also talked with her about her road diet for a feature on Radio.com called GRAMMY Gourmet and the difficulties being a vegetarian on the road can bring.
“It can be challenging, you don’t get to eat the foods you normally eat at home,” she told me. “You can’t cook. You’re on a bus with tons of people and different cities every day living out of a suitcase. It’s a lot of wear on your mind and body.”
Last year, I began asking every artist that I interviewed about the first time they heard themselves on the radio. I’m not quite sure where exactly I came up with the question, but it was always one of those moments in an interview that each artist would light up as they told me about it. I mentioned it one day in a meeting and everyone seemed to like the idea. Somehow, it became a big initiative right before the GRAMMYs and ACM Awards and many of the artists I asked this wound up in a commercial for Radio.com. On TV!
Later in the year, we decided to make it a weekly feature so every Monday I assign and help select some of the best answers to that question. This week’s feature is T-Pain, the very first rapper I’ve ever interviewed. His answer was a rather unique one.
“The first song of mine that I heard on the radio was ‘Time To Make Love,'” he told me. “I don’t even think it was on my first album. It was part of a mixtape I did before it came out. I was in my dad’s house in my room asleep. I definitely heard it in my sleep and I woke up and was like, ‘Oh man, I totally missed it!’ I definitely heard it but I was dreaming. I was laying down in my dream, but when I woke up I was like, ‘Oh that was really on the radio just then!’ I wish I had woken up a little earlier.”
He went on to tell me about his next album, Stoicville: Rise of the Phoenix, due out later this year.
“It’s a crazy range of songs, from swing songs and songs from the 60s to reggae songs and R&B,” he said. “I’m putting a country song on my album. There’s a lot of range so it’s hard to say what we want the sound to be. Anything that we pick will be a lot of range.”
For my complete interview, visit Radio.com. Stay tuned for more of my chat with T-Pain!
Though they only formed a year ago, Brooklyn-based Whale Belly has made a name for themselves.
Still experimenting with their sound, frontman Todd Bogin explained what concertgoers can expect from their live show.
“We craft this soundscape. We think of classical music where you’d see 45 minutes [of music] straight,” he said. “What we’ve been reaching towards is bringing that idea to indie music, that 45 minute musical piece that goes through different movements. Our movements are songs; 10 different movements within the 45 minute piece.”
Hailed as a band that “would make Woody Guthrie proud,” Bogin says part of the group’s success is that they’re all friends.
“We really are best friends. We’re super close and trustworthy of each other and we all value each other’s talents,” he said. “We’re not following any trend that’s going on right now. We’re not doing something because it’s cool or following a sound that will be dated in a few years. There’s something really heartfelt in us.”
Well respected for his honest and heartfelt lyrics, singer-songwriter Griffin House is currently on an East Coast tour with friend and fellow musician Matthew Perryman Jones.
“We’re both going to be playing acoustic sets. That’s kind of rare for both of us because we generally either take a band out or have some kind of accompaniment with us,” House said. “We’re looking forward to stripping it down and having some conversation with the audience just playing solo.”
House moved to Nashville in 2003 to pursue music. Since then, he’s been traveling the country and moving audiences everywhere with his confessional and relatable music. I chatted with him before the start of his current tour to find out more about his songwriting process, the stories behind the songs and what’s next in store for Griffin House.
It’s been a while since your last release, has your songwriting process changed at all?
I think the songwriting process has remained the same. Life affects the subject matter. But in terms about how I go about writing, it’s the same way.
Does a song come out better when it’s based on real life or fantasy?
There’s always a little bit of both. A lot of the true stories that I’ve written have been based on real life and then they’ll take maybe a slight fictional turn for the sake of the song, to make the song work better. That’s usually how I go about it. I think a lot of times when you talk in first person people assume that it’s autobiographical but that’s not necessarily always the case.
Are you ever afraid to reveal too much in a song about your own life?
I’ve never been afraid to do that. I think in the beginning when I was writing, I used that more often. I think it was almost extremely confessional and revealing in a way and I think that’s part of what made the songs stick; their vulnerability. It’s a very tricky thing to do. Anybody can be vulnerable and say, ‘This is how I’m feeling and this is who I am.’ If you don’t do it in the right way it comes across as very trite. It’s something I’ve had to learn to work around but I also think that maybe I don’t hold back as much but I’m more conscious of what I’m doing.
Is there a song that means more to you now than when you first wrote it?
“Better Than Love” is a song that has turned out to be something that I play almost every night. At the time when I wrote it, I didn’t really want to write any songs that dealt with love or relationships and it just came out of me. It wasn’t what I was intentionally trying to go after. I was making a record in California with some of the guys in the Heartbreakers and some other really good musicians and I was trying to make more of a rock & roll record.
I wasn’t really all that excited about recording that song. Even when we w ere recording it, I just wanted to get it over with. It turned out to be one of my best songs for sure and one that I think has meant a lot to a lot of people. It just goes to show you that a lot of times the artist has no idea whether or not what he is creating is good. He or she may think that they’re creating the best thing in the world and it turns out to not be so special and other times they don’t think what they’re doing is anything and it turns out to be something really valuable.
“The Guy That Says Goodbye to You Is Out of His Mind” is one of my favorite tracks on that album. What is the story behind it?
That song was written in a way that was inspired by a girl that I just wanted to take out. We were out on a semi-date together and joked around that she’d marry me if I wrote her a song so I went home and wrote her a song. It was something that started obviously with a sense of humor but it really ended up incorporating a lot of heavier things that were going on under the surface too. It started out as a joke and then it took a multifaceted turn after a while. That song came out of nowhere. That was the same story, I didn’t know what I had until I played it for somebody else later and they said, ‘Oh man, that’s a hit song.’ I had no idea.
I was reading the stories behind some songs on your Website and “Heart of Stone” sounds like it was written subconsciously and after you wrote it you figured out more about your life. Does that happen a lot?
What happens is, a lot of times I see how maybe in my subconscious or underneath the surface I really know what’s going on but I won’t admit it to myself or maybe I’m in denial. So, when I write the answers all come down on the page but I might not see them until after, way after. Maybe a year down the line I’ll look back and go, ‘Oh I really knew what was going on I just wasn’t admitting it to myself in my conscious brain.’
How is the music scene in Nashville different from the rest of the country?
I think there is a sense of community here. First of all, it’s a smaller city so it’s become over the last six or seven years more densely populated with musicians so it’s easier for everyone to know one another. There does seem to be a sense of community. Everybody moved here to make it and a lot of people don’t mind helping each other out along the way and becoming friends and working together. While there’s always probably competition going on, maybe the Southern hospitality thing plays into a little bit where they don’t mind helping out a little bit.
It’s changed a lot since I moved here. When I moved here in 2003 I literally felt like one of the only people doing what I was doing which is an alternative style of music in Nashville, just a songwriter with a guitar. There were a lot of people in the country world and Christian world doing that but I felt there were only a handful of people doing what I was doing. Now, since I’ve been touring over the last five or six years I’ve come back to Nashville and have seen hundreds or thousands of people who have flocked here from all over the country to start doing music and I think it’s really had an influx of a lot of people since I moved here under that demographic.
How do you stand out being one of so many?
I don’t try to at all. First I moved here and tried to play as much as I could and tried to stand out as much as I could. Now I’m not on the scene at all. I’m actually not even that social. I have a routine where I go and I work on my hobbies that I do in my spare time. I’m a dad and I spend time at home with my wife and I do some yoga. When I go out on the road I’m in front of people. I don’t really mix it up in Nashville a whole lot.
What do you wish you knew before perusing music?
I don’t know. I was very green when I got here. I didn’t really know anything about the music business. It’s easy for me to look back and say, ‘If I had this bit of information then I would have done this differently.’ There’s really no telling where that would have taken me. It’s not like you can know what would have happened if you would have made a different choice. You just know it would be different. A lot of the learning I’ve had, I’m thankful I moved down here a long time ago and I’m still playing music and still enjoying it and still making progress. I can’t really ask for anything more than that. It’s been good.
What can fans expect from you in the next few months?
Well, I’ve been doing this for a while now and I’ve been thinking about maybe compiling a “Best of” record that has 10 or 12 songs that are maybe the most popular ones. Putting them on a record and re-releasing that so that other people can hear my music and have a better idea of what I’m about and what I’ve done over the last decade. That might come first before a brand new record. Maybe there will be a new song on that or something. That’s just an idea but that can very well happen.
What’s going through your mind while you’re onstage performing?
Sometimes you’re a million miles away in the middle of the song. You just get lost and forget where you are for a minute. A lot of the songs have been played so many times that you’re really on automatic. I try to think about singing the words and hitting the notes. It’s pretty simple. I try not to think about anything else other than what I’m doing at the moment and not get ahead of myself, what I’m going to say next or what happened a few minutes ago. It’s a good exercise in really being in the present moment and that’s usually when performances are the best, when you can do that well.
For more on Griffin House and his current tour dates, visit his Website.
On any given night in New York you can stumble into a venue that’s hosting a hip-hop dance party, rappers or a live band. But, have you ever seen a tap dancing rapper that combines all three?
Meet Benjamin Ryan Nathan.
He’s a performer that combines all his skills into one performance, and he’ll hit the East Village Thursday night for a performance.
“There’s always that reaction, ‘You tap and you rap? What does that look like?’” Nathan admits. “There’s a lot of intrigue around that because people have had so much exposure to tap as children. And then to see it again as an adult and see it in a different way that’s not in a dance class, in a venue that’s onstage with popular music, it’s interesting.”
Combining rap and tap is a long process for Nathan, which often begins with lyrics.
“I write lyrics whenever it comes to me, a lot of times it’s on the train,” he said. “I create structure of the song first and then once I get together with the rest of the band and they’re writing their musical parts I’ll bring in the beats and see where that fits. It’s an experimentation together starting with the lyrics first.”
As with creating a song, Nathan’s routine is always getting tailored to his surroundings.
“Often I have to bring my own floor with me. It’s about figuring out what the space constraints are, how much I can move around, how it will be audible with musicians. My first question always is, ‘Will they have a wood floor?’”
Nathan didn’t want to audition when the National Dance Institute came to his school in the fourth grade. Today, though, he can’t imagine what his life would be like without dance.
“I definitely wouldn’t have become a dancer or a filmmaker if it wasn’t for this program in particular. It helped me get outside of myself and be able to get onstage in front of a community,” he said.
While Nathan admits there were challenges over the years, one being that it’s never easy being a young boy taking dance classes, he said he has always been an individual.
“I think I’ve learned from a young age that people are going to judge what I do. It’s just a question of really pursuing what matters. To me, I feel like tap is in my blood and I can’t not do it,” he said. “I’m always tapping, whether it’s tapping my fingers, or tapping my feet or tapping in my mind. It’s just how I express myself. I tap because I love it but I also tap because I have to.”
At the end of his first year dancing he performed onstage at Madison Square Garden with 1,000 other kids from New York Public Schools. He loved dancing onstage so much he decided to stick with it and soon discovered tap.
“I would go to jam sessions with older tap dancers at Swing 46. It was encouraging and supportive. Everyone would come and dance,” he said. “The other way I learned tap was by just watching. I would get my hands on any video tape on great tap dancers and just watch it again and again in my room and try to copy the steps.”
As a teen he started rapping and once college came around, Nathan decided to combine his tap and rap skills.
“I started a band in college called Ben Tap Soul and we started to experiment with how we can bring the tap and rap together with musicians. Instead of hip-hop beats behind it, there is actually live music being created with all of these elements.”
Additionally, Nathan has started to loop his tapping into his live band performance, providing an entirely new element into his live show.
“It’s great. I love to push the envelope. It’s important to keep pushing new ideas and surprising people and bringing it to a new audience and level,” he said. “It’s always been important to use the skills I have in a positive way. I call it conscious rap. There’s a Hasidic saying that music is the language of the soul. When you put music out there, it’s speaking people’s language and it’s important to know what you’re putting out.”
Ben Tap Soul performs tonight at Alphabet Lounge at 8 p.m. For additional tour dates in February, visit their Website.
Over the summer, I caught up with Canadian-based rock band The Trews after an intimate performance in Brooklyn. “I find playing in the living room more nerve-racking than playing in front of 30,000 people,” frontman Colin MacDonald admitted after their set. “Playing in front of 25 people in a living room, you can really feel the eyes on you.”
After their set, the band filled me in on their songwriting process, what it’s like performing to American audiences and learning from the bands they tour with like Kid Rock and Robert Plant. Be sure to catch them tomorrow at Mercury Lounge. For complete tour dates, visit their Web site.
Their fourth album, the standout Hope and Ruin, is a departure from previous studio albums as the band wrote and performed everything live. A more organic process, The Trews spent time recording at The Tragically Hip’s Bathouse Recording Studio. Located on the shores of Lake Ontario between Toronto and Montreal, the band lived in and wrote the album at the converted mansion.
“We were just trying to catch lightning in a bottle, just playing until it felt right,” MacDonald said. “Bathouse has a tree house kind of vibe, it’s a good hang. It has a pool table, record collection, woods in the backyard, lake in the front yard. It’s a really cool place to focus for a band, to get out to the country and really focus on the task at hand. It’s really informal. We’ve recorded records at places that have felt a lot more clinical.”
For this record, the band went into the studio for the first time without songs completely finished. “The Dreaming Man” was written over coffee with their producer after jamming on a D riff.
“We had a great little melody and great little jam and I found some lyrics for it from some other song I had. It was done that night and recorded,” MacDonald said.
Songwriting isn’t always that easy though, guitarist John-Angus MacDonald explained.
“Sometimes songs are more fully formed upon delivery than other ones. For the most part, we want to have music that you feel something from,” explained MacDonald ‘s brother, John-Angus. “I don’t think the lyrics have ever come first for us. It’s mostly just a feel, melody, groove or riff and we either shoehorn or Colin comes in with lyrics that are more fully finished than others. Lyrics can be painful. If you don’t get them right away, it could take a while.”
Colin went on to explain that songs often come from what the title dictates.
“A song like ‘Hope and Ruin,’ came from a magazine cover somewhere. I saw hope and ruin and thought it had a nice ring to it, ‘I’m going to sing that over this song. What does hope and ruin mean to me?’ It’s as simple as that. If a song comes in 15 minutes chances are you have a pretty good song on your hands. Sometimes I write from personal experience, sometimes I write from other people’s perspectives and make it sound personal. It’s not always just about me.”
In fact, often the songs fans most relate to are not about him.
“If you can write a song form someone else’s perspective and still feel it, that’s important. You can’t just keep wining about your own situation over again. You have to broaden your emotional pallet,” he said. “Sometimes you write a song that predicts your future, which is weird. Maybe it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. You write this great breakup tune and you’ve broken up four months later. I don’t know what that means, maybe it’s you asking for it. From time to time, a songwriter can tap into something that has yet to happen to him or her.”
Having toured with everyone from the Rolling Stones and Robert Plant to Kid Rock and Nickelback, The Trews say they learn something from each act they perform with.
“As soon as I’ve done my set, I’ll go grab a beer, park myself side stage and watch the entire set of the bands we’re playing with,” MacDonald said. “We just got off tour with Kid Rock and that guy is one of the greatest rock performers out there right now. I watched his set every night and he was incredible. We opened for Robert Plant a few years back. It’s incredible. It’s always a thrill to open for bands you admire.”
Having been called “the greatest rock band of their generation,” The Trews continue to expand their fan base in the United States and Australia. While performing throughout various cities in Canada always feels like home, the band admits there is something special about U.S. audiences
“This is taking nothing away from our Canadian fans, but there is a real sense of diehard devotion that we get from the fans that we gathered here from the States,” MacDonald said. “It’s there in Canada too, but I guess I’m more struck by it because the numbers are generally smaller. To see them follow us from city to city in these small clubs that we’re doing in the States just emphasizes how much they really do believe in it. That’s cool because we’re not as well known down here. Americans, if they decide they like you, they’re lifers.”
With the goal always in mind to make music they want to listen to, The Trews continue to grow their fan base worldwide.
“It’s an ongoing process,” MacDonald explained. “We’re always trying to make the best possible music that we can make. If it’s something that I want to put on when I’m hanging out at home, then I’ve succeeded.”
Catch The Trews at Mercury Lounge Wednesday night. For more, visit their Web site.
