Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Native Run's New Single 'Good On You' Follows Under 'Cover' Operation

Native Run's Rachel Beauregard and Bryan Dawley have been in Los Angeles for less than 24 hours, but the burgeoning country duo has already had a celebrity sighting at their hotel: Kings of Leon's Caleb Followill.



"I talked to him for a little bit and we smoked a cigarette together," Dawley says. "You hear about the Sunset Marquis and how star-studded it is, so it was cool."


For her part, Beauregard is just happy she didn't freak out. "Normally when I meet really talented people, I geek out and I get really awkward, but last night I didn't make eye contact and I went to bed without making a scene," she says with a laugh. Mission accomplished.


The Nashville-based pair are in town to tout their first single, "Good On You," which is at radio now. (Listen to the song via its lyric video below.) It's on their Luke Laird-produced debut album, out on Toby Keith's Showdog-Universal Music label in early 2015.


The two prefaced the single's release with a series of internet clips, dubbed Cover Under the Covers, that features the Virginia natives on a bed recording their versions of some of their favorite songs, including Tim McGraw's "Red Ragtop," Bruce Hornsby's "Mandolin Rain," and Ellie Goulding's "Burn."


Dawley jokes that "Robert Mondavi," the California wine brand, is to blame for the fun, loose cover tunes.


"One thing with Bryan and me, we really want people to know that we're probably the weirdest people on the planet," Beauregard says of the sometimes goofy clips.


For now, Native Run is out from under the covers and opening for David Nail through November 15th. It's the first time they've had the luxury of a tour bus and a full band on the road. "We're not having to get to a hotel at 2 a.m. and then wake up at 4 a.m. to drive six hours to the next venue," Dawley says.


They love watching Nail perform and have picked up a few pointers, primarily, consistency and professionalism. "When you see him sing ["Let It Rain"], it's like he hasn't sung it 1,000 times already. When he hits those notes, he's wailing and singing his ass off. You feel the emotional connection he's giving to every single song."


As Native Run's EP, out now, amply displays, Beauregard and Dawley also have a love for mandolin and banjo. "One of my favorite things about the banjo is how understated it can be," Beauregard says. "If it's not there, you don't miss it necessarily, but if you heard it in a song and then it went away, you'd be like, 'this is not the same'."


They gravitate toward such instrumentation in their own music and in the music they love as fans. Rolling Stone Country asked the two to pick their favorite songs that highlight some fancy banjo picking:


"Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms," Flatt & Scruggs

Beauregard: "The first thing you think of when you think banjo is Earl Scruggs because he is insane… 'Roll In My Sweet Baby Arms' is just perfect bluegrass: it's fast, it's harmony, it's just great.


Dawley: Not a lot of people know this about him, but [Scruggs'] style of playing banjo, his right hand, is taught as the premier banjo method.


"Araceli," Nataly Dawn

Dawley: Nataly is from the group Pomplamoose. The song is about the Greek figure Araceli. A guy named Ryan Lerman plays this awesome, very complex banjo lick that follows the story almost. It's really interesting.


"Spaceman," Tall Tall Trees

Beauregard: "I used to go to the Kennedy Center [in Washington, D.C.] every Tuesday night. There's a free concert series —we've actually played it — and one Tuesday there was a band called Tall Tall Trees out of Brooklyn. The lead singer plays banjo and he has a song called 'Spaceman' and I just fell in love with the song. It's quirky and weird and very Brooklyn-y, it's just another example of how the banjo has made its way into the most indie of the indie songs.


"Rye Whiskey," Punch Brothers

Dawley: "Chris Thile is one of my favorite instrumentalists, musicians and lyricists of all time. The thing I love about 'Rye Whiskey' is the banjo kind of takes the lead melody on all the instrumental sections. It's just cool to hear the vocal quality [on] the lyrics and then when the banjo comes in and mirrors it, it's an interesting pass-the-torch kind of thing."


"Patchwork Girlfriend," Punch Brothers

Beauregard: "If you go back and listen to old Opry videos by Scruggs and Flatt and fast forward to what the Punch Brothers do, there are so many similarities. 'Patchwork Girlfriend' has the lyric quality of that silly, old school bluegrass stuff: it's basically about making his own girlfriend."


"Friday Night," Eric Paslay

Dawley: "[The banjo] has a very adhesive quality in a lot of country that you hear on the radio today, just the understated rhythmic quality. You hear that in 'Friday Night,' the way the choruses just elevate. A lot of that has to do with the banjo rolling through and that's something I love doing in our music."


"Katmandu," Bela Fleck & The Flecktones

Beauregard: "Bela Fleck mixes world music, African music, jazz…. he brings the banjo into everything. [On] 'Katmandu,' he adjusts the notes just by tuning. It's just incredible to watch. It's perfect. It's freakish, in a way. When you watch someone do something so perfectly and they know their instrument so well, you feel like you just saw something that really resonates.


"The Ballad of Jed Clampett," Bela Fleck & The Flecktones

Beauregard: "Bela does a cover of 'The Ballad of Jed Clampett,' and it's just so funky and weird and it has this woman singing through the whole thing. It's a journey. It's a weird experience, but I love how he plays the banjo in that thing."


"I Don't Feel It Anymore," William Fitzsimmons

Dawley: "I love sad ass music. He sings this song with Priscilla Ahn, who has an incredible voice too. The banjo is just so eloquently sad. It just pulls and tugs on your heart and adds to what they're singing at each other. It's a cool palette over a song like that."


"Neon Light," Blake Shelton

Beauregard: "This is an example of the Ganjo [a combination guitar and banjo]. We use Ganjo, as does Keith [Urban], as does Blake Shelton in this song. We just love it. Blake just always makes the right choices."


"When God Dips His Love in My Heart," Alison Krauss

Dawley: "She does this song with the Cox Family. I think originally Hank Williams did it. It's just one of these three-part harmony [songs] and I'm obsessed."


"I'm Nowhere and You're Everything," Chris Thile

Dawley: "This is a very Chris Thile-centric list. This song is off a record he made right after he was divorced called 'Deceiver.' I believe he played everything on the record, just kind of sat alone and made a record himself and cried into his banjo. The whole motif of the song is based off this banjo lick and the rest of the song musically sort of ebbs and flows around it."







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Big Star's Third Live: The Legacy Lingers

The legacy of Big Star—that early ‘70s rock ’n’ roll band that sold very few records but appears to have influenced an entire generation of musicians—has never been stronger.


All these years later, the best has stayed in the forefront of modern pop culture in unexpected ways:


*An excellent documentary film (2012’s Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me) continues to make the rounds.


*A Man Called Destruction, Holly George-Warren’s excellent biography of the band’s central figure Alex Chilton emerged to much praise this year.


*The band’s first two albums, #1 Record and Radio City were just reissued, newly remastered and bearing appreciative liner notes by longtime Big Star fan Mike Mills of R.E.M.


*And anyone who’s enjoyed the opening theme of TV’s long-running That ‘70s Show, otherwise known as “In The Street,” was digging Cheap Trick’s cover of a Big Star song.


But the potential of any massive commercial resurgence of Big Star is irreparably damaged by the passing of three of the quartet’s founding members: guitarist Chris Bell, band founder, songwriter and vocalist, left the band after its first album and died in 1978; Chilton, guitarist, songwriter and vocalist (and former member of ‘60s hitmakers the Box Tops), died of a heart attack in 2010; and Andy Hummel, bassist, singer and songwriter, died the same year of cancer.


Still, Big Star can be righteously celebrated--and most recently were in Los Angeles, when the band’s music was performed by an extended assemblage of distinguished musicians dubbed Big Star’s Third to benefit the local non-profit Autism Think Tank.


Central to the event was the core group dubbed Big Star’s Third--featuring original Big Star drummer Jody Stephens, music director Chris Stamey (the dB’s), Ken Stringfellow & Jon Auer (the Posies), Mitch Easter (Let’s Active), R.E.M.’s Mills, Ira Kaplan (Yo La Tengo), and comparative newcomers Django Haskins, Skylar Gudasz, and Brett Harris. Guest musicians at the benefit concert were conspicuously numerous, and all of them quite good, including the Bangles, Aimee Mann, Pete Yorn, Dan Wilson (Semisonic), Dean Wareham (Galaxie 500), Jason Falkner, Tommy Keene, Luther Russell, and the distinguished Van Dyke Parks, conducting a full-on chamber orchestra.


Two days prior to that very memorable concert, a significantly stripped-down version of Big Star’s Third stopped by Yahoo’s Santa Monica studios to give us a preview of what we’d be hearing—and our minds were relatively blown.


Featured in the small group were Stephens, Stamey, Harris, Gudasz, Haskins and bassist Jeff Crawford, and between them they ran through three unexpectedly sweet Big Star classics, all performed with love, warmth, accuracy, and the respect such music clearly deserves.


Following the performance, drummer Stephens—who as you’ll see is himself a fine singer—discussed the upcoming event, the genesis of the current performing group, and what it is about Big Star that always was—and still is—so definitively magical.


This is powerful stuff.







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Wynonna Judd Announces Tour of Historic Venues

Sometime next year Wynonna Judd will release her eighth solo record, an as-yet-untitled collection of "mournful, raw, primal sounds that come from the guts of music." She wrote the new songs with her husband, Cactus Moser, whose motorcycle accident in August 2012 forced the couple to take some time out of the spotlight to recover, reflect and effectively restart Judd's career.



Judd says she's no longer chasing radio hits or worrying about current trends, and when her band hits the road in January 2015 for the "Wynonna and Friends: Stories & Song" tour, they'll focus on cozy, intimate rooms rather than the larger venues Judd (often with her mother Naomi as the Judds) has been playing since the mid-Eighties.


The tour launches on January 14th at the Carolina Theatre, a 1,000-seat auditorium in Durham, North Carolina, before hitting up a string of historic venues across the country, including the Wilbur Theatre in Boston, the Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia, and the Paramount Arts Center in Judd's hometown of Ashland, Kentucky. The trek wraps up on March 8the. Judd will be backed by a three-piece band for all the dates, including Moser on drums.


Here's the full tour itinerary:

1/14 Durham, North Carolina — Carolina Theatre

1/15 Alexandria, Virginia — The Birchmere

1/16 Ashland, Kentucky — Paramount Arts Center

1/17 Louisville, Kentucky — Brown Theatre

1/29 Wabash, Indiana — Honeywell Center

1/30 Youngstown, Ohio — Stambaugh Auditorium

1/31 Merrillville, Indiana — Star Plaza Theatre

2/6 Boise — Morrison Center for the Performing Arts

2/7 Lewiston, Idaho — Clearwater River Casino Event Center

2/12 Campbell, California — Heritage Theatre

2/14 La Mirada, California — La Mirada Theatre

2/16 Beaver Creek, Colorado — Vilar Performing Arts Center

2/19 Salina, Kansas — Stiefel Theatre for the Performing Arts

2/26 Lancaster, Pennsylvania — American Music Theatre

2/27 Westbury, New York — Theatre at Westbury

2/28 Verona, New York — Turning Stone Casino Resort

3/5 Williamsport, Pennsylvania — Community Arts Center

3/6 Ridgefield, Connecticut — Ridgefield Playhouse

3/7 Niagara Falls, New York — Seneca Niagara Casino & Hotel

3/8 Boston — Wilbur Theatre







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Lera Lynn's 'Standing on the Moon' Was 'Self-Fulfilling Prophecy' — Video Premiere

"I'm not crazy," Lera Lynn tells Rolling Stone Country, before a brief pause. "OK, maybe I'm a little bit crazy."



Not crazy, but maybe a touch prophetic — the Nashville-based, Georgia-born singer-songwriter is talking about the process of writing "Standing on the Moon," a track from her sophomore LP, Avenues. Lynn had been suffering from a several month-long bout of writer's block, so she migrated to a friend's home on the lake in Georgia for some inspiration and creative isolation.


"I was kind of panicking," she says. "For most writers, if you are not writing, you start to loose grip on who you are. So I brought a bottle of wine or two and decided I would just sit there and write a bunch of songs in a night. Three our of four were horrible and the one left was 'Standing on the Moon.' And I didn’t really know who it was about yet, which is new since I tend to always write from life experience — but it was a self-fulfilling prophecy because I met the person I wrote it about after the song was done. I know that sounds weird."


That person was someone who preferred to be "untethered," and the song deals in the delicate balance of both respecting the space some wanderers require to love and be loved and pining for it to shorten — an emotion mirrored in the arrangement that's strong and mournful without being too delicate or sentimental.


In the video, premiering on Rolling Stone Country, Lynn took an organic approach to the stark and simple black-and-white clip.


"This video was a pretty spontaneous experience," she says. "Within a half hour we'd shot two songs. There was no forethought into how it was going to look. It's important to have these live performance videos for people who have never seen you play, though…. 'Oh yeah, there's a person behind that music.'"


Produced by Joshua Grange, a member of Sheryl Crow's touring band, Avenues is a unique soldier in the Americana landscape — though there are threads of country in her writing, there's a stronger inclination towards the more free-wheeling, free-form folk of Fiona Apple, Traci Chapman or Joni Mitchell's Turbulent Indigo, even the aggressive, sultry moodiness of Chris Isaak. Her broad palate can be seen in the various covers she's released recently — including a banjo-picked deconstruct of TV on the Radio's "Wolf Like Me" or Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea." Done in cowboy boots, mind you.


"When people ask me what my music sounds like and I say 'Americana,' you would be surprised how many people are like, what? Ameri-who?" she says laughing. "There's a little country in there, but sometimes you just have to listen to it."


Still, Lynn enjoys her newfound hometown of Nashville, and isn’t particularly afraid that it roots her in one genre or another. "Nashville has given me a greater musical identity because there is such a juxtaposition," she says. "It gives me stronger legs." It's a base that made completely crowdfunding Avenues possible — a campaign that included an opportunity to purchase a "Nashville Night on the Town" with the singer for a thousand-dollar donation.


"Someone did buy that, and he's yet to cash it in," she says. Won't that be a little uncomfortable — a little crazy, even — to have cocktails and dinner with a total stranger? "If it's awkward, well, then we'll just have more drinks."







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Cody Canada Steers New Band Toward Familiar Sound With 'HippieLovePunk'

As the frontman of Cross Canadian Ragweed, Cody Canada spent years swirling Southern rock, Dustbowl country and roadhouse roots music into songs that celebrated the ups and downs of life in middle America. He was the poster boy for the Red Dirt movement, a proud outsider who could camp out in the upper reaches of the country charts — and sell more than a million copies of the band's albums, to boot — without playing by the rules of the Nashville machine. Even the band's own breakup bucked convention, with the guys deciding to throw in the towel after releasing four Top 10 records in a row.



Now, four years after Cross Canadian Ragweed's final gig, Canada is back with a particularly Ragweed-ish album from his new band, the Departed. Former solo artist Seth James, who shared the band's vocal and guitar duties with Canada during the Departed's first two albums, is out of the lineup, leaving Canada in full control once again. The result is HippieLovePunk, an album whose title reflects the three basic ingredients of Canada's songwriting catalog these days: tunes about getting along, getting it on and getting mad at whoever's trying to back you into a corner. Shot through with organ, harmonies and plenty of guitar muscle, it's a bigger, bolder, boomier version of the sound Canada's been creating for roughly two decades. [Listen to the Southern stomp 'n' strut of the album's lead single, "In Betweener," below.]


"I think some of the things we did on the last record were a little out of my element," he told Rolling Stone Country during a recent tour stop in Fayetteville, Arkansas. "I wasn't leading. I know that sounds cocky, but I've been the leader for so long. When the Departed started, it was me and Seth sharing that role. We both got tired of that situation, and I think we were both ready to lead again. This record is back to a comfort zone for me. It's me writing the songs. It's me sharing my opinion. We've hit a few bumps in the road with this band because people have been wanting the Ragweed sound, and I think we're kind of getting back to that."


Many of the harder-hitting songs on HippieLovePunk were inspired by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings that rocked America in late 2012. Canada, a father of two boys, was terrified by the event.


"Most musicians live in a bubble," he explained. "You play a show, have a few cocktails, smoke some weed, wake up, repeat. You feel so protected and so safe until you turn on the news, and then you're scared. I've always been a literal writer, and I think having kids made me pay attention to what's happening in the world."


HippieLovePunk hits stores in January 2015. Meanwhile, the Departed will be on the road through Thanksgiving, with Canada filling in the gaps between full-band shows with a handful of solo gigs.







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Monday, October 13, 2014

Eric Church, Florida Georgia Line, Kacey Musgraves to Perform on 2014 CMA Awards

A trio of country rebels have been added to the 48th annual CMA Awards. Eric Church, Florida Georgia Line and Kacey Musgraves are on the bill for the November 5th broadcast, the Country Music Association reveals exclusively to Rolling Stone Country.



Church has four nominations going into the show, including Male Vocalist, Album of the Year for The Outsiders, plus Single and Song of the Year for "Give Me Back My Hometown." He was 2012's CMA Album winner for Chief.


Florida Georgia Line are the reigning CMA Vocal Duo of the Year and are up for that honor again this year. Musgraves is the reigning New Artist winner and has three nods this year: Female Vocalist, Song and Video of the Year, for "Follow Your Arrow."


Miranda Lambert leads the pack of 2014 nominees with nine nods. Winners are determined by the nearly 6,000 members of the CMA — mostly music-industry professionals, ranging from record label executives to musicians to music journalists. Voting ends October 27th.


Hosted for the seventh consecutive year by Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood, the 2014 CMA Awards will also feature performances by Jason Aldean, Dierks Bentley, Luke Bryan, Kenny Chesney, Lady Antebellum, Miranda Lambert, Little Big Town, Tim McGraw, Paisley, Blake Shelton, the Band Perry, Underwood and Keith Urban. The show airs live November 5th at 8:00 p.m. ET on ABC.







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Friday, October 10, 2014

Flashback: Reba McEntire Causes a Stir With Infamous Red Dress

When country superstar Reba McEntire recorded the 1993 duet "Does He Love You" with Linda Davis, the dramatic tune about a romantic triangle became a smash hit. Penned by Sandy Knox and Billy Stritch, the song also spawned a memorable music video directed by Rob Reiner, who had also recently directed McEntire in the film North.



Although "Does He Love You" topped the charts (becoming Reba's 18th Number One country hit) and won the two women a Grammy and a CMA award, those accomplishments began to pale in comparison to the attention McEntire received for the red-hot (emphasis on the "red" and "hot") gown she wore while performing the single with Davis on the 1993 CMA Awards telecast.


McEntire's Las Vegas-inspired live shows, complete with eye-popping outfits, were becoming commonplace for the singer, but up to that night in front of her Nashville peers (and a huge TV viewing audience) none of the stage costumes in the redhead's closet would raise as many eyebrows (or temperatures) as the gown with the plunging neckline and well-placed sequins. Perhaps echoing the thoughts of many who were not accustomed to seeing Reba in such revealing attire, her father noted at the time that he thought she had the gown on…backwards.


In 2010, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum spotlighted several of McEntire's stage outfits, including the silk and jersey gown designed by her stylist, Sandi Spika, in an exhibit appropriately titled "Reba McEntire: Put on Your Red Dress, Baby."


Linda Davis, by the way, is mom to Lady Antebellum's Hillary Scott, who was a mere seven at the time this memorable performance took place.







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