The Dirt Drifters

By Bob Doerschuk
© 2011 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.

Words like “gritty” come to mind when The Dirt Drifters take to the stage. Of course, there’s no shortage of grit out there, but something in the sound of this five-piece separates it from the pack.

Maybe it’s the vivid images on these 11 tracks performed by band members: drummer Nick Diamond, lead singer/guitarist Matt Fleener, singer/guitarist Ryan Fleener, bassist Jeremy Little and singer/guitarist Jeff Middleton. The images — cigarettes and beer cans on “Sun Goes Down” (written by Matt Fleener, Middleton and Rivers Rutherford), the bullet holes, blue lights and traces of cheap perfume on “Married Men and Motel Rooms” (Middleton, Mark Irwin and Josh Kear) — seem to have been scraped up from a cellar of hard-time memories. (The group wrote or co-wrote all but one track on the album.)

Then there’s the performance, the power chords, the galloping groove that feels like you’re taking corners a little too fast on “Something Better” (Diamond, Matt Fleener, Ryan Fleener and Middleton), the blue-collar epic that John Mellencamp might have conceived had he grown up in a Southern factory town (“Always a Reason,” Ryan Fleener, Middleton and Justin Wilson), the way that lyrics come to life in the union of Matt Fleener’s whiskey-rough lead vocals and pristine backup harmonies.

5 Things You Don’t Know About The Dirt Drifters >> Continue Reading

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Ronnie Dunn photo courtesy of Sony Music Nashville.

By Deborah Evans Price
© 2011 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.

With the release of his self-titled solo debut album, Ronnie Dunn just might be the best-known newcomer in country music history. For 20 years he was half of the phenomenally successful duo Brooks & Dunn, which won 19 CMA Awards and dominated the country duo scene. Now the veteran singer/songwriter is starting over as a solo act, though he admits this transition hasn’t exactly been easy.

“I just panicked,” he said. “I just pushed the panic button and took off running in circles and recorded 34 songs before it was all over. I finally had to bring it down to 11 and went back in and negotiated to get it up to 12. But I was all over the map.”

At the same time, lots of well-meaning folks were offering advice. For example, in suggesting a way to establish an individual identity after his long partnership with Kix Brooks, “I had one guy at the label tell me, ‘Whatever you do, don’t say “honky-tonk”’,” Dunn said. “There were people in my own camp who said, ‘Hey, you just left a really good paying job, dude. What was that about? Did you think about this before you said “I’m going off on my own”?’

“I was certainly helped by a lot of good people, but I’d never felt so alone in my life,” he remembered. “All of a sudden, everyone just went, ‘OK, well, go do what you’ve got to do and I hope it works out for you.’” Continue Reading

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Aaron Lewis, lead singer of Staind.

By Bob Doerschuk
© 2011 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.

Not every newcomer can persuade Charlie Daniels, George Jones and Chris Young to join in on his debut single. Then again, Aaron Lewis isn’t your typical newcomer. He’d already built a massive following as frontman for Staind when he came down to Nashville to explore a side to his music seldom exposed on the alt-metal circuit.

Town Line, produced by Lewis and James Stroud and released on R&J Records, brings that side to life. These five songs and two bonus tracks, all written solely by Lewis, combine sensitivity and introspection, poetic soul and fierce pride in his roots. Lewis is in fact a product of rural America, raised in Vermont and exposed by his grandfather to Merle Haggard, Hank Williams (Senior and Junior), fishing, hunting and communion with nature. Continue Reading

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Photo by Mark DeLong, courtesy of the CMA.

By Bob Doerschuk
© 2011 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.

Before getting into the often raucous heart of The House Rules, jump ahead to the last track, one of only two not written or co-written by Christian Kane. If his cover of Tracy Chapman’s heartbreaking masterpiece “Fast Car” is all you heard from this album released on Outlaw Saints in partnership with Bigger Picture Group, you’d know that Kane possesses depth as a lyric interpreter that stands him apart from many of his peers.

It’s important to understand that from the top, because it lets us hear more clearly that on the riff-slamming single and title track (written by Kane and Blair Daly), the banjo-studded swagger of “Callin’ All Country Women” (Kane, Jerrod Niemann and Jimmie Lee Sloas), and the steel sweetened rocker “American Made” (Kane, Wayd Battle and Steven Carlson), his connection to the material is unusually insightful. As a singer, Kane knows how to bring each of these songs to life, whether an intimate narrative or a call to party fast and hard. Continue Reading

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Photo by Kristin Barlowe, courtesy of the CMA.

By Bob Doerschuk
© 2011 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.

Some people were born Country. Brett Eldredge came to it a little late — but once he got there, he dug in deep and made it his home.

Growing up in Paris, Ill., Eldredge spent a lot of time hanging out at the local lake. He played baseball, basketball and football in high school. He enjoyed all music, especially big-band swing. Hearing Brooks & Dunn when he was 16 put Country in the center of his map, but the full-blown conversion didn’t occur until his sophomore year at Chicago’s Elmhurst College, when he visited Nashville for the first time. Continue Reading

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Jamey Johnson photo courtesy of UMG Nashville.

By Robert K. Oermann
© 2011 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.

Jamey Johnson has a way of defying our expectations. At a time when it is harder than ever to sell full-length albums relative to single digital tracks, he has followed his Mercury Nashville Gold-certified That Lonesome Song with a double album. The Guitar Song contains 25 songs and demands more than an hour of a listener’s attention – yet in September it debuted at the top of the Country chart and at No. 4 on the all-genre Billboard Top 200.

The music video for his anti-Hollywood song “Playing the Part,” written by Johnson and Shane Minor, was filmed in Hollywood and directed by actor Matthew McConaughey. And though at the top of his game as a Country songwriter and record producer, Johnson has also taken a left turn to produce a gospel album for the legendary Blind Boys of Alabama. Continue Reading

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Photo credit: Jerrett Gaza

By Bob Doerschuk
© 2010 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.

Keith Burns built his chops through club gigs in his hometown of Atlanta before starting a six-year run on bass with Joe Diffie. He then stepped into the spotlight in 1996 as co-founder of Trick Pony, with whom he recorded and performed all the way to the group’s breakup.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, and raised in Plantation, Fla., Michelle Poe learned the ropes as bassist in the family band, with her father on guitar, her mother on piano and a drum machine providing the beat. After high school graduation, she moved to Nashville and picked up band gigs on bass and harmony vocals with Dierks Bentley, Steve Holy and Hank Williams Jr. Continue Reading

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Easton Corbin photo by James Minchin, courtesy of UMG Nashville.

By Bob Doerschuk
© 2010 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.

Easton Corbin looks back warmly at Gilchrist County, Fla., where he spent his boyhood fishing in the Suwannee River, participating in FFA and 4-H activities and aspiring to a career in Country Music. As a child, he nurtured that dream through hours spent watching “Hee Haw” and “The Grand Ole Opry” with his grandparents and playing vintage Country albums he discovered there while exploring the collections his father and aunt had assembled in their early years. By his late teens, he had developed his guitar chops through lessons with former Nashville session player Pee Wee Melton and was opening for national acts as they passed through his area. Continue Reading

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Nathan Lee Jackson photo courtesy of the CMA. Photo credit: Abigail Hadeed

By Bob Doerschuk
© 2009 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.

Nathan Lee Jackson nourished his talent with a regimen of piano lessons, church choirs, talent contests and opening slots at shows around Winchester, Ky. Moving to Nashville after high school graduation, he followed the well-trod path into the music business, though with two unusual advantages. The first was one of his roommates, Billy Strange’s former wife, who happily introduced the young newcomer to her industry friends. Continue Reading

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The Oak Ridge Boys Photo Credit: Jarrett Gaza

By Bill Friskics-Warren

© 2009 CMA Close Up ® News Service / Country Music Association ®, Inc.

If anyone has proven the merits of the old adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” it’s The Oak Ridge Boys.

For more than 35 years, the internationally renowned quartet has been making hit records, collecting honors that include three CMA Awards and selling out concert halls with much the same ebullient blend of Country, pop and gospel — and, except for one late ’80s interruption, the same four voices.

So what’s with the version of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” on the quartet’s new Spring Hill Music album, The Boys are Back? And not just that, but what about the hip-hop-inflected rhythms on the title track and producer David Cobb’s blues- and rock-influenced arrangements elsewhere on the album? Continue Reading

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