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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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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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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Josh Thompson's 2010 CD, Way Out Here. Photo courtesy of Sony Music Nashville.

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

Josh Thompson’s future seemed written in concrete — specifically, in his father’s concrete business in Cedarburg, Wis., where he began working at 12. Years would pass before Thompson dared to dream about making music as a livelihood. In fact, he was 21 when he got his first guitar.

“I really just intended to play some of my favorite Merle Haggard songs around the campfire,” he explained. “But I began writing about six months later. Then it just got into my blood and controlled my life.”

By the time he got to Nashville in 2005, Thompson was nurturing a knack for capturing the nuances of life in a lyric and a tune. After landing a music publishing deal and making an initial impression by co-writing “Growing Up Is Getting Old,” the title track of Jason Michael Carroll’s latest album, with Jeremy Campbell, he built a reputation strong enough to earn a record deal with Columbia Nashville, which released a four-song, self-titled digital EP in November 2009. 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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Sarah Jarosz. Photo: Scott Simontacchi

By Bob Doerschuk

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

Music found its way early to 18-year-old Sarah Jarosz, beginning with solfège and ear training in kindergarten and culminating with her participation for seven consecutive years in the Organization of American Kodaly Educators National Honor Choir.

But her true muse came in the form of a mandolin, given by her parents one Christmas when she was almost 10 and living in Wimberley, Texas. Her proximity to Austin may have been the final ingredient in leading her toward American roots music. Continue Reading

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Gloriana photo courtesy of Emblem Music Group. Photo credit: Kristin Barlowe.

By Bob Doerschuk

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

Established through club gigs in North Carolina as a duo, brothers Mike and Tom Gossin moved to Nashville in 2007 and soon after hooked up with Rachel Reinert. Working now as a trio, they connected with Cheyenne Kimball, a member of the audience during one of their gigs at Nashville club 3rd & Lindsley; instrumentally as well as vocally, she proved the last ingredient in the sound of Gloriana.

They rehearsed for six months before sending a demo to Emblem Music Group. Matt Serletic, founder of the new record label, responded immediately, welcomed them to the roster and got to work lining up material for their debut album. Continue Reading

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Justin Moore photo by Kristin Barlowe, courtesy of The Valory Music Co.

By Bob Doerschuk

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

If you can make your past come alive through music, then you’ve got a gift that will serve you well. In this department, Justin Moore is amply blessed.

Case in point: Though written by Randy Houser and Jeremy Stover, Moore’s first single, “Back That Thing Up,” conjures how life must have felt back on the Arkansas farm where he was raised. Kids grew up there hunting, fishing, milking the cows and working the land — the kind of routine that feeds the good-natured, double-entendre swagger in this tale of a country boy as he introduces a city lass to the wonders of rural recreation. Continue Reading

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