Page 141 – Maverick Country

Morgan Wade releases her debut ten track album tomorrow (March 19th). Wade, now 26, kept her songs and her voice hidden in her younger years, later taking to the stage naturally at age 19, and then choosing sobriety soon after in her early twenties. The album, she notes, is an honest portrayal of her truth, grit and growth. Working alongside Paul Ebersold and Sadler Vaden, long-time guitarist for Jason Isbell as well as an acclaimed solo artist in his own right, the trio shaped songs Wade has written over the years and developed new tracks to create a debut that speaks Morgan Wade’s truth and shines a light on the difficult issues affecting society today. Wade notes influences that span bluegrass, country and pop, with her sensibilities of the latter on full display in “Last Cigarette.” Reckless was announced with the release of critically acclaimed opening track “Wilder Days,” landing on Rolling Stone’s “Country Music Picks of the Week” where it earned praise as a “polished country-rock gem.” “Wilder Days,” as well as additional early releases “Don’t Cry” and “Take Me Away,” quickly earned placement on over 30 prominent playlists, including the cover of Spotify’s coveted Indigo playlist and Apple Music’s Country Risers of the Week, and have since garnered over 1 million streams. Playing the full collection of heartfelt music to fans in a live setting for the first time, Wade performs a stripped-back version of Reckless tonight, March 18, in two sold-out limited capacity audiences at Nashville’s 3rd and Lindsley – livestreaming across the country to celebrate the album’s long-awaited release at 8 p.m. CT. Livestream tickets are available HERE. For more information, follow Wade on Instagram @MorganWadeMusic, Twitter @TheMorganWade and Facebook.com/MorganWadeMusic. Reckless Track List: 1. Wilder Days 2. Matches and Metaphors 3. Other Side 4. Don’t Cry 5. Mend 6. Last Cigarette 7. Take Me Away 8. Reckless 9. Northern Air 10. Met You Watch Livestream from 3rd and Lindsley HERE Tonight @ 8 p.m. CT/ 1 a.m. GMT To stay up to date on the latest country music news, please register to receive our newsletter here. Media contact Zoe Hodges, Editor, Maverick Magazine Tel: +44 (0) 1622 823920 Email: [email protected]

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Drake White Celebrates One Year Of Wednesday Night Therapy, Mar. 17

Leave a Comment / Live Events / Rochelle Mills

This Wednesday, March 17th, marks the one-year anniversary of Drake White’s weekly Wednesday Night Therapy livestream shows. Drake and his band, The Big Fire, will celebrate the milestone with this week’s special guest, Hayes Carll. With Drake’s indomitable spirit, the voracious live performer was one of the first artists to launch a streaming live show as the gravity of the pandemic became apparent, kicking off the life-affirming hour-long shows on March 18, 2020. Kip Moore, Colbie Caillat, Frankie Ballard, Dillon Carmichael, Ryan Berg of “The Voice,” and Hannah Dasher are among the many artists who’ve joined Drake at his Whitewood Hollow barn in Nashville for a Wednesday Night Therapy session. Seeing Drake White live is far from an ordinary concert experience. Equal parts warrior leader, holy-fire reverend, and gypsy Appalachian mountain man, he fronts his band with a mix of Muscle Shoals groove and honky-tonk grease. The goal? To continue building an inspired community with his voice, country-soul spirit, and relentless optimism, fusing everything he does — from the shows he plays with The Big Fire (his blue-collar band of road warriors), to the events he hosts at Whitewood Hollow, the rustic event space he hand-designed with his wife, Alex, in rural Tennessee — with the big-tent spirit of a revival. Tune in to tonights show HERE at Midnight GMT/7pm Central! To stay up to date on the latest country music news, please register to receive our newsletter here. Media contact Zoe Hodges, Editor, Maverick Magazine Tel: +44 (0) 1622 823920 Email: [email protected]

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CMT Crossroads: Nathaniel Rateliff and Margo Price

Jessica Lynn shares lyric video for her single ’Getaway Car’

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Country crossover sensation Jessica Lynn releases a brand-new lyric video for her latest hit single ‘Getaway Car’. Listen to the track and you’ll find Jessica’s voice full of enthusiasm and joie de vivre, and the song full of infectious exhilaration. Starting with a well-baited, tasty guitar hook and harmonious vocals, ‘Getaway Car’ brims with positive energy, playing on the free-roaming driving experience that so infuses American dreams and culture. It’s imagery that feels even more vivid and liberating in these grey, locked-down months in the UK! So how does the lyric video give that visual form? “Getaway Car is such a feel-good song that it required a fun, fast, and colourful video,” said Lynn, “As we are in the middle of cold winter here in New York, I didn’t feel that shooting a traditional music video would suit the track! Instead, for now, we can take a fast-paced, virtual ride through love.” Check out the Lyric video for Getaway Car here https://youtu.be/be6LB9llyG4 As a single, ‘Getaway Car’ has already been earning airplay and acclaim. BCMA British Country Music Association awarded Jessica Country Release Friday artist with Modern Age Music as Single Of The Week and added it to their Best New Country Spotify playlist. The single recently charted on iTunes #2 in Belgium. In other news, Jessica has been gracing the January/February cover of Maverick — the biggest international country music magazine — and is the subject of a feature interview inside, focusing on ‘Getaway Car’ and her forthcoming ‘Lone Rider’ album. Jessica is also up for Belles & Gals’ UK Country Music Spotlight Awards, nominated in the category, of Best International Artist of the Year (sponsored by Voice of a Woman). What’s more, Jessica herself will also be performing in the headline slot at the International Awards Special tonight Friday, 19 February – 7pm GMT. The event will be streamed via Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Check out the lyric video for Jessica Lynn’s ‘Getaway Car’ and see her website and social media for further news about her forthcoming album, and her website for pre-ordering it. ‘Getaway Car’ is available to download & Stream from all digital platforms. Single Smart Link: https://snd.click/getawaycar

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Cover story: Jessica Lynn, the lone wolf

Cover story: Jessica Lynn, the lone rider

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Jessica Lynn has always done things differently and in her own way, but after many years of plugging away, she is now in a position to release her debut album and make a huge statement in the process. They say that you make your own luck in life. If you keep chipping away, doing the right things and try to be a good person along the way, things will fall into place for you eventually. It may not be the next day or the next week, but it will happen in time. That has very much been the case for Jessica Lynn, who after finally getting into a position where she could put out a six-song EP, instead got to work for a debut album. The nature of lockdown saw the New York based artist hunker down and as such, she wrote some of the best songs in her career to date and is now merging them with songs from her past that were never given the studio treatment to create a 13-song album. There is also a notable guest contribution, but the whole process highlights how Lynn takes an opportunity and grabs it with both hands. “This album was never supposed to happen,” Lynn says. “It was going to be a six song EP that went out right before we went on the tour, so we had some new stuff to push. I’m the type of person that just finds the silver lining in everything – I don’t know if it’s the hard-headed New York Italian in me, but I was like ‘alright, let’s do something great with this and fight back’. So, we chose to do a full-length album, it’s now up to 13 songs and one of which actually features one of my favourite UK musicians in Steve Marks from Gasoline & Matches. “I wanted to put songs on there that I felt never had a proper chance. For example, there’s a song on there from my first nationwide TV special in America that only had a live album to go with it. It was never a single, it was never even recorded properly and it was my favourite track on the whole thing, so we added that and some songs that I’d only performed live prior to this. I then also started writing again for the record and that’s why it ended up getting so long, because I was locked in here and just writing stuff that had to go on it!” Not bound by genre In addition to tracks that never got a proper chance, you will notice with Lynn’s album that she fuses and blends a number of different genres together. While she does, of course, stick largely to country and her style of rock, she doesn’t pigeon herself into boxes and stick to them – if she comes up with a song that is a bit left field but really feels it, she’ll run with it. That is something that she is hoping to push with ‘Lone Rider’, as she feels the record shows her genuine self across a few genres. “I think that this record is going to show people really who I am. When I set up to write it and put it together, the intention was never to stick to genre. I’ve loved so many types of music and growing up in New York I didn’t have the traditional country music influences that a lot of other artists have, but I just wrote from my heart and very honestly and purely. “It could be a kind of weird ballad but you know what? If I love it and it’s me, it’s going on. I don’t have to care about anything else and that took my writing and me as an artist to a totally new way and I think people are going to like that.” Building up to this moment In the early part of January, Lynn celebrated her 31st birthday and considering she has been involved with music ever since she was 13-year-old, the question was asked as to why it is only now that she is releasing a studio album. The answer to that is primarily down to the financial difficulties of being an independent artist, but Lynn also wanted to wait until she could unleash everything into a project and then go with that. Now, she has her chance as everything has fallen into place for her. “I’ve always been an independent artist and it’s very difficult. I have dedicated my life to getting out there, shaking hands, doing social media to try and get people to understand my music, because you never have money as an independent artist. You always have to be creative and think about the most bang for your little buck that you have or how you’re going to do it. “Putting out an album is a big undertaking and to get people to purchase an album is a bigger undertaking with streaming and Spotify, so I always try and do things the smart way, because we’ve always had very limited resources. For me, just putting out singles or live albums was always just the way to go. I never wanted to put so much of my heart and soul into something and then not be able to do something with it. “I’ve fought hard during the pandemic and before lockdown, I was reaching 500,000 people on Facebook. I hit 15 million last month. It blows my mind, but it’s so cool to see all your hard work and your effort actually pay off in a very tangible way. It’s been making me feel very confident, so you know what? This is the perfect time to take a new step as my career has reached new heights.” Life lessons Things could’ve been very different for Lynn from a musical perspective but for things out of her control, as the childhood band that she fronted and wrote all

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Tom Ovans new album 'Crows In The Corn' – Available Now!

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The long awaited 14th release by Texas-based artist Tom Ovans, Crows In The Corn, is now available digitally on all major platforms via Orchard Distribution. In tandem, all 13 of Ovans’ previous albums have been re-released and are available online. The 11 songs on Crows In The Corn, continue Ovans’ string of gritty, bare-bones recordings. Recorded analog to a 4 track, the songs and performances are left alone to stand on their own. The album kicks off with the dirt-road blues of “Going Back Home” and ends with a haunted tender version of one of Ovans’ most well-known songs, “Avenue of the Americas” (6th Avenue). The new recording captures the song as it was originally written. ‘The first time I recorded it I was just in a different place musically, so I changed it up a bit. I always knew I had to get back to it, back to the way the song came to me,’ says Tom. The second song on the album “Spaghetti Blues” may seem funny on the surface, but there’s a dark undertone about the struggles of an artist sticking to his guns. “Her” is some kind of ballad, an all-nighter that wanders through a dark city. Fourth track “Rolling and Rambling” seems to be about two exes sparring with each other while the carnival of life spins on around them. The title track “Crows in the Corn” is just Ovans and his guitar, but the vision is cinematic. A tale of two lovers lost to each other, once defiant yet now mostly broken. “Apocalyptic Dawn” is a surreal crazed tale of surviving faithless love in an upside-down world. The area around Reelfoot Lake in northwest Tennessee is called “Land Of The Shakes”. The lake was created by the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-12. In a powerful country song Ovans’ uses the title as metaphor to take us on a journey through the bear hunting days of Davy Crockett, to the pollution and degradation of the land, through the gospel of Elvis, and finally to the struggles of today’s forgotten working class. The slow-burning “Hard Road Mama” hits the road, the walls of reality, takes no prisoners and asks for no pity. “On A Greyhound” is just one of those songs that makes you get quiet and listen. Finally “The Mighty Sea” recalls the epic folk ballads of long ago telling the tale of a doomed love. Listen to “On a Greyhound” here: “Ovans’s world all is loaded, sometimes you don’t even know with what exactly, but time suspends and the moment freezes, freighted with glower, leavened only by that lonesome shiver and spark. A sense of thrill and chill in equal measure. His singing seems in part, at least to me, to have shifted intriguingly a notch. All else is bang on the same. From Bleecker to Texas to muddy shore of mighty sea. Gaunt songs of errant haunt that still the soul and echo soft through the midnight hour. Uncomfortable but necessary.”

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The Outlaw Orchestra Premiere their Video for Single ‘Send Some Whiskey Home’

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Country rebels The Outlaw Orchestra ride again and premiere the brand-new video for their single ‘Send Some Whiskey Home’: a track that is rich in country rock and sweet slide guitar that demonstrates the boys flexing a more mature direction in songwriting and performance. The song has come to serve as the band’s calling card for their country blues roots and their unrepentant tongue-in-cheek lyrics, affectionately homaging the women (and dogs) who allow them to maintain their musicians’ lifestyle. This is a heartfelt love song between man, dog and whiskey. Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/qXXf4BKX5o4 Listen to the song here: Taken from their recent, critically-acclaimed 10-track debut album ‘Pantomime Villains’,the single will be released on 22nd January 2021. Reflecting on ‘Send Some Whiskey Home’s origin and inspiration, the band admit that “The roots of this song can be traced back to Dave Roux spending yet another day watching back-to-back cartoons, with his dog (Ted) sat on the sofa. “Dave’s good lady arrived home after a long day at work. Dave and Ted both looked at her and said ‘We’re starving: What’s for dinner?’ “She walked right on past them, sighed, looked back and said ‘I wish you loved me like that dog loves you!’ Dave looked at Ted, who was wagging his tail, and said “Pass me the guitar, boy, I feel a song coming on!” When Dave Roux (guitars/lead vocals) played the tune that he’d hit upon to Pete Briley (banjo/lap steel/vocals), it fitted so well with lap steel that it was surely a match made in Heaven! Dave toyed with the song in Long Beach California, sitting in with musician friends Trish Burke and Buzzy James of The Buzzy James Trio, Laidlaw; also the band M.O.B. (Michael Olivieri Band, whose lead singer cut his teeth in 80’s hair rockers LeatherWolf). Trish’s soulful gospel harmonies and Buzzy’s accomplished slide guitar (once revered by legendary guitarist, Eddie Van Halen, himself) “put the icing on the cake” of a song that has become a firm fan favourite. The video was filmed at 6am on a frosty autumnal New Forest morning, featuring a special cameo by Dave’s dog Ted, who sets the benchmark for love and devotion in both the original remark and the lyrics. 2020 saw the band’s debut album hit the ground running, earning praise from many respected broadcasters and reviewers. Steve Beastie (Hard Rock Hell Radio) ranked ‘Pantomime Villains’ in his Top 25 albums of 2020. Mick Birchall Reviews named it in his Top 40 Albums of 2020 (just beating Chris Stapleton, whom The Outlaw Orchestra admit they dig!) whilst Rockposer put the album in their top 3 Albums of the Year. What’s more, looking forward, Metalplanetmusic have put The Outlaw Orchestra down as Ones to Watch for 2021. “Somehow, from somewhere,” Rushonrock mused in amazement, “The Outlaw Orchestra have outshone the opposition. David Roux and his merry men have reinvented the wheel. They’ve rewritten the rock and roll rulebook.” As MNPR Magazine observed, “To create a body of work as stylistically diverse as ‘Pantomime Villains’ takes talent, and to make it look as it if it was seemingly thrown together over a few beers, is pure genius.” Check out The Outlaw Orchestra’s latest single and video release from that excellent album. Send Some Whiskey Home is now available to download and stream on all digital platforms https://open.spotify.com/track/0WfTvMH5zuGHupA6f22Tdz?si=Uv88GoBMQPudLpzegh5D2g https://music.apple.com/gb/album/send-some-whiskey-home/1544052774?i=1544052775 Website: https://www.theoutlaworchestra.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theoutlaworchestra/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/outlaworchestra Instragram: https://www.instagram.com/theoutlaworchestra/

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One to Watch: Tim Prottey-Jones

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If you talk to any UK based artist on the UK country scene, there is a strong chance that Tim Prottey-Jones has written with them, produced for them or has supported them in some way. The former Wandering Heart has been keeping his finger on the pulse and has chosen now as the time to launch his solo career. Given that he has worked in bands mainly, it is a bit of a shock to the system on that front, but it is something that he is relishing as ultimately, everything he produces is for him and him only. “I don’t know what it is about putting your name to something personally,” Prottey-Jones said. “It almost feels like you’re working behind the scenes with a band name and I quite like that. “But I think there’s something about this year where it’s just one of those years, where you just go ‘if I can’t do it this year, then when can I?’, so I think it’s purely stems from how proud and happy I am of the music that I’m coming out with and at the end of the day, this music is just for me. It’s only me that’s got to sing it and it’s only me that’s got to perform it.” A blend of sounds While Prottey-Jones hasn’t yet figured out if he’ll be making the collection of singles he has at his disposal into an EP or to push on and make an album depending on how it goes, what he has figured out is his sound – even if no-one knows what to expect. By combining a number of genres together and complete with his own twist, Prottey-Jones has something going and is very keen to see how people take to it. “When I put Bite the Bullet out, I don’t think people knew what to expect and I think that comes from being in a band, producing and writing for other artists and it being a case of knowing what my sound is. My only answer to that is wait until you hear all these songs put together, because they pretty much will sum it up. “There will always be elements of rock due to my love of that growing up, country runs through without a doubt because that’s what I love and there’s pop stuff in there because from a production point of view, that excites me as well. I’ve tried to fuse all of those things as well as showing off parts of my voice. If I have any luck, you’ll certainly know what I’m all about.” Never say never While Prottey-Jones is very much a solo artist now, the heights he hit as part of The Wandering Hearts were astronomical and while he isn’t intentionally trying to make lightning strike twice in that respect, he doesn’t see the harm in trying to push himself as far as possible as you just never know what is going to happen in the music world. “The stuff that we achieved with the band, some of it was honestly out of this world incredible. It may never be recreated. Playing at the Ryman for our first American show alongside people like Chris Stapleton – that’s a real pinch me, bucket list kind of moment. There really is no point me saying “I’ll never do that again”, because you just don’t know. I never thought that was gonna happen and I never thought I’d get a major record deal, but I did and those things happened and they happened fairly late on in my career really. “You never know. I feel like I’ve learnt a lot over these past five or six years and probably even more so since the band. I think I know now what I need to do, what I don’t want to do and I need to trust my instincts as well I think. Those instincts were right when the band started and when I put that band together and who’s to say I can’t do that again with my own stuff?” Regardless of whether he hits those heights again or not, it’s a very safe bet to assume that Prottey-Jones will be a shining star in the UK country scene for as long as he wants to be.

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J R Harbidge shares new track 'Wrong Side of the Fight'

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J R Harbidge has given fans a taster of what is to come from his upcoming new album by releasing lead single Wrong Side of the Fight. You can listen to the song here or watch the video below. [wpdevart_youtube]ubUpfMMMTQI[/wpdevart_youtube] Harbidge’s second album ‘Long Black River’ will be released on April 30 and Wrong Side of the Fight is the first single from that, with the Cannock based artist following up on his 2018 debut ‘First Ray of Light’. Speaking about the song, Harbidge said that it has been kicking around for over 25 years, but only got finished in 2020 as the artist simply couldn’t find a melody for it until that point, while also offering some insight as to how the album went for him. “It’s a song that started life when we were 15 and got completed when I turned 41,” Harbidge said. ““I remember having that music on a four-track X28H multi-track recorder as a teenager and I have spent years trying to get a melody for it. That song waited until 2020 to disclose its undeclared magic. Songwriting is a mysterious process, isn’t it? “This album was both a joy and a chore at the same time. I loved writing and recording the songs, I loved getting some fantastic musicians playing on the album and I loved collaborating with a new collaborator on one of the songs. I also loved getting loads of my FB and Instagram friends to sing on the ‘yob chorus’ at the end of side-by-side: all great experiences!”

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