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Granger Smith and Earl Dibbles Jr.
will be performing live at The Bluestone on Thursday, March 16th
Doors for the show will open at 7pm
Opening Artist: TBA
Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 day of show
Tickets will go on-sale Friday, February 3rd at 10am
PURCHASE HERE
RESERVED LOFT TABLE SEATING
RESERVED TABLE PURCHASE DOES NOT INCLUDE ADMISSION TICKETS TO THE SHOW.
Admission tickets must be purchased separately.
- Loft Lower Tier: $250 (seats four people-no exceptions)
- Prime view of stage!
- Includes first bucket of Miller or Coors Light
- Server
- Exclusive Private Bar access
-
Loft Upper Tier: $200 (seats four people-no exceptions)
- Includes first bucket of Miller or Coors Light
- Server
- Private Bar Access
- May be Obstruction in View
*All Reserved tables located in the loft area
My name is Granger Smith. Sometimes long, fancy industry bios are helpful, but other times you just need to hear from the guy actually living it, so here’s my story.
I was born and raised Texan, and I’m proud of that. I grew up along with two brothers, a couple of yellow labrador retrievers and parents that stayed together because they loved each other. My life changed when I was 14 years old and decided I would teach myself to play guitar. This was motivated by two things: I thought the guitar would make girls pay attention to me, and George Strait played one. By the time I turned 15, I was performing weekends on small town stages in North Texas, and doing my best as a fan club member to attend every George Strait concert within driving distance. Playing high school football was an important rite of passage for me, along with hunting and fishing, but the dream of a music career consumed me. At age 19, I was satisfied with enough songs I had written to make an album. As a freshman at Texas A&M, I was able to scrape together some studio money by pre-selling the album to friends around campus. For being just a kid, that album did pretty well. It landed me a songwriting deal with EMI Music Publishing in Nashville, and the following year, I took the leap to Tennessee.
DAVID NAIL will be performing LIVE at The Bluestone
on Friday, November 17th, 2017
Doors for the show will open at 7pm
Opening Artist: Jimmie Allen
Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 day of show
Tickets will go on-sale Friday, August 18th at 10am
PURCHASE HERE
RESERVED LOFT TABLE SEATING
RESERVED TABLE PURCHASE DOES NOT INCLUDE ADMISSION TICKETS TO THE SHOW.
Admission tickets must be purchased separately.
- Loft Lower Tier: $250 (seats four people-no exceptions)
- Prime view of stage!
- Includes first bucket of Miller or Coors Light
- Server
- Exclusive Private Bar access
-
Loft Upper Tier: $200 (seats four people-no exceptions)
- Includes first bucket of Miller or Coors Light
- Server
- Private Bar Access
- May be Obstruction in View
*All Reserved tables located in the loft area
ALL SALES ARE FINAL
ABOUT
During the making of his fourth MCA Nashville album, David Nail underwent a transformation – and so did his music. Fighter is the most vulnerable, personal record the Missouri native has ever made, and it signals the beginning of a new phase in his career.”
“Six months ago, people would ask me about the record and I would jokingly say ‘It’s my love-making record,’” Nail explains. “But what it meant to me then and what it means to me now are completely different. … Having been a father for about five months, it definitely changes the dynamic of things.”
Following the birth of he and wife Catherine’s long-hoped-for children (twins born in December 2015), the singer-songwriter found his world turned upside down. The mark he wanted to leave and things he wanted to say had changed, and despite an early version of Fighter being already finished, he decided to record four new songs, completely changing the project’s tone.
In short, Nail decided to get real in a way he never would have allowed himself before. Already known for powerful, emotionally-charged vocals, he took the same approach to choosing Fighter’s 11 tracks (seven of which were written or co-written by Nail himself), celebrating life’s victories but also exposing the knock-downs he’s endured – and it wasn’t always flattering.
“[I was] like, ‘Am I ready to sing this? Am I ready to tell this story?” Nail says. “[But] they come from a genuine place that you can kind of say, ‘Okay, I’ve said that. I’m at peace with that.’ I think that’s what this record is.”
Writing and singing in courageous personal detail, Nail confronted some of his deepest troubles, revealing the clarity he’s achieved about his hometown, the true struggle depression caused in his marriage, the answered-prayer of his children’s birth and the things he never told his own father.
Meanwhile, producer Frank Liddell (who also guided Nail’s first three albums, I’m About to Come Alive, The Sound of a Million Dreams and I’m a Fire) made sure Fighter’s musical tone was just as authentic, backing Nail’s volcanic vocals with a melting pot of Mississippi-delta sounds — a mix of classic-country balladry and sweaty Memphis soul, with touches of in-the-moment modernity sprinkled throughout.
“I grew up listening to all this music that my father listened to,” says Nail. “A lot of it was classic, huge songs and artists from the ‘60s and ‘70s – and even the ‘80s – so I think there’s always part of me that just falls toward that type of sound, rather than fighting it and trying to say ‘Whoa! No-no-no, we need to stay 2016.”
Big-name collaborations abound, with Nail inviting Vince Gill, Brothers Osborne, Lori McKenna and Logan Brill to help tell his story, as well as Bear and Bo Rinehart of NEEDTOBREATE.
“When I’m making a record I selfishly want to push my buttons so I try to approach it as my swan song, it could be the last piece of music I make. I want to fulfill some life goals in the process and one of my biggest influences in the word is Vince Gill so I’m thankful he said yes”
Brothers Osborne kick the project off in star-crossed revelry on “Good at Tonight,” McKenna joins “Home” to quietly uncover Nail’s love/hate relationship with his hometown, Gill adds stunning harmony vocals to the country-soul “I Won’t Let You Go” – a promise to David’s wife Catherine – and the Rineharts help close the album in tender admiration with “Old Man’s Symphony,” an overdue thank-you note to Nail’s dad.
Along the way, he toasts to the passion of youth in the upbeat hit “Night’s On Fire,” pledges romantic relief in the raw Chris Stapleton co-write “Ease Your Pain,” delivers a desperate double entendre in the indie-rocking “Lie With Me” and crafts a loving, rock-a-bye origin story for his new family in “Babies” – an instant classic.
Then there’s the project’s title track, “Fighter,” a heartfelt ‘80s-country throwback ripped from Nail’s real life that holds his wife up as an unshakable supporter – even when he was at his worst.
“’Fighter’ is about as honest as I’ve ever been in a song,” Nail admits. “I mean, when you’re quoting your wife saying things that are not pleasant [about you], you know it was our story. … But it also, I think, tells the story of me.”
Nail and Catherine have had to fight their whole lives, he explains – for his career, for their marriage, to battle back inner demons and to conceive their beautiful kids – but their ultimate success in those battles has led them to a better place. And it also gave the album a mission.
Fighter is more than a bookmark in Nail’s life and career – it’s a period on the final sentence of a difficult chapter. Penned during dark times that have given way to a new sunrise, these are some of the most meaningful and personal songs he’s ever recorded. And now that they exist for all to hear, he can finally move on.
“I feel like I’ve told the main aspects of my career, and my life, up to this point,” he explains. “So I really think whatever we do in the future, we’ll be able to start just completely fresh. It’ll be a new story, a new part of my life.”
-Chris Parton
The Cadillac Three will be performing live at The Bluestone on March 8th, 2018
Opening Artist: Austin Jenckes
Doors for the show will open at 7pm
Tickets are $25 in advance and $30 day of show
This show is SOLD OUT!
PURCHASE HERE
The Cadillac Three LIVE at The Bluestone
THE CADILLAC THREE
It may be a ballsy move for The Cadillac Three to name their new album LEGACY, but if any country band has the shared history to lay claim to such a weighty title, it’s the longhaired trio of Nashville natives.
Singer-guitarist Jaren Johnston, drummer Neil Mason and lap-steel player Kelby Ray have known one another since they were teens and have been sharing stages together for nearly 15 years. This summer, they’ll headline their hometown’s most famous venue, the Ryman Auditorium, just a few blocks from where Johnston and Ray sat in high-school math class daydreaming about one day playing the legendary hall. Johnston’s connection to the Ryman goes back even further: his father has been a drummer at the Grand Ole Opry since Jaren was a child. And now he has a son of his own, who, like his old man, will be well-versed in all the sounds that make up both Music City and The Cadillac Three, from country and blues to rock & roll.
So, yeah, “legacy” looks good on this band.
“We’re trying to build something and do it our way, which is always harder,” says Johnston. “If you’re going to leave something that people are actually going to remember, you can’t take the easy way. So we took all of our history, mixed it with the energy of The Cadillac Three and put it into a record that makes sense of where we’ve been and where we’re going.”
After nearly a full year on the road in support of 2016’s BURY ME IN MY BOOTS, their first full-length album recorded for Big Machine Records, the group returns with a more mature perspective. Johnston, Mason and Ray have experienced a lot on tour, whether opening arenas across the country on Florida Georgia Line’s Dig Your Roots Tour or headlining their own consistently sold-out string of sweaty club and theater shows in the U.K. and Europe. As they prepare to head back in November for another big run, for The Cadillac Three, the old saying really is true: this band is huge overseas.
“Europe showed us that we should bet on ourselves. It was a big gamble the first time we went over there,” says Mason, “but the shows and the fans have continued to grow.”
“And going overseas reinforced that we wanted to get more music out more quickly,” adds Ray. “They go through singles really quickly over there. They want more, more, more and that encouraged us to go into the studio, knock this album out and keep going.”
All that travel, from city to state, country to continent, could decimate a lesser band, but it only served to creatively inspire the mighty TC3. They wrote many of the 11 songs that make upLEGACY on the road, cut the tracks on rare days off in Nashville and then recorded all of Johnston’s vocals – one of the most “country” voices in the genre – in the back lounge of their bus in between shows, adding a crackling sense of vitality to LEGACY. They also produced the album themselves.
“We knew what we wanted to do with this record. Instead of putting it together in bits and pieces, we started with a batch of songs and then picked a single,” Johnston says. “That’s how this shit should be done.”
That back-to-basics approach to making music yielded the band’s most infectious single to date: the woozy sing-along “Dang If We Didn’t.” Written, as is most of the album, by Johnston and Mason (here, with Jonathan Singleton; other times with songwriters like Laura Veltz and Angelo Petraglia), “Dang If We Didn’t” teases fans with its ambiguous title, before revealing what the guys actually did in the chorus: get drunk last night.
“When you’re a songwriter, you can be critical of song titles,” says Johnston. “But with ‘Dang If We Didn’t,’ I thought it was a little bit mysterious. It makes you wonder, ‘Dang if we didn’t do what?'”
“Eat pizza last night,” quips Mason. “It could be anything.”
“American Slang” rivals “Dang If We Didn’t” in its grandeur. It’s a huge song, akin to Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin'” or The Cadillac Three’s own “Graffiti,” off BURY ME IN MY BOOTS. Lori McKenna (Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush”) began writing the tune with the intention of having The Cadillac Three finish it. “We are vampires on Hollywood Boulevard / angels and sinners of our hometown streets,” go the lyrics, painting a picture of life’s rebels, before a massive country-radio chorus kicks in: “We are the back roads, dirty water shore banks…we are born and raised on American slang.”
The constant throughout LEGACY, however, lies in the players: as on all three of The Cadillac Three’s albums, only Johnston, Mason and Ray are the musicians. There’s no guest keyboard player, no second percussionist and certainly no bassist. Ray holds down the low end on his lap steel.
Especially on the standout LEGACY track “Take Me to the Bottom,” which features Johnston reaching high for a breathtaking falsetto. “‘Take Me to the Bottom’ has the best bass sound of anything I’ve ever done,” says Ray, who also keeps things greasy on the intense “Tennessee.” A thrashing love song, it evokes the stomp of ZZ Top – a favorite of TC3 – and features a lyrical shout-out to progressive country hero Sturgill Simpson, a kindred spirit of the band.
No matter the influence, though, the trio stays faithful to their own unique sound throughout LEGACY. “Hank & Jesus” glides along with Tennessee twang; “Demolition Man” is distinguished by the space between the notes; and the swaggering “Cadillacin'” is a band anthem. “We don’t put anything on our albums that we can’t re-create live,” says Mason. “If there is a TC3 rule, it’s that: keep it honest.”
Honesty, or authenticity, is a favorite buzzword around Nashville. But few artists come to it as naturally as The Cadillac Three. These guys couldn’t fake it if they tried. In the album’s title track, they offer a heart-on-the-sleeve testimony to what’s really important at the end of one’s days: love and a family tree.
When Mason and Ray heard “Legacy,” co-written by Johnston, they flipped, and pushed for it to be the title of the record. “We’re far enough along in our careers where doing an album called LEGACY doesn’t feel presumptuous to me,” says Mason.
Not when you run through The Cadillac Three’s milestones. It’s all there, from boundary-pushing albums, Grammy-nominated No. 1 songwriting across genres and fan-favorite singles to sold-out club shows and massive festival gigs alongside Aerosmith.
“With this album, we’re continuing to build this thing we’ve created. We’re touring nonstop, headlining shows in the U.K., playing the Ryman, and putting out a new record,” says Johnston. “Shit, that’s a pretty good legacy so far.”
Country Fuzz presents: The Cadillac Three LIVE in Concert February 13th
Doors for the show will open at 7pm
Opening Artist: TBA
Tickets are just $27.50 in Advance and $32.50 day of show
Tickets will go on-sale Friday, November 22nd at 10am
PURCHASE HERE
Singer-guitarist Jaren Johnston, drummer Neil Mason and lap-steel player Kelby Ray have known one another since they were teens and have been sharing stages together for nearly 15 years. This summer, they’ll headline their hometown’s most famous venue, the Ryman Auditorium, just a few blocks from where Johnston and Ray sat in high-school math class daydreaming about one day playing the legendary hall. Johnston’s connection to the Ryman goes back even further: his father has been a drummer at the Grand Ole Opry since Jaren was a child. And now he has a son of his own, who, like his old man, will be well-versed in all the sounds that make up both Music City and The Cadillac Three, from country and blues to rock & roll.
So, yeah, “legacy” looks good on this band.
