Jelly Roll, Keith Urban and Other CMT Stars Discuss Coming Projects
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While the CMT Music Awards reward videos from the past year, the stars who perform on the show often use it to tease singles from upcoming projects, even as others close out their current “eras” on the telecast but are happy to talk backstage about what’s coming next.
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In the wings of Austin’s Moody Center before and after the 2024 CMTs, Variety nabbed many of the most celebrated performers and awardees of the night to discuss what they have in the hopper, as well as how their performances went. Some, like Keith Urban and Trisha Yearwood, were premiering previously unheard songs; others, like Jelly Roll, were content to give their previous projects one last push in the spotlight, while hinting at the new. Following are excerpts from our backstage convos with Lainey Wilson, Dasha, Megan Moroney, Brittney Spencer, Jordan Davis and others about the here and near-future.
Jelly Roll
Jelly Roll is, by some measures, the biggest thing happening in country music right now. And he’s not looking to coast through 2024 — new music is very much on the way. Although he performed “Halfway to Hell,” a song from his 2023 breakout album, on the CMT Awards, the singer said we can expect to see him debuting previously unheard material very shortly.
“This is it, man,” he said backstage after the show. “This is the end of the ‘Whitsitt Chapel’ era. We started it here a year ago with ‘Need a Favor’” — the 2023 CMT Awards performance that blew him into the stratosphere — “and we performed ‘Halfway to Hell’ tonight. I kind of started and ended an era of my music career right here. And then, next time y’all see me in an awards show, God willing, it will be so new.
“I wrote probably a hundred-and-something songs last year,” he continued. “I’m sitting on a phone that is shaking out of my pocket with the spirit and soul in it that needs to be released. I’m to the point where I’m finna just start releasing music, just doing it. I need to get it out of me. It’s therapeutic for me. …I’ve never been more inspired. I’ve never been more aware of the people I’m representing and what I’m here to do and what my purpose is.”
How soon would he say the next era starts, then, publicly? “I’ve got an idea,” he answered. “I’d say here in about a month or two. Look at the calendar. You’ll see it. It’ll jump out at you in a minute. You’ll be like, ‘Ah, OK, that makes sense.’ That’s what I’m hoping for. I haven’t got the green light, but I know what moon I’m shooting for, baby. What I’ve learned in this process is, don’t be afraid to tell ’em what you want. Just shoot for it.”
Jelly Roll was putting our powers of deduction to the test with that invitation to examine the calendar. It doesn’t take too much brainpower to notice that the ACM Awards are just over a month away, on May 16. That would seem to be what he was hinting at for a time frame for premiering a new song. (He has yet another big performance scheduled in the meantime, at the 2024 iHeartCountry Festival on May 4, but since that show is primarily destined to go out over broadcast radio, it’s unlikely he’d schedule a major premiere there.)
The CMTs will always hold a special place in his heart, as a kind of before-and-after demarcation point in his career, because of last year’s galvanizing turn for him. “I’d only been out a few months at that point, the album was on its way, and that song (‘Need a Favor’) was probably in the late 30s on country radio at the time. So it was kind of what pushed that song over the edge. … This is always gonna be special to me because it was the first award show I ever performed at, the first award show I ever won an award at, and it’s a fan-voted award show, which makes the playing field a little different.”
But he just recently triumphed at another awards show that meant something, the People’s Choice Awards, with two fan-voted trophies there. “I didn’t go there thinking I was gonna win anything. And then when they were like, Best New Country (artist) award, I was like, ‘That’s awesome! I got it.’ And then when they (gave him the) Best New Pop award, I was like, ‘Somebody’s mad, for sure.’”
Jelly Roll merited an item on TMZ for the way he partied after winning those two People’s Choice Awards — by doing a little streaking on his hotel floor. (This was posted and then quickly deleted on social media by his wife, the site reported.) Should his current choice of lodging get a warning? “We’re sending that in the advance (to hotels) now, that every now and then, Jelly over-celebrates,” he laughed. “I tell you what, though, man, if you’d come from where I come from and you win two awards on national TV, you’d act a little crazy too.”
Time will tell whether he can keep the same track record going at industry-voted shows, but fan-voted honors seem to be a shoo-in for him right now. “The Jelly Roll fans are the mighty 300 Sparta. I tell ’em I may not ever be one of the biggest artists in country, but man, I will always have a fan base that will scream because they have been quiet for so long and they’ve been shit on for so long. … I think that people understand that I represent a group of people that aren’t properly represented, and when I win, we win. It’s like a win for a whole bunch of kind of misfit people, you know what I mean? I’m a straight-up misfit dude. I’m as white trash as I look like I am. I am who I am all the time. What you see here is what you see at a dinner table.”
Lainey Wilson
Lainey Wilson is on an awards sweep that doesn’t look likely to end any time soon, following up her big wins at the industry-voted CMA Awards last November — principally, the entertainer of the year prize — and a People’s Choice award for favorite female country singer in February… now followed by a somewhat inevitable CMT Award for favorite female music video.
Up at the podium, she made a remark about observing the sheer diligence of every other woman in her category — a comment that seemed to have more to it than just the usual everyone here is a winner comment. We asked her to expound on that following the show.
“Every single girl in that category that was mentioned works their fingers to the bone, and I see it and I know it because they’re friends of mine,” she said. “And we check on each other. We say, ‘Hey, how you doing? How’s your heart? How’s your mind?’ And my guy friends — I mean, they’re running up and down the road burning the candle at both ends, too. But I will tell you, I think that sometimes the girls have to do a little bit more. And that’s OK, because I tell all the guys, ‘We coming for y’all. We coming in hot and you don’t even know it.’ But we have a story to tell, and it feels nice to be a part of that change, like folks like Carrie Underwood and Miranda Lambert were a part of that change for me, and folks like Reba and Shania were for all of them. It just kind of goes in waves like that, and so it’s just about continuing to pave the way for each other.”
Speaking specifically to the appeal of the winning song/video, “Watermelon Moonshine,” Wilson acknowledged a specific debt.
“When I think back to the songs that touched me growing up, and especially as a teenager, it was songs like Deana Carter’s (1996 classic) ‘Strawberry Wine.’ And when I was writing the song, I was definitely channeling ‘Strawberry Wine.’ There will never be another one, but this is kind of my version of that. I remember how ‘Strawberry Wine’ made me feel, and it did take me back to a certain time and place of memory. I felt like I could just go back there in my mind and feel it. And I wanted to make sure that ‘Watermelon Moonshine’ did the same thing. I think songs like that, that are nostalgic like that, they’re just timeless. People can relate. They want to go back to that place; everybody wants to feel at home.”
Rather than reprise “Watermelon,” Wilson sang her new single on the show, “Country’s Cool Again.” And that was one of just two bangers she had on the CMTs, the other one being her part in the tribute to the late Toby Keith that couldn’t have been better-selected for the swagger she brings.
“With what Toby has meant to me — I mean, he was the soundtrack of my childhood — to be able to honor him was very special. When they (asked her to perform) ‘How Do You Like Me Now?,’ I said, ‘I need to pull up my scroll — a list of names of who I’m singing this to.”
Keith Urban
Keith Urban had his new era all primed and ready to go in time for the CMT Music Awards. He premiered a new single, in his classic road-friendly-rocker vein, called “Straight Line,” in advance of an album that’s on the way.
The singer-guitarist revealed that he had finished an entirely different version of the forthcoming album before scrapping almost all of it and starting virtually from scratch with a new energy in mind.
“It was a really interesting process to make,” Urban said. “I’ve never made a record and then bailed on it and started another one, ever, and that’s what happened this time around. I started another album two years ago and got a year into it and had 13 songs, but I could feel like it wasn’t the record that I was wanting to make. And so I cherry-picked four songs off it, and then built around those four to make this new album.” What was different about the previous attempt? “It was linear. It just didn’t have the dynamics that I like on albums. I personally love albums where not one song is the same, so it’s a journey. I can’t stand records where you play one song and the very next song is pretty much like the one you just heard. If the third one’s like that, I’m out. So I love diversity and dynamics on a record. … Because we were touring and I was sort of piecemeal recording, I’d record when I was off the road, which would be sometimes one song at a time. And it wasn’t until I put them all together that I went, ‘Oh, this doesn’t have the color that I was wanting.’”
Backstage, he took us step by step through the creation of the new song, which was one of the ones that came about only after he restarted the album process. “The groove and the melody and intro of the song were how we started,” Urban said. “We had a cool little dance drum loop going and had the little 12-string mandolin riff happening. And then a melody starts happening. With my couple of writers, ee were like, what are we singing? I sounded like one of the guys was singing ‘Late Night Lover.’ We kept singing this over and over again, and when one of the guys was singing it quietly under his breath, it sounded like he said ‘Straight Line Lover.’ And I thought, ‘Well, that’s way quirkier and cooler than Late Night Lover!’ So we went with that for a minute, and then realized, well, it’s really just ‘Straight Line.’ It’s just making a straight line — getting your life back on track when it’s just lost its way.
“It’s a very liberating song. The energy of it, the spirit of it, the lyric of it is really about breaking out of monotony. And I’m sure that, subconsciously, I was writing about the previous record I’d just been making and wanting to break out of that and just have vibrant fun in the studio, and just not think but play, play, play, and create and jam with people I love. And ‘Straight Line’ came outta that.”
Dasha
Dasha is part of a new breed of upstart country star — the ones that break out first as viral sensations on TikTok and then leave traditional gatekeepers like country radio to decide whether it can and should catch up to the phenomenon. Fortunately, CMT likes to take the “traditional” part out of the gatekeeper equation, and so the namesake awards (first broadcast on CBS) were able to do something that the rival CMAs or ACMs probably wouldn’t: put that TikTok smash right into prime time, alongside the established radio stars. In this case, it was with a currently growing song that just happens to share a name with the CMTs’ host city: “Austin.”
“This was my first primetime awards show, and also my first arena I’ve ever played,” Dasha noted. “We did a full-out dance routine, with eight dancers, me dancing with them. It was an elevated version of the true intention of the song — the tension between the guys and girl dancers, where the girl has all the power and she’s angry at the guy, and the guy’s having attitude… I feel like it was kind of like a musical theater performance.”
It was quite a bump up for someone unknown even to the country music community a few months ago, but Dasha didn’t have much in the way of nerves going into the performance. “I feel the pressure, but also I feel like I’m really prepared for the pressure. You know, I released my first song when I was 13, and I’ve been, in a way, preparing for my moment since then. And with all the training I’ve done, of ballet and musical theater growing up… we’re ready for it. I felt like I had a lot to prove to the country community of, like, I belong here, and I wanna prove it to you.’”
Her push into country comes even though she was recently signed to Warner Records out of the L.A. office, afte “Austin” had already come out independently, thanks to “Aaron Bay-Schuck, my guy over at Warner. I was having conversations with literally every label under the sun, and I had my pick. And there’s something about the heart there at Warner. They had such a genuine passion for me and my music, and they really got the vision, Tom (Corson) and Aaron and Karen (Kwak), so it just felt right in my gut. I feel like I make a lot of big decisions not even using logic; obviously, logically, they’re an incredible label and they have really amazing artists in their roster. But the decision came down to my gut feeling, and Warner just had it.”
A push to pop radio is said to be in the works, too. If the non-country world is becoming accustomed to the line-dancing ethos via Beyonce’s “Texas Hold ‘Em,” maybe others can follow? “ I always say I’m a songwriter first, and I really love visual storytelling, and that’s what ‘Austin’ has — a really clear story, but also that pop hook that gets you to sing it back the first time you hear it,” Dasha says. “And I think because of that, we’re in a position where we can start bringing other fans into the country world with the song ‘Austin,’ so we’re gonna push to pop, we’re gonna push to country radio and see how big we can make it.”
Dasha was due to start shooting the music video in Nashville this week, right after the CMT Awards — a perhaps ironically late start on that, given how the song has already had a few months of visual success now, less formally, on TikTok and other apps. “Isn’t that funny? We have that visualizer, but I wanted to wait till the right moment (for a proper video), because I wanted it to be as big and bright as possible, and we got the right people involved. Actually, I made a video and put it out to my fans of saying, Hey, if you guys wanna be in the video, you can audition. And so tons of people have submitted videos, so genuine fans of mine are gonna be able to get in the video with me.”
She didn’t want to give away the concept of the music video before filming it, “but think the chaos and the drama of that scene in ‘Footloose’ where they’re kind of doing that dance battle — that’s what it’s gonna feel like.”
Brittney Spencer
Brittney Spencer was using her hands to fan her face right after walking off-stage from her final rehearsal for her performance with Parker McCollum on the CMT Awards. As associate walking up to her mistook her for being emotional about the experience. “I was just up there with flames for like 30 minutes!” she exclaimed. “I mean, I’m emotional too, but I’m also just hot.”
The massive display of pyro was a ring of fire for Spencer and McCollum as they made a duet out of “Burn It Down,” which came into the telecast as the No. 1 country radio single in the country, albeit for him as a solo act. Spencer recently released her Big Machine debut album, and stood a lot more to gain from the performance, which, judging from all reactions, she got.
“Parker, I heard, had for the last year been wanting this song to become a duet,” Spencer said, “and so it felt like a good match, and (it came together) about a week ago. It was beautiful and it was insane. We just immediately had like this really cool musical chemistry, and it was really cool to hear him say, ‘I’ve been wanting this for a while, and this fit is the first one that makes sense.’ … The song calls for a duet. Sometimes they can kind of force it in a song, to kind of put a feature on or something like that just for whatever reason. But this song just feels like it was born to be reimagined with another person. So I’m happy it’s me. And Parker is so fun, and very encouraging on stage. His energy is very magnetic in the way it pulls you in, and I think that makes for a fun collaboration.”
The last stretch of the McCollum/Spencer performance ended with a camera operator swooping around the two singers as they sang directly to one another, in a flash 360-degree pan. “We’re not looking out at the crowd very much,” Spencer said. “We really wanted to make it a personal performance, to just have us looking at each other and singing and inviting everybody else into the world that we’re making on that stage for three minutes, which I thought was a really fun, great idea. There’s a whole crowd out there and I’m literally kind of pretending they’re not there, so that’s interesting and new for me, but I like it.”
Spencer also had a presenting slot on the CMTs alongside the three other Black country women who guest with Beyonce on her cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird” on the “Cowboy Carter” album: Reyna Roberts, Tanner Adell and Tiera Kennedy. “It was great to see them,” said Spencer. “I love what we’ve gotten to do and, gosh, Beyonce is incredible and she’s the greatest artist of our generation. To be a part of something that she’s doing is dope, and getting to do it with my friends is even better.”
But for the moment, collaborating with McCollum, she was dealing with literal flameworthiness. “It’s like the most like extravagant fireplace that I’ve ever seen in my life,” Spencer said. “I wanna make some s’mores and burn shit down.”
Megan Moroney
Megan Moroney is still getting accolades aplenty for her excellent 2023 debut album, “Lucky” (and in fact, just got a walloping six nominations for it from another awards show, the ACM Awards). And yet, even after putting out a 16-song deluxe edition of that first effort, she’s already moved on to releasing newer-still material, with two fresh non-album tracks already this year, “28th of June,” and “No Caller ID,” the latter of which she was able to perform on the ACMs.
“I’m very thankful that they let me play ‘No Caller ID,’” she said backstage, “because I feel like it’s connecting with so many fans right now, so it’s cool that I get to debut it on TV.” The ballad has a classic country ballad feel, even if the title isn’t exactly Harlan Howard-level old-fashioned. “I listen to that kind of music that has that kind of production, and I work with (producer) Kristian Bush (of Sugarland), who does a great job. He always says he tries to stay outta the way of the lyrics, because a lot of my songs are so lyric-driven, so as to not overproduce it. But I think the steel guitar and all those other instruments add the sadness to it that it needs. It’s got that kind of sad-girl but ready-to-move-on kind of sentiment, on that cusp that I do between sad, empowering and little bit fun.”
The show’s producers said that Moroney was already scheduled for a solo performance on the show when Old Dominion asked if she could join the group for a rendition of “Can’t Break Up Now,” the current single on which she’s featured. “I get to perform twice, and that’s never happened to me, so me and the CMTs are very cool right now,” she said.
Another thing she likes abou the CMT Awards: “I like that the dresses are usually shorter. I know that no one else probably cares about that” — well, don’t be so certain — “but I just like it because it’s a different look.” And, Moroney said, her intent had been to go “way over the top. Sparkles, big hair, a lot of makeup, seven pounds of hair on my head.”
All the post-“Lucky” material she’s been putting out does augur for a second album. “I think it’s interesting how the album cycles are kind of changing. My fans were like, ‘We love “Lucky,” but we want more.’ So I was like: sure. I’m still doing a Lucky 2.0 tour, so I’ve got a few more shows until I close that chapter, but I’m excited.” For the full project, “consider me thinking about it every second of the day,” she said. “She is already well thought out. We’ve already done a lot on it, so we’re finishing it up and it’s coming sooner than you think.”
Trisha Yearwood
Trisha Yearwood was on hand at the CMTs to be given the June Carter Cash Humanitarian Award, but also to premiere “Put It in a Song,” a preview of a new album that will be the first one she ever entirely co-wrote, in a recording career that goes back 33 years. As the song title might indicate, it’s sort of a theme song for her and for the forthcoming project.
“For me, as an artist, especially when I didn’t write, if somebody said, ‘Is that song personal to you?,’ it was easy to hide behind the song and say, ‘Well, I didn’t write it,’” Yearwood said. “And when you write it, you’re always, there’s always a little piece of you in there. But music was always the way for me to get my emotions out, because I’m not a real heart-on-my-sleeve person in life, but music was the place to do that. So this song is kind of about that. It’s like, if you can’t say it out loud, if you somehow don’t know how to deal with it, write it down. And it just felt like, if we’re gonna tell this story and gonna start releasing some of these songs, this might be the good one to start with.”
What spurred her to spill more, on record? “You know, I didn’t really intend to,” she said. “Honestly, I kind of had an a-ha moment and I just started writing — for me. I never thought these songs would see the light of day. I think that’s why I’m having so much fun, because I didn’t put any pressure on myself. There was never an album that was gonna come outta it; maybe I’d have one song I wrote that would end up on a regular album. I thought this was gonna be really scrutinized against ‘Walkaway Joe’ and ‘She’s in Love With the Boy’ and all these amazing (outside) songs that I’ve had my hands on over the years. So I thought, if I put out a collection of songs that I’ve written, it could be: This is just what I’ve been doing for the last couple years. I’m not trying to compete with what I’ve done. And it took the pressure off.
“And then,” Yearwood added, “I live with a guy who’s in a bunch of Songwriter Hall of Fames who said these songs are good, and ‘You should do something with ’em,’ so that gave me confidence.”
As we spoke, Yearwood was standing in front of a Trisha Yearwood-branded concession at Austin’s Moody Center, one of several that have just opened up or will open up around the arena — a franchise she is looking to extend to other such facilities, one by one, once she’s convinced it’s working in Texas.
“When we start talking about food,” said Yearwood, already a cookbook queen and TV cooking personality, “we want to be the place that instead of getting your dinner before you come to the concert, what if the food is so good, you want to go have dinner at Moody’s Center? I’m hoping this is the first of many. You know, I’m a Virgo and I’m very much a control freak. So the food has to taste like it would if I made it for you. That’s been a process of scaling up recipes that are family recipes to make it work on a large scale. There’s been some hits and misses and so if it didn’t cut it, it didn’t stay on the menu.”
Good news for a certain kind of foodie, then: At her Moody Center concession, Yearwood’s Chicken Broccoli Casserole and the Doughnut Grilled Cheese With Bacon must’ve worked, because they are still on the menu.
Jordan Davis and Needtobreathe
Two nights before the CMT Awards were broadcast live, Jordan Davis and Needtobreathe hooked up to tape an episode of “CMT Crossroads,” before an audience made up largely of University of Texas students. The air date has yet to be announced, but both parties can relay how the taping went.
Said Davis backstage, “To be honest with you, since we got down here and started rehearsals, I was almost like more nervous than I was before. Obviously being a huge Needtobreathe fan, I was worried about how was I gonna interject myself into a band that’s been together for a long time. But man, it was seamless. I feel like they kind of accepted me in, and it was cool to get to spend a couple days playing with a great band.
“I’ve been listening to them for a long time, but the ‘Outsiders’ record (from 2009) was one that just really turned me on to the songwriting. Obviously Bear’s (Rinehart’s) vocals are killer, and the band is super tight and so extremely dynamic. I think they were one of the first bands that I remember seeing and it just feeling bigger than it should have felt. They’re obviously all great musicians, but I mean, a lot of it, too, is their faith. I love that they carry their faith on their sleeve and write about it in honest lyrics.”
For the CMT Awards, they did a mashup of two of their respective songs. “’Brother’ is a obviously a huge song for them, and ‘Next Thing You Know’ was a big song for me, so it always felt like those two songs could kind of go in back and forth. It was probably easier for me than them” to pick a single song to be represented by in the CMT medley, “but once we locked in on it, it came together pretty quickly.” As far as the plethora of songs to be considered for the far longer “Crossroads,” “there’s a ton of Needtobreathe songs that I love. I love ‘Banks,’ and ‘Money & Fame’ is a song of theirs that I used to cover when I first started playing music.”
Said Rinehart of Davis, whom they’d just met in person for the first time a few days before taping the episode: “He’s a little too nice, to be honest. He makes us feel uncomfortable.” Kidding. “He is so sweet about it. Actually one of his kids’ songs when they were born was one of our songs, ‘Banks to the River.’ So that means a lot to us. It made it special (during the taping) for sure.”
The “Crossroads” won’t be all sentiment: In addition to doing four songs by each artist, they capped it off with “You Wreck Me” from “our favorite Tom Petty record, ‘Wildflowers’ — it was a good way to end the night, with rock ‘n’ roll.”
Little Big Town and Sugarland
The collaboration between Little Big Town and Sugarland on Phil Collins’ “Take Me Home” during the CMTs was not a one-off, but a heralding of big plans for the year ahead. As Little Big Town members explained in a previous Variety story, the cover song — a studio version of which was released Monday as a single — was the outgrowth of the two groups wanting to do something in advance of touring together this fall (the itinerary of which was also released earlier this week).
“When we were on the road together years ago, we would really learn songs in the afternoon and then sing ’em,” said Karen Fairchild. “Like, if we were in Memphis, we’d do ‘Walking in Memphis.’ So it was just something fun that we did on the road. So when this tour was gonna be announced and we were gonna get to do a song, then it was like, what do we do? And this song was Kristian Bush’s (of Sugarland) idea. and then we decided that we should get in the studio, because it sounded so good, and make it our own.”
Will there be a new LBT album this year? Looks exchanged among the four members indicate there’s probably a yes to that they can’t say yet, with the joint tour being the big news of the moment. Whether Sugarland, whose reunions have been few in recent years, will also take advantage of the touring moment to release new material remains to be seen, but it’ll be more of a surprise if they don’t.
Kelsea Ballerini
Kelsea Ballerini announced on the weekend of the CMTs that this fourth year of hosting the awards show would also be her last, so she can free herself up for different opportunities — with strong hints in recent months and now that this could involve different kinds of forays into film and TV work besides hosting. “I’m really creatively fulfilled by the idea of finding a way to get involved with newer artists and find a way to creatively collaborate. And I’m really excited about the idea of doing some stuff in film and TV and just pushing myself outside of my comfort zone. Music is always gonna be my baby and my focus and the thing that I protect the most, but in the space around it, I want to keep growing and I want to keep challenging myself.”
In the meantime, though, she’s re-inked with Black River Entertainment and will be releasing a new album this year. From the sound of things, it might combine some of the serious tone of her Grammy-nominated “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat” with a sense of the renewed fun she’s having as a 30-year-old woman finding her free spirit again. While the first single off that album will wait a bit, she did just release (and perform on the awards telecast) a much-changed remake of her seminal hit “Love Me Like You Mean It.”
“I stand by the song and the sentiment so much, still,” she avows. “The heart of ‘Love Me Like You Mean It’ is that we accept the love that we think we deserve, and encouraging each other to hold ourselves accountable to accept good love. And me as a 30-year-old feels the same way, but has a lot of life since I wrote that song at 19. So I was like, how would 30-year-old me sing this? And that was a really fun discovery. To me it was like the ending of a decade of music together, and and then a continuation of ‘Welcome Mat’ and sonically kind of a hint as to what’s next.”
Read her full interview with Variety from Austin here.
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