Joe Nichols
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As far as where I’m at with my music and my label, Red Bow, this is more than a new chapter. It’s a new book. My latest album CRICKETS received as great a reception as anything I’ve ever done, spawning two back-to-back #1 hits “Sunny & 75” and “Yeah.” CRICKETS is something I might have hoped I could do at other points in my career, but have been held back from. And I’ll be the first to say that the holding back has mostly been me. What strikes me this time is how much freedom I’ve felt in this process, the depth I have in my relationships – personal and professional, it really is a family thing. And, to be honest, just how much fun I’m having. Freedom, family and fun … there’s your sound bite.
The hard part of this journey, if that’s not too cliché a word for it, was leaving my last label, because the wheels in Nashville just turn really slow sometimes. And time turned out to be our enemy and our friend. The more distance I was able to get from the last few years of stops and starts, the better. But our enemy was losing a consistent presence with the fans and radio. That hurt, but it set up some anticipation for something new; it was also very healing and humbling.
I went into the studio to start making music with my own money. One of those sides was my song “Yeah,” which ended up becoming one of my biggest all-time singles and held the #1 position on the Billboard Country Airplay chart for three consecutive weeks. The other was a stone-cold country song called “Billy Graham’s Bible.” So, we walked into labels with something to play for them. Quite a few were interested, but the majors tend to have a lot of artists in line and wanted me to look at a later release date. I wanted to be in business with somebody who had the same sense of urgency about me as I do, and Broken Bow did. Being one of the flagship artists on their latest imprint, which is a joint venture with Sony Red, helped this all feel brand new.
The one thing about my approach to CRICKETS that I was almost militant about was that I wanted to find hit songs that might be a bit unexpected. Having a hit, writing or making good albums has never been a problem for me; it’s been that momentum you get from a consistent series of hits. That’s why I wanted to be rigorous about finding songs that cut through, even if they didn’t seem to fit the idea people have of what I should sound like. I wanted to be able to say we’ve got six singles on this album. Or ten. And that meant being open to songs and sounds a lot of folks wouldn’t have thought would work.