Mo Pitney and Morgan Wallen

Crystal Palace Concert Series
Free Admission!

Morgan Walden: Unplugged from 7:00pm till 7:30pm
The Buckaroos from 7:45pm till 9:15pm
Mo Pitney: Unplugged from 9:30pm till 10:15pm
Dinner Served from 5:00pm till 10:00pm

Mo Pitney
When Mo Pitney sings “let me tell you about country” in his debut single, he’s doing more than telling. He’s showing. Appropriately titled, the song “Country” is as much positioning statement as introduction. In three minutes and 16 seconds, it is almost precisely who he is in word and deed. The vocal delivery, storytelling, musicianship and reflections of his outdoor lifestyle – as well as faith, family and patriotism – offer a spot-on portrayal. Joined by early fan favorites “Clean Up On Aisle Five” and “Come Do A Little Life,” the song carves an unmistakably country yet completely fresh groove for the genre. In short, it sounds like nothing else, but absolutely belongs.

To paraphrase the song, a life in music isn’t a place on a map; it’s a place in Mo Pitney’s heart. “I just love music,” Pitney says, exhibiting atypical maturity for someone still in their early twenties. “It has never been about praise. Playing the Grand Ole Opry was an amazing experience, but I have just as much fun sitting on my bed playing along to an old record. It’s always been that way.”

That music-centered outlook is already generating the unsought acclaim of which he speaks. Perhaps the best example is the aforementioned Opry performance. “Everybody asked me if I was nervous, but I don’t think I was,” he says. “I definitely thought about it a lot more than I normally do. My respect for that stage and the circle is great.

For his first song, he selected “Clean Up On Aisle Five” and eyed one goal: to sing his heart out. “I didn’t feel like anybody was sucked into the song at all, but when it was over I stepped back from the microphone and people erupted,” he says. A standing ovation approaching a full minute ensued. “After about 30 seconds, I stepped forward to say something because I thought I heard them dying down, but they just got louder. I lost it. It took me about a week to come off that feeling.”

That pivotal moment capped a journey that started in the red brick town of Cherry Valley, IL, where Mo grew up loving the outdoors. “Right out my back door was a lake about a mile away,” he says. “I’d ride my bike there with a fishing pole on each handlebar, like two tridents sticking out in front of me.”

Music was a family affair, and Pitney picked up the drums at six and guitar at 12. “I learned how to play with a cast on my arm by laying a rag over my dad’s guitar so it wouldn’t get scratched,” he says. “Johnny Cash At San Quentin was my introduction to playing music. I learned the whole album.”

Two weeks later, he played two Cash songs at an open mic night – his first public performance. “After I played, I saw a guy backstage playing a banjo, so I picked that up for a couple of years. By age 15, I grabbed the guitar again playing lead acoustic, my brother played bass and we had a friend who played mandolin.” His affection for bluegrass led him to Keith Whitley. “When I heard him sing it helped me bridge over into country music. I started hearing great country songs, songwriters and singers … and I just fell in love.”

Encouraged to move to Nashville by a songwriting friend, Pitney was the uncommon arrival who receives early interest from record labels. He signed with Curb and began working on bringing his songs and sound into alignment with his musical vision. One of the lynchpins was connecting with his producer, Tony Brown (George Strait).

“Instead of trying to put some songs together to come out of my mouth and create an artist with my face, Tony said, ‘I want to find out who you are, pull it out of you and put it on tape.’ It wasn’t just the way he said it, it was in everything he did. Realizing I can create a record the way I want to and use the musicians I want was an eye-opening experience. We recorded my vocals while I was sitting on a stool and playing guitar at the same time, so it’s a live record in a lot of ways. My hands were untied.”

As music lovers become exposed to his music, rousing receptions may be something he’ll become accustomed to seeing. But they won’t change Mo’s core motivation. “Even if this thing doesn’t go huge, I believe that I can make a decent living playing music,” he says. “And I always knew that I could do that. When I was younger, my plan was bluegrass. I used to buy and sell cars, I did body work and I trained bird dogs. I figured I would just kind of piddle around, doing different things around the music.

“People who have done this for a long time think there’s a place for my music, and I hope that’s the case. My eyes are set on being successful, but success is not number one for me. If I can make a comfortable living and have a career making music and keep my head on straight, that’s my goal. And I think that I have a great opportunity to do that if I don’t get ahead of myself.”

And that kind of seasoned perspective isn’t often heard from someone of his generation. “I’m a God-fearing man,” he says. “I love simple things. I love simplicity in songs because I love simplicity in life. But I’m also very deep, which is weird. I’m a thinker. And I go so deep, a lot of times I just confuse myself and get frustrated, but when I come home and my dog runs and jumps up on my lap, that does something to my spirit. I love to hunt and fish. I love the outdoors. I love my family. I try to live pretty morally square. Pretty clean guy. I’ve got my problems, but I try to stay pretty straight.”

Perhaps the best expression of how Mo Pitney has created his own definition of country music success is found in “Behind This Guitar,” a song by Don Sampson and Phil O’Donnell that may not even make the album. “People tell me I can’t cut it because the chorus says, ‘Behind this guitar there’s just a boy who had a dream in his heart, behind this guitar there’s just a guy that can’t believe he got this far.’ And they point out that I haven’t gotten anywhere yet, so save it for the second album. But I remember sitting on my bed with the dream of just making music the rest of my life. It wasn’t that I had to be on radio or even make a living doing it. I just loved music. Now I’m on the Opry. I have a record deal. And I’m loving the music that I’m making. I can’t believe I got this far!

“I’m probably just going to cut the song.”

Morgan Wallen
He’s a passionate singer with a unique sound who grew up in Appalachia, and you’ll be hearing Morgan Wallen before 2016 is over. Wallen moved to Nashville in July 2015, not sure what he would find, but convinced that he should at least give his dreams a legitimate shot. Less than a year later, he’d already been signed to Big Loud Records, recorded some initial tracks with producer Joey Moi (Florida Georgia Line, Jake Owen) and hit the road on his first radio promotion tour.
It might appear that Wallen’s on the fast track, but it took him a while to get there. Born in Sneedville, Tennessee (a town that also lays claim as the birthplace of bluegrass pioneer Jimmy Martin), to a hard-rock-lovin’ preacher and contemporary-Christian-devoted teacher, Wallen showed his musical interests early, singing in front of the local congregation at age three and asking for a violin for his fifth birthday. He would soon switch to piano and later add guitar to his arsenal, though he never really imagined it was possible to make a career of it.
“I didn’t think that was realistic because I had no clue about how the music business worked,” Wallen says. “Even living three hours away, I had no idea about Nashville.”
Instead, he focused his efforts on baseball, and he was pretty good at it. Playing shortstop and pitcher for Gibbs High School in Corryton, the same school where Kenny Chesney graduated. Wallen earned an offer to continue playing at a major college.
But fate intervened. While pitching during his senior year, he felt a pop in his right elbow and would undergo a tendon replacement procedure. While he was able to continue playing guitar and piano, it proved to be the end of his baseball career.
“Looking back, I’m glad it happened the way it did, because I really actually loved music more than I ever did baseball,” he says.
The kind of music almost didn’t matter. Rock, hip-hop, country – he loved it all, particularly the emotional connection that it created between the musician and the listener. But when he wrote, the music was invariably country.
“Writing music was a way for me to get my feelings out,” he says. “I don’t really express my feelings very much, and I guess it was just a way for me to let some of that go. It’s my safe place.”
His mother signed him up to audition for NBC’s The Voice, convinced that he’d do well. Wallen had no idea what to expect – he’d never seen the show – but he was chosen by Usher and was later stolen by Adam Levine. The last song he performed during his run, a cover of Florida Georgia Line’s “Stay,” helped him steer him toward his creative destiny.
“Honestly, I was just trying to figure out who I was,” he reflects. “I was trying to figure out me as a person, me as an artist. It was one way to do it.”
During his time in California, Wallen met Sergio Sanchez, the lead singer and writer for Jive Records’ hard-rock band Atom Smash. While Sanchez initially served as Wallen’s vocal coach, they hit it off and started co-writing regularly in Knoxville. Armed with new music, Wallen and Sanchez moved to Nashville and became ingrained in the city’s music community. From there, things moved quickly. Wallen’s managers, Dirk Hemsath and Mike Bachta of Working Group Artist Management, set him up to play for William Morris Endeavor’s Kevin Neal, agent for Jason Aldean and Florida Georgia Line. Neal signed him on the spot. Hemsath and Bachta next sent demos to Big Loud Shirt’s Seth England, hoping to land some co-writing opportunities with songwriters at the publishing company. England was so impressed that he brought Morgan in to audition for his partners in Big Loud Records: Craig Wiseman, Clay Hunnicutt, Kevin “Chief” Zaruk and Joey Moi. They signed Wallen to both the label and the publishing company.
Wallen started woodshedding as a songwriter, working with the likes of Wiseman (“Live Like You Were Dying”), Rodney Clawson (“Dirt”), Chris Tompkins (“Drunk On A Plane”), the Warren Brothers (“Highway Don’t Care”), Tommy Cecil (“Home Alone Tonight”) and Matt Dragstrem (“Sippin’ On Fire”). Meanwhile, Big Loud proved that it was big-league – while Wallen worked on his own music, the label’s first-ever single, Chris Lane’s “Fix,” went into the Top 15 and continued climbing, an unheard-of start for a brand-new label.
Wallen hopes to build a similar story. He headed out on a promotion tour of radio stations in the summer of 2016, giving him a chance to start playing for people again after spending so much of the previous year in writing rooms and the recording studio. The end goal is to be on a stage, making that emotional connection with his distinctive sound. But it takes time to get there.
“We’ve just really been trying to get the focus on the music,” he says. “If we don’t have that, then there’s no point in playing.”