Photo credit: Mason Allen

Old Dominion will release its third studio album on Oct. 25, it was announced Monday morning (July 8) on Good Morning America. The new self-titled project finds the band co-producing their album for the first time, alongside longtime collaborator Shane McAnally.

The group recently celebrated its seventh No. 1 song, “Make It Sweet,” and released a followup radio single in “One Man Band,” which has earned more than 40 million streams to date.

Old Dominion’s 2017 sophomore album, Happy Endings, debuted at No. 1 and the band is the reigning ACM Vocal Group of the Year for 2019.

In addition, Old Dominion’s Matthew Ramsey was recently featured on “And the Writer Is…with Ross Golan,” a songwriting podcast produced by Joe London and Ross Golan.

Riley Green’s life has been a whirlwind of studios, writing rooms, tour buses, and radio station conference rooms since he signed with Big Machine Label Group barely 16 months ago.

He’s earned a No. 1 single with “There Was This Girl,” and released his four-song EP Get That Man A Beer last month. His follow up single, “In Love By Now,” is climbing the radio charts.

“I don’t know if it will ever really sink in, all that is going on,” he says. “I couldn’t even dream that I would have a record deal, so that was kind of a victory in itself. The other thing is, we had the number one single, and I think we put the next single out the next Monday, so it never stops, it’s just kind of wide open.”

Alabama native Green had been making regular trips to write songs in Nashville–“There Was This Girl,” written with Erik Dylan, was the result of one of those regular migrations. After an indie EP in 2017, Green found himself in a four-way bidding war among several Nashville labels, before signing with Big Machine in March 2018.

“I ended up with four different labels, Warner Brothers, Universal, Big Loud, and Big Machine,” he recalls. “They were all great. At the end of the day, a lot of it has to do with where I felt I was going to get the most attention. Big Machine came to me with ideas they loved, I really felt they were going to stick by my brand that I had already built.”

He recalled signing his deal at Joe’s Bar in Chicago. “Jimmy [Harnen] and them gave me a bottle of Crystal and we walked around the streets of Chicago. I didn’t sign that night, but we still drank the champagne.”

“In Love By Now,” is a slice of heartbreak wrapped in up-tempo ‘90s reminiscent sounds. Green penned the track alongside Marv Green, Ben Hayslip and Rhett Akins, the artist and writer behind ‘90s hit “That Ain’t My Truck,” which can still be heard on country radio.

“That guy in the song I think plays pretty well the aw shucks I lost her kind of thing. I grew up listening to that kind of country music, but also I was writing with a lot of ‘90s country guys and that doesn’t hurt at all. It just gives a different way to write a song that’s been written a lot of times, I guess.”

Green is the sole writer on another standout song on the EP, “Numbers On The Cars,” written about his great uncle’s battle with Alzheimer’s.

“I watched him kind of go from the guy who was always talking, always cutting up, to the quietest one in the room. He was the big NASCAR Fan, a big fisherman. That was one of those things I just knew he’d always be able to tell me, who drove what car and what the numbers were, who the sponsors were. So it was odd to do a song about Alzheimer’s and NASCAR I guess, but it’s cool to see how people can take it and make it about their own situation or their own family member.”

Green has seen first-hand the impact of those songs on fans over the past several weeks, as he’s been on the road opening shows for Brad Paisley.

“Going out in front of someone else’ fans is something I’ve never been able to do. His fans are more traditional country music fans and Brad’s whole team is great. That’s the one good thing about country music, is all these artists who have been doing this for 20-something years, he was where I was at one time and he gets it. Everyone helps each other out. I can say we’re not roughing it on this tour. He’s got catering and he rented out a Laser Tag and Go-Kart venue after a show in Montana. He takes good care of us, but I’m sure the pranks are coming,” he says of Paisley’s notorious tour pranks.

Given the hectic schedule of touring, and time spent in the studio working on a full album, Green hasn’t yet splurged on much to celebrate his success.

“I’ve talked myself out of a lot of things because I don’t have much time. There’s no reason to buy a big fancy truck because I wouldn’t be able to use it, I’m on a bus or a plane all the time. I will say that since I’ve had a little bit of success, I don’t mind spending money on guitars anymore. I don’t think I ever had a really nice guitar until I signed a record deal. I thought, ‘Well, I’m doing this for a living now and I can make money off of it. So now I have a little collection of like 12 or 15 guitars.”

He jokes he still has a long way to go to catch up with Paisley’s collection.

“He’s got like 15 guitars on stage at all times,” he jokes. “If I have a career like he does, I’ll get plenty of guitars.”

[The story below is an excerpt from a piece included in the recently released 2019 MusicRow Awards print issue. To read the full interview, pick up a copy at musicrow.com or subscribe to MusicRow.]

Eight years. 101 artist interviews. Nearly 600 music cues. An in-depth study of the stories, songs and artists behind a century of country music.

On Sept. 15 the highly-anticipated eight-episode, 16-hour documentary Country Music will premiere on PBS stations, helmed by acclaimed director Ken Burns.

Burns, alongside producer/writer Dayton Duncan and producer Julie Dunfey, and a team of 15-20 researchers and filmmakers, sifted through nearly 100,000 photos (3,400 of which made it into the final series).

“I was surprised at how open people were,” Burns says. “They were going into attics, pulling out old boxes of photos and footage.”

Since the debut of 1981’s Brooklyn Bridge, Burns has built a reputation for painstakingly researched, unflinchingly authentic documentaries such as 1994’s Baseball, 2009’s The National Parks: America’s Best Ideas, and, in 2017, the harrowing 10-part, 18-hour examination of the history of the Vietnam War. He first set his scope on music with 2001’s 10-part, 19-hour series Jazz. 

A friend of Burns’ suggested the idea of following the intense Vietnam War documentary with a series on country music, noting that like jazz, country music is a uniquely American art form. Burns presented the idea to Duncan, who quickly agreed. “I said, ‘Yes, as long as I can write it,’” Duncan says. “At its best, country music is filled with universal human experiences or emotions, and does what great art does.”

“We want to either be introducing people to this great American music, or for people who already like country music, we hope they will hear some stories that they weren’t familiar with,” Burns says. “For some people who might have a stereotype of what they think country music is, or a bias against it, we hope if they watch our film, they will find things that surprise them.”

Instead of relying heavily on historians, Country Music allows artists including Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs, Marty Stuart, Rosanne Cash and Kathy Mattea to guide viewers throughout the series.

“There are a number of artists who have important things to offer in our early episodes, where it talks about things that happened before they were alive or when they were little,” Duncan says. “Then, at a certain moment around episode, say seven or eight, they enter the story as characters in their own life.”

Burns and his team began doing interviews in fall 2012. Of the 101 artists who were interviewed throughout the making of the film, 20 percent are now deceased, including Merle Haggard, Roy Clark and Little Jimmy Dickens.

“We started by age and worked our way back,” Duncan says. “The very first interview was with Little Jimmy Dickens. The second interview we did, that same day, was Harold Bradley. Our third, which we did in Tulsa, was Roy Clark. The fourth was Wanda Jackson, who of course is still with us. We just missed getting an interview with George Jones,” he notes; the legendary entertainer and “He Stopped Loving Her Today” singer died in April 2013.

[Read more in MusicRow‘s 2019 Awards print issue, available at musicrow.com or with MusicRow subscriptions.]