Discovery Communications, Inc. has inked a deal to acquire Great American Country parent company Scripps Networks Interactive, Inc. in a cash-and-stock transaction valued at $14.6 billion. The transaction is expected to close by early 2018.

Scripps Chairman, President and CEO Kenneth Lowe is expected to join Discovery’s board of directors following the close of the transaction.

Discovery and Scripps combined company will produce an estimated 8,000 hours of original programming each year, and will be home to 300,000 hours of library content. Combined Discovery and Scripps will hold a nearly 20 percent share of ad-supported pay-TV audiences in the U.S.

The combined company’s portfolio of brands will include Discovery Channel, HGTV, Great American Country, TLC, Animal Planet, Food Network, Travel Channel, DIY Network, and more.

The deal’s $90 per-share cost, based on Discovery’s Friday closing price, represents a premium of 34 percent to Scripps’ unaffected share price as of Tuesday, July 18, before deal talks were first reported. Discovery is paying $63 per share in cash and $27 per share in stock. Scripps shareholders will own 20 percent of Discovery, which will also take on Scripps’ net debt of approximately $2.7 billion in the deal.

“This is an exciting new chapter for Discovery. Scripps is one of the best run media companies in the world with terrific assets, strong brands and popular talent and formats. Our business is about great storytelling, authentic characters and passionate super fans. We believe that by coming together with Scripps, we will create a stronger, more flexible and more dynamic media company with a global content engine that can be fully optimized and monetized across our combined networks, products and services in every country around the world,” said David Zaslav, President and CEO, Discovery Communications.

“Through the passion and dedication of our incredible employees, and with the support of the Scripps family, we have built a lifestyle content company that touches the lives of consumers every single day,” said Lowe. “This agreement with Discovery presents an unmatched opportunity for Scripps to grow its leading lifestyle brands across the world and on new and emerging channels including short-form, direct-to-consumer and streaming platforms.”

Singer-songwriter Eric Paslay, known for the radio-friendly grooves of songs like “Friday Night” and “Song About A Girl,” as well as the smooth, soulful “She Don’t Love You,” will take fans deep into the earliest moments of the album-making process—songwriting–with his new five-song digital release The Work Tapes, which is available today (Friday, July 28) on various digital outlets.

Paslay, who has also constructed hits for Lady Antebellum, Jake Owen, Eli Young Band, and Rascal Flatts, found he still had plenty of his own songs to mine while assembling songs on the follow-up to his 2013 debut project—a catalog of about 1,500 songs.

“We haven’t made it through all of them honestly,” Paslay tells MusicRow. “We’ve made it through maybe half of them, so if people dig what we are doing with the work tapes, we’ve got plenty more to share.”

Instead of letting old acoustic recordings go forgotten, Paslay and his wife Natalie, who also works in music publishing, sifted through older work tapes and found among them five makeshift acoustic recordings, often created just moments after the songs were written.

“These songs didn’t fit with the album I’m making, but they sounded so good, I wanted people to hear them,” Paslay says.

“Back Home To You,” finds Paslay and co-writer Carey Ott trading harmony lines while Ott’s electric guitar work complements Paslay’s acoustic pickings.

“It’s a sweet song of us traveling and a lot of people travel for work, so lines like I’ll pick a different colored flower from every field I pass and bring it back home to you,’ it’s just saying I’ll share the journey with you when I get back. It could be a kid or something, too. I don’t have kids yet, but a father might share that with his kids.”

Amy Stroup co-wrote and provided harmony vocals on “Amarillo Rain,” which she and Paslay wrote in about 45 minutes.

“She’s from Abilene and I was born in Abilene but I think we just figured Amarillo sings better. Amarillo sings so beautifully. I think rain’s more precious in Amarillo than in Abilene, but don’t tell the Abileners I said that,” he quipped.

The majority of the songs were written and recorded at the former Cal IV building on 19th Avenue. Spirit Music Group acquired Cal IV in 2014. “It’s one of the last-standing old houses over there on 19th avenue, between all the condos,” says Paslay. “so I’m glad it’s still there. It’s cool to still have the building where all the songs were written and recorded.”

“Let Go,” one of the oldest recordings on the release, was penned six years ago with Dylan Altman and Rose Falcon. At the time, Paslay was promoting his very first major label single, “Never Really Wanted,” to country radio—and it wasn’t going well.

“The day I wrote ‘Let Go,’ was the day I found out ‘Never Really Wanted’ was dying at radio, and you have a little disappointment that it didn’t work out. I don’t think I was completely broken hearted, but you know, you put your heart and soul into finally getting a record deal and trying to get songs to work and you want them to work so badly, and also you think, ‘The world is over. My first single didn’t go to No. 1.’ But then you realize, ‘No, this is the first stage, it’s all good.’ But that day we just tried to channel a disappointment of the outcome of something into something people can relate to, to a love relationship. Now, listening to it six years later, you go, ‘Yeah, that did hurt, but what a beautiful song.’”

 

Paslay would go on to pen his own Top 5 hit, “Friday Night,” with Falcon, and pen Jake Owen’s “Barefoot Blue Jean Night” with Altman.

Fans won’t have to wait long for music from Paslay’s forthcoming full-length sophomore album. He anticipates a new single to release later this year, and he’s well on his way to having the full album completed.

“I think we’ve got one more recording session left, and we’ve been overdubbing and cutting vocals. I have plenty of songs. We went in and recorded about six songs and I was like, ‘There are four singles in here for sure and the other two are just going to be great live,” says Paslay. “Then we wrote five more songs that were like, ‘These need to be recorded.’”

For now, Paslay is excited to give fans a glimpse into the earliest stages of the album-making process.

“I think they are special songs and there’s that ‘it factor’ magic in a work tape that I think only the business even knows exist. So it’s cool to let people kind of go behind the scenes to find out this is how a song gets born.”

The Work Tapes Track Listing
Less Than Whole (Paslay, Big Kenny)
Amarillo Rain (Paslay, Amy Stroup)
Back Home To You (Paslay, Carey Ott)
Come Back To This Town (Paslay, Dean Alexander)
Let Go (Paslay, Dylan Altman, Rose Falcon)

Kelsea Ballerini has announced the release date of her sophomore project, Unapologetically, which will drop right before CMA week on Nov. 3. The leadoff track from the project, “Legends” is already skyrocketing up the charts, reaching the Top 15 on the iTunes all-genre charts within the first 12 hours of its release. The tune was co-written by Ballerini along with Hillary Lindsey and Forest Glen Whitehead, who also serves as producer alongside Jason Massey.

The album is the followup to the singer-songwriter’s debut CD The First Time, which yielded three consecutive platinum and gold No. 1 singles “Love Me Like You Mean It,” “Dibs” and “Peter Pan.” The project’s fourth single, “Yeah Boy,” rose to No. 3 on the charts and was certified gold.

She’ll perform on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon tonight at 10:35 p.m. CT on NBC.

With her upcoming eighth studio release, Sara Evans wants listeners to refocus on the power and strength of Words.

For the 14-track album, set to release July 21, Evans turned to a stable of 30 of Nashville’s top songwriters, among them 14 female tunesmiths, including Ashley Monroe, Caitlyn Smith, Hillary Lindsey, Sonya Isaacs, and Evans herself.

Evans says she didn’t realize female writers made up approximately half of contributors to the album until A&R executive Tracy Gershon brought it to her attention.

“It wasn’t intentional,” Evans said during an interview with MusicRow. “I tell people not to tell me who wrote songs because I don’t want any preconceived notion about it. I don’t want to know when they were written or whom they were pitched to. When we were done, Mark Bright, Tracy Gershon, Craig Dunn and I were sitting and having wine at the very end of tracking on the third day. Tracy said, ‘Do you realize there are 14 female writers on this album including you?’ I think that makes it cooler.”

Helmed by producer Mark Bright, the album begins with Evans’ smooth voice covering the plucky bluegrass track “Long Way Down,” a stark reminder of Evans’ deeply-held country and bluegrass roots. Her versatile voice easily navigates the varied rhythms on Claude Kelley and Charles Harmon’s “Rain and Fire,” and is perhaps at its best on her new single, the cautionary “Marquee Sign,” which she co-wrote with Jimmy Robbins and Heather Morgan.

“Words,” the album’s title track, serves as a potent, yet never preachy, reminder of the building and destroying influence even the smallest utterances can have on relationships. For Evans, it is also a one-term charge for a song’s lyrical substance to resonate as much as its hooks.

“I’m trying to make a point that we need better lyrics. Not everybody can be a prolific writer. I don’t even call myself some genius writer; I’m no Jason Isbell or Patty Griffin. But as soon as I sit down to write with somebody I can tell whether or not they are going to just rhyme or if they are really going to think about it.”

Earlier this year, Evans announced that Words would be released on her own label, Born To Fly Records. The singer, songwriter and businesswoman’s vision for the new venture includes plans for a publishing company and development program for new artists.

The move to launch her own independent label follows a former deal with Sugar Hill Records.

“We were totally going to go with Sugar Hill, then everything changed and Tracy Gershon left, so that was when we were like, ‘Lets just dive into it and start our own label.’”

Similarly, Evans has immersed herself into every aspect of the new album, inviting fellow songwriters to her home just outside of Birmingham, Alabama, where Evans relocated after marrying Jay Barker in 2008.

Bringing writers to her home turf was an apt choice, given that much of Words is a family affair for Evans.

Evans teamed with Victoria Banks and Emily Shackelton to pen “Letting You Go,” an ode to her 17-year-old son Avery, who will begin his senior year of high school this year.

“It was so overwhelmingly sad, we were sobbing,” Evans says of the writing session. “I had a hard time doing a work tape for it because I was crying. I loved that I could pay tribute to Avery since it will be another couple of years before I make another record.”

The track comes full circle for Evans, who notes that Avery’s voice can be heard on “I Keep Looking,” a track from her 2000 project Born To Fly, which was recorded soon after Avery was born.

“I was such a protective mom so when we were tracking the album I was singing scratch vocals and I would just hold him the whole time so you can hear him,” Evans says. “We just left it on the record and now I just wrote this song about him graduating.”

Evans’ 14-year-old daughter Olivia contributed vocals to “Marquee Sign,” while Evans’ siblings, who have spent years touring with their sister, lent harmonies to “Night Light.”

“I told Olivia, ‘Just sing how you sing.’ She’s much more like Beyoncé/Ariana Grande. She will end up being a better singer than me, and she wants to do that—not country, though. We didn’t fix her vocals at all. She was very adamant about not having anyone fix her vocals. Avery is a musician also and they are so concerned about being legit.”

That passion and desire for authenticity and respect is one their mother shares and still fervently pursues, even within an industry where she has co-written two of her five No. 1 singles and notched three platinum and two gold albums. Still, Evans has had to fight to have her voice as an artist heard—sometimes even in her own co-writing sessions.

“I’ve always wanted to prove myself. Even when I started writing as an artist, I was like, ‘I will not sit in here and have you two write and only sort of include me.’ I even had an experience like that writing for Words. These two really young, although successful writers who write together all the time literally came down and kind of ignored me. One said, ‘Seriously though, the song should be like this…’ It’s amazing that so many people still have that idea that the singer doesn’t really do anything and isn’t legit.”

Evans took control of the project, overseeing every detail from writing, recording, sequencing, and musicianship. It was a deeply hands-on process that rendered some of her most commercially successful albums including Restless and Born To Fly.

“I literally lived in the studio on those albums,” she says. “I didn’t let any detail go without being there [in the studio]. There have been times in my career where I haven’t been as careful or particular with the albums. More than ever, I have to prove myself over and over. There is something weird about turning 40. All of a sudden people start questioning your abilities. I’m better now than I’ve ever been and I know myself better. With this album, I remembered the respect that I have for my music.”