Bill Bennett Country Music

To me, there’s certain integrity to country music; I grew up with it. There are values that country music shares. I try not to let them get put in political terms or media terms. I think there are pop records that are country and I think there are country records that are pop. For this conversation I would say country music is pretty much, unfortunately, defined by the country format of radio. There’s another radio format called Americana that could easily be part of country. Certainly bluegrass is part of country. In a lot of ways, old R and B is country music. It’s hard for me because I kind of feel it’s mostly southern music, but right now, for this purpose, I think, unfortunately, we’re basically talking about what you hear on country radio, which is barely the breadth of the actual genre.

We really think about the quality, we really do. If it’s a great song, and the guy has vision or the girl… we just signed an act, Laurie McKenna, who I had never heard of. I went to California and sat with Faith Hill, she hadn’t made a record in two or three years, a lot of people were talking about it, and we went to hear 25, 26, 28 songs and somewhere in the middle of her playing songs for us, she plays us 3, 4, 5, songs in a row that are stunning, in the quality of them, but also because they resonated with Faith to the point where you really believed Faith was singing about her own life. She told us about this girl she found, Laurie McKenna, who had written these songs. So I assumed, I had just moved here, I assumed she was a songwriter in Nashville who demos her songs, has a song plugger pitch them to artists and was lucky enough to get through to Faith. I got back to Nashville and found out that she had actually made a record, three records I later found out, but these songs were on an album recorded by her. So I got the album from Paul, put it in my DVD player and by the third song, I’m reading the credits, there’s a phone number, so I call her. I go, “You gotta come to Nashville, one way or the other we want to do business with you.” We’ve signed her, and we’re going to make a record with her. We’re not setting out to make a pop record, a rock record, a country record; we’re going to make a Laurie McKenna record. When that record’s done, she’s already recorded three or four songs… it is stunning. All I know is it’s going to be a great record. When we finish it we’ll sit down and look at it, we’ll figure out how we’re going to market it.

Minneapolis is one of the biggest country markets in America; Chicago’s a nice one, obviously Texas. But Texas is kind of its own country within a country. It’s like NASCAR is big in California, there’s a parallel there that, you know, it’s all over the country. Without New York City, which I think there will be a country station there, but certainly rural America pretty much subscribes to it. The big shock to me I think was, I grew up here, and I distinctly remember the first time I saw Johnny Cash on the street, or the first time I saw Johnny Cash play. Johnny Cash introduced me to Eric Clapton. Things that are a part of my life, they’re always kind of a mix of country-ish rock. Whether it was the Grand Parsons or the Birds or whatever, I’ve always been interested in that. But just recently, a girl who works here said to me, “I remember the first time I heard Garth Brooks. I couldn’t breathe.” To her it was a seminal part of her life. I guess the epiphany is that when someone knows everything there is about Brooks & Dunn, or Reba McIntyre, or even Sugarland today, is really quite shocking because my kids that grow up in LA, they know Fallout Boy, they know Damien Rice, they listen to KCRW and KRock. There’s a whole massive culture out there of kids, they may wear their hat backwards, they may listen to Eminem and 50 [cent], but they drive pick-up trucks and they love Kid Rock, they love Kenny Chesney and they love to rock. I think that’s the part that gets lost in the mix. You can’t live in America without being touched by a different culture. Even here you can’t. So you go to a Big and Rich show, or almost any big country act, the Dixie Chicks, Rascal Flatts, Big and Rich, all draw teens, young teens. I mean, 13-25, maybe go up into the thirties, but big deal. The same crowd you would see Fallout Boy (would) draw at Staple Center. They’re growing up with country music and they by the way love rock music, love R&B music, love rap, and it all getting… just like it does in your life.

If you’re shooting at anything, you’ll miss it. You gotta make great records, you gotta make adventurous records. Just make great records and people will be attracted to it. If you try to catch something, you’ve already lost. You just gotta make great records. We have artists that by the nature of their careers, Faith Hill, and Big and Rich, and Blake Shelton, are Platinum artists who bring with them a core of fans. But, if anything, the new artists we’ve signed, like Ray Scott, Shannon Brown, we just signed a guy named Lance Miller, Jimmy Stewart, we’re trying to sign this band called The Lucky Bucks, they’re going to be very youthful country artists and I think if we don’t do that then there will be no country music if you don’t have kids. I think we’re probably shooting younger; we’re really, consciously trying to make younger country records.