Outlaw Festival: Willie Nelson, Wilco, Sheryl Crow & More!

Willie Hugh Nelson is an American country music singer-songwriter, as well as an author, poet, actor, and activist. The critical success of the album Shotgun Willie (1973), combined with the critical and commercial success of Red Headed Stranger (1975) and Stardust (1978), made Nelson one of the most recognized artists in country music. He was one of the main figures of outlaw country, a subgenre of country music that developed in the late 1960s as a reaction to the conservative restrictions of the Nashville sound. Nelson has acted in over 30 films, co-authored several books, and has been involved in activism for the use of biofuels and the legalization of marijuana.

Throughout the past two-plus decades Wilco has won multiple Grammy Awards, released ten studio albums, as well as a trio of albums with Billy Bragg penning music to lyrics by Woody Guthrie. They have founded their own record label (dBpm Records) and festival (Solid Sound), and 2020 sees them curating Sky Blue Sky, a destination concert experience in Mexico, for the first time. The Chicago sextet continues to be regarded as a live powerhouse, as described by NPR "To see Wilco on stage is to hear the best of the best."<p> The band's forthcoming album, Ode To Joy, will be out October 4, 2019. The band will be touring Europe and North America extensively surrounding its release.</p><p></p>

“Feels Like Home may be the most focused album I’ve ever made,” Sheryl Crow says of her debut album for Warner Nashville, the label based in Music City where Crow choose to settle and raise her children years ago. “All of my albums have had a few different styles going on in them, and this album definitely has a few different takes on what country music means to me, but not calculatedly so. First and foremost, I just wanted to make sure that for this album I wrote about were things that I really knew about – subject that hit close to home. Full of great storytelling and featuring some of the most powerful and heartfelt vocals of Crow’s career, Feels Like Home is literally an album that this proud daughter of Kennett, Missouri was born to make. “Country music is rightly suspicious of carpetbaggers who jump on a bandwagon, but in my case, this world in Nashville really does feel like home. I grew up three and a half hours from Nashville, and my parent just moved out of that home that I grew up in recently. So I grew up in a community that was all farmland and churches and school and a town square. So country is where I come from, and that’s the kind of life I wanted to give my kids, and you can find that sort of life here in Nashville. Even though Nashville has so much more to offer, there is still a small town feel that I love. As Crow recalls, “Back when I was growing up, the outside world wasn’t much of our experience, and that’s different now. But we grew up with two radio stations that played country, but now the world is much more connected wherever you are. Clearly, I’m also a girl who also loves to rock and fell hard for the Rolling Stones and Dylan too – but you’ll notice my favorite rockers also had close ties to country music too. And I’ve love being part of the community here in Nashville, and the fact that my kids are growing up inside of that community. For me, it’s been amazing to not only be around so many other artists and music people who go to church together, and support each other’s school fundraisers, and basically have a real sense of community here.” Indeed, it was a friendly conversation with one Nashville neighbor by the name of Brad Paisley that set Crow on the course to start work on Feels Like Home. “I had a lot of trepidation about trying too hard to make an album within the country format. Because I do love it, and between my friends in Kansas City, and California and even New York, it is what anyone who wants to hear songs, and wants to hear guitar solos and storytelling basically listens to now. But over the years, I’ve seen lots of artists try to make this transition and it hasn’t to me gone well or felt natural or real to me, and the only way I wanted to do this was authentically. Brad instantly understood how to approach this. He said, `Let’s just do what you do. Bring your influences with you. Just turn your vocal up and make your stories a little more concise and you’re already there.’ That realization that I already was at home here is really the reason this album ended up being made.” This is not Sheryl Crow’s first musical rodeo. She is, after all, a nine-time Grammy Award winner who has sold more than 50 million albums around the world. Still, Feels Like Home captures the sound of a great and established artist enjoying a kind of fresh start. Feels Like Home really got started with Crow, Paisley and Chris DuBois -- one his frequent collaborators – penning one of the albums’ standout tracks “Waterproof Mascara,” a stunning song that recalls classics by some of country’s greatest female vocalists like Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn, the latter of whom Crow sang with, along with friend Miranda Lambert on the CMA Awards in 2011. According to Crow, “It meant so much that a great country artist like Brad put his faith in me, there wasn’t a label at that point – Brad just believed we’d land in the right home here, and I do believe with Warner Nashville, I’m on the greatest label for me now. I feel spoiled to be around people who are on fire for music -- especially after being in another situation that did not feel like that. Gradually, Crow began working with a series of collaborators that included her longtime guitar play and frequent co-writer Jeff Trott (with whom she co-wrote such past Crow classics as “If It Makes You Happy,” “Her Favorite Mistake” and “Every Day Is A Winding Road) as well as many of Nashville’s finest writers, including Chris DuBois, Luke Laird, Natalie Hamby and Chris Stapleton, among others. “The thing about country music is the stories you tell usually get to the point quicker,” Crow explains. “So writing the songs for this album, after 20 years writing songs, felt so great because I am still doing what I love, but I’m learning and stretching at the same time. Because I have such a strong curiosity and the songwriting process that’s really at the heart of what goes on in Nashville, it’s been invigorating and satisfying to study what makes a country song work." The writing process for Feel Like Home was a little different for Crow. “It took a while because I didn’t want to find people to write a Sheryl Crow song for me, but in the end I loved the experience One thing I found interesting is that in Nashville people often write in groups of threes – which I don’t think I’ve ever done,” she says. “In fact, other than my first album, I’ve rarely written with anyone else other than Jeff Trott -- let alone two other people. But it works -- I think there’s a sense that if there are three people there, then a song will actually get finished.” Crow also credits her co-producer Justin Niebank as a key collaborator on Feels Like Home. “After a little false start, I was asking around for a great engineer, and Vince Gill told me Justin was the man for the job, and he was right. And after a few days, I realized that he was more than just a great engineer, but a real partner in producing this album. For Crow, making her first album for a Nashville label is an experience she won’t forget. “It was amazing to be making an album in my community, and have my life still be my primary inspiration,” she says. “I was still driving my kids to school in the morning, and doing mommy things in-between sessions. Having a structured time to work, and being able to work at my house, everything about this just felt very loving and homey. Like the title says, it just felt like home.”

After turning inward for his 2021 album, A Few Stars Apart, the frontman of Lukas Nelson + POTR is reaching further into his country music roots than ever before. Although Sticks and Stones is front-loaded with tongue-in-cheek humor and full-throttle tempos, the album also makes time for reflection, allowing fans to glimpse a different side of Nelson’s personality. As the album’s producer, he also achieves the near impossible: Capturing the electrifying energy of Lukas Nelson + POTR concert on a studio project.

Stephen Wilson Jr. is a singer/songwriter from rural Southern Indiana. Wilson was raised by a single father who was a boxer and had him boxing from age 7 through adulthood as a Indiana State Golden Gloves finalist. Wilson, a self-taught guitarist moved to Nashville to pursue a degree in Microbiology at MTSU. There he started indie rock band AutoVaughn after finishing his degree, where Wilson toured for over 5 years &amp; co-wrote songs as lead guitarist until his creative focus turned more to songwriting &amp; singing. After the band, Wilson relied back on his education working years as an R&amp;D Scientist until signing a publishing deal with BMG Nashville in Aug 2016, where he's currently building his catalogue. He’s had his songs recorded by ‪Tim McGraw‬, ‪Trace Adkins‬, Chase Bryant, ‪Mackenzie Porter‬, ‪Sixpence None the Richer‬ &amp; ‪Leigh Nash‬. Stephen Wilson Jr. as an artist independently released his first single “the devil” &amp; cinematic video for the song in Sept. 2019 with more to follow soon. His full EP will come out in early 2020. Wilson almost always plays a late-70’s gut-string acoustic and some of his main influences are ‪Willie Nelson‬, ‪Kurt Cobain‬, ‪John Mellencamp‬, ‪Bruce Springsteen‬, The National, ‪Glen Campbell‬ &amp; ‪Randy Travis‬.

First impressions matter. Especially on a debut album. Time and attention-strapped listeners size up an artist within a song or two, then move on or delve in further. Fortunately, it only takes Margo Price about twenty-eight seconds to convince you that you're hearing the arrival of a singular new talent. “Hands of Time,” the opener on Midwest Farmer's Daughter (coming Spring 2016, Third Man Records), is an invitation, a mission statement and a starkly poetic summary of the 32-year old singer's life, all in one knockout, self-penned punch. Easing in over a groove of sidestick, bass and atmospheric guitar, Price sings, “When I rolled out of town on the unpaved road, I was fifty-seven dollars from bein' broke . . .” It has the feel of the first line of a great novel or opening scene in a classic film. There's an expectancy, a brewing excitement. And as the song builds, strings rising around her, Price recalls hardships and heartaches – the loss of her family's farm, the death of her child, problems with men and the bottle. There is no self-pity or over-emoting. Her voice has that alluring mix of vulnerability and resilience that was once the province of Loretta and Dolly. It is a tour-de-force performance that is vivid, deeply moving and all true. From the honky tonk comeuppance of “About To Find Out,” to the rockabilly-charged “This Town Gets Around” to the weekend twang of “Hurtin' (On The Bottle)”, Price adds fresh twists to classic Nashville country, with a sound that could’ve made hits in any decade. Meanwhile, the hard-hitting blues grooves of “Four Years of Chances” and “Tennessee Song” push the boundaries further west to Memphis (the album was recorded at the legendary Sun Studio). Price grew up in Aledo, Illinois (pop. 3,612), and after dropping out of college, she moved to Nashville in 2003. She soon met bass player – and future husband – Jeremy Ivey, and formed a band called Buffalo Clover. They self-released three records and built a local following, but it was personal tragedy that brought Price’s calling into even sharper focus. “I lost my firstborn son to a heart ailment,” Price says, “and I was really down and depressed. I was drinking too much. I was definitely lost. I did some things that I regret very much now that resulted in a brush with the law. Thank god I had my friends and family to keep me going. Coming through that, I thought, 'I'm just going to write music that I want to hear.' It was a big turning point.” A year before, she had visited Sun Studio as a tourist. “The first time I walked in the room, the guide said, 'This is where Elvis stood.' They have the X on the floor, and she said, 'It's rumored that Bob Dylan came in and kissed the X on the floor.' So I waited for everybody to leave, then I got down on my knees, and thought, 'There, now I've kissed both Bob Dylan and Elvis.” Price and her band worked the night shift, from 7pm-2am (after the museum had closed), cutting tracks live to analog tape. “It was cool to do later sessions,” she says. “It's like doing shows, where you're singing at 11 o'clock. My voice was already warmed up. It was such a relaxed vibe at Sun. And it felt haunted in a good way, like Elvis and Johnny were watching over us.” After recording the recording sessions, Price shopped the album to a number of Nashville labels, and reached another critical career moment when a friend brought up Third Man Records and told her, “You're on Jack's radar, he wants to hear the record.” Price says, “I sent it over, and it just felt like home. A good creative space to be involved in, and everyone is so down to earth. It was awesome when I met with Jack. He told me he thought my voice was a breath of fresh air, and that he loved the record.” As Price looks ahead to a busy 2016, full of touring and promoting Midwest Farmer's Daughter, she reflects on her hopes for what listeners might get from these songs. “I hope that the record helps people get through hard times or depression. That's ultimately what music did for me in my childhood, and especially in my early adult years. It's about being able to connect personally with a song, and hopefully, it makes you feel not so lonely.”