Month: July 2021

Hootie & the Blowfish are here to help you stoke your ’90s nostalgia and get a tan at the same time.

Darius Rucker‘s iconic rock group is hosting HootieFest: The Big Splash, a “destination concert vacation event” that will take place at Moon Palace in Cancún, Mexico, from January 26 to January 29.  The four-day event will include three headlining performances from Hootie on the beach, as well as daytime entertainment and nightly concerts by Barenaked Ladies, Toad the West Sprocket, Spin Doctors, Better than Ezra, Sister Hazel, Blues Traveler and Toadies.

After their 2019 Group Therapy tour with the Barenaked Ladies, Hootie & the Blowfish’s members just can’t help but keep the party going.

“We were blown away by the response from fans during our last tour,” Darius says. “It was so special to be back on stage together and to know that people still love the music as much as we do. What better way to keep that celebration going than in Mexico!?”

Packages including accommodations, concert access, transportation and more go on sale Thursday, July 15, at 1 p.m. ET  A 24-hour pre-sale starts Wednesday a 1 p.m. ET. For more information, visit Hootiefest.com.

In his solo country career, meanwhile, Darius scored his ninth number-one hit this year with “Beers & Sunshine.” His current single, “My Masterpiece,” is climbing the charts.

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It's been 25 years since LeAnn Rimes released her career-making debut album, Blue, when she was just 13 years old. Now, in a new conversation with Kelleigh Bannen on Apple Music Hits, LeAnn says she stands behind who she was as an artist back then.

“When I was younger, people would say, Oh, you're really going to be able to sing amazing when you get older, because you'll have this life experience to connect with it,'” she remembers, adding that the sentiment offended her at the time.

Now, she says, she can understand what they meant, but she's still proud of the way she tapped into adult emotions as a young performer.

“I was able to really dig into emotion I didn't know where to place as a kid, and act in a lot of ways,” LeAnn explains. “Then, as I grew, there was real truth to the power behind what I was singing.”

LeAnn goes on to say that only recently has she been able to fully appreciate who she was as a young artist.

“I really respect myself as a kid…I don't think I've had the respect I have for her now until recently,” the singer reveals. “Because I was just in survival mode for 25 years and now being out of survival mode and being able to reflect…I'm kind of always looking to reconnect with what it was about her that was so clear and so powerful.”

Blue won LeAnn two Grammy Awards, including Best Female Country Performance for the title track, her version of the 1958 Bill Mack song “Blue.”

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Kane Brown joins a star-studded list of presenters as part of the upcoming 2021 ESPYS Presented by Capital One, the awards show that celebrates the best in sports.

Kane's the sole presenter from the country genre, but he's not the only musician: Rapper DaBaby will also hand out an award. Other celebrity presenters include actor Taye Diggs, YouTube star Dude Perfect, actor/comedian Tracy Morgan, Good Morning America's Robin Roberts and many more.

The 2021 ESPYS, which will be hosted by actor/producer Anthony Mackie, is set to air on ABC on July 10. The show will take place in New York City.

Kane's passion for sports has been well documented over the years. Specifically, when it launches in October, his 2021 Blessed & Free Tour will highlight his love of basketball. The tour route includes stops at all 29 NBA arenas, making Kane the first-ever country star to hit each one on a headlining tour.

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The CMT Music Awards show is going through changes in 2022.

Variety reports that the show will broadcast on April 3, 2022, which is a departure from its usual June airing. The announcement comes just a couple weeks after Viacom revealed that the annual country music awards show is moving from its original home of CMT to CBS, the former’s much larger sister broadcast network.

Of course, April is the month that CBS formerly aired another country music awards show: The ACM Awards. The ACMs most recently aired on CBS in April 2021, but the network and the Academy subsequently parted ways after failing to agree on terms for a deal renewal. 

There's no word yet on whether the ACMs will keep its usual April broadcast slot or move to another time of year in order to avoid competition with the rescheduled spring CMT Awards. It is also not yet known where the ACMs will air next year, though per Variety, the Academy has reportedly been in negotiations with NBC.

Meanwhile, the CMT Awards are riding the momentum of the success of their 2021 show, which saw a ten-percent increase in total viewership on CBS and was the top social program of the night across TV.

ViacomCBS has also announced a string of special programming, dubbed “Country Music Week,” to surround the next CMT Awards.

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Fans might know Luke Bryan best as the country superstar onstage at his annual Farm Tour, but there's another side of the singer that his audience doesn't see as often: The guy who wakes up at sunrise and heads out to tend to his own plot of Tennessee land.

Now, viewers can get a look at life on Luke's farm in his new mini-video series, a collection of approximately 25 one-minute long videos that will air twice a week through the summer. The series is a partnership with agriculture equipment maker Fendt, and features Luke's Fendt 724 Gen6 tractor.

Topics for the videos range from serious to silly. In one, Luke ranks the farming skills of fellow country star Blake Shelton, while another finds him reflecting on the significance of farmers both in a national context and in his personal life.

The series is called Rise Before Sunrise with Luke Bryan, and true to its name, you’ll have to wake up on farming time to catch the clips right when they air: Each one goes up at 6 a.m. ET.

Luke's video series lasts until September, which is also when his 2021 Farm Tour starts. The trek launches September 9 at Statz Bros. Farm in Wisconsin, followed by stops in Iowa, Indiana, Illinois and Ohio. The Farm Tour wraps at Kubiak Family Farms in Michigan on September 18.

In the meantime, fans can catch Luke on his Proud to Be Right Here tour, which begins in July.

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Maren Morris didn’t take kindly to a so-called fan saying she deserves to be sexualized because of the clothing she wears.

In a fiery exchange on Twitter Wednesday, the “My Church” singer responded directly to a follower who took offense to the silver wrap-around crop top Maren wore for her promotional tour photo.  

“When you dress like that, you’re definitely inviting people to look at you in a sexual way,” the critic allegedly wrote, according to screen shots that have since been set to private. “Don’t complain about being sexualized when you sexualize yourself.”

The user also called Morris’ outfit “disgusting” and remarked, “Imagine if Luke Bryan tried to use sex appeal to win awards by posing with his shirt half off.”

Maren referenced the negative comments when she tweeted her tongue-in-cheek response, which reads, “Daniel’s really gonna hate it when he finds out I did Playboy.”  Morris, 31, even included snaps from her 2019 Playboy photoshoot, which depicted her posing for tastefully done half-naked portraits.  She also linked to the poster’s account, which as of Thursday morning had apparently been deleted.

The country singer later spoke out about the exchange when another user, who also deleted their tweets, appeared to defend her critic.

“He publicly put this sexist garbage online and [directly tagged] me,” Morris remarked in response. “Also, ‘not liking someone's clothing’ is one thing. Saying I deserve to be sexualized for a *pretty tame* outfit is just a hop, skip to ‘don't dress like a slut and you won't get creeped on.'”

“The Bones” singer later retweeted one of her old posts that supported women being able to wear “whatever… they want.” 
 

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Old Dominion grabs your attention from the very beginning of their top-twenty hit, “I Was on a Boat That Day.” But what exactly is the seemingly nonsensical, exotic-sounding phrase that starts off the song?

There’s an amazingly simple explanation, but Brad Tursi says first, you need to understand the mood the five guys in the band were in at the time: They’d fled Nashville to isolate themselves in a house and recording studio in Asheville, North Carolina — and they were getting a little wild.

“Honestly, that song, we wrote it, obviously, the same day we recorded it,” Brad recalls. “We went upstairs, we had some tequila, we were in a fun kind of crazy mood.”

“Usually you start every song, you find the tempo, and you have a click track and it’s easier to edit…” Brad continues. “But we kind were discussing it and someone was like, ‘Forget [it]… No clicks!’ And then [lead singer] Matt [Ramsey] just went, ‘One, two!’ So we just played it right off his count off, and that’s how this crazy thing in the beginning started.”

With lyrics like “drunk as a skunk eating lunch with a cross-eyed bear,” the antics don’t end there, but Trevor Rosen reveals there is a message in the song.

“It’s just a guy who needs to put some things behind him, right?” he says. “I think this character in our story is much like the world that we live in… He’s trying to get past a tough time. So what better way to do that than to get on a boat and get away from it all?”

“I Was on a Boat That Day” is the lead single from OD’s as-yet-unannounced fourth album, the follow-up to 2019’s self-titled Old Dominion.

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