OLD DOMINION: Assets to support the release of self-titled album, Old Dominion on Friday 10/25
Here are some assets we hope you find useful to support the release of Old Dominion’s self-titled album. Thank you for your continued support!!
Old Dominion Album Cut x Cut Audio
Brad: “Smooth Sailing” we wrote on the road in a hockey dressing room or something with our friend Jesse Frasure, who’s been a part I think of every record? Not the first one, but the last record and this record. Matthew actually, I feel like he had that title, and we actually started writing it- Was that the one we started writing a different way?
Matthew: Yeah, but then we went- we kind of scrapped it. It a more mellow kind of idea, and then we got into the room with Jesse and he started playing this track and I remember Brad just kind of starting-
Brad: Starting with that first line, yeah.
Matthew: Starting with, “I feel like a beat-up backroad.” And then I realized “Smooth Sailing,” that’s the same kind of vibe, same kind of song, so we plugged that kind of lyric into what he [Brad] was doing. It was great.
Matthew: Josh Osborne and Shane McAnally were on the road with us writing for a few days. Three or four days they were following us around writing, and so we wrote “Never Be Sorry.” It was in a military base is what it was actually, a military base, behind the stage on a picnic table we wrote “Never Be Sorry.”
Brad: I don’t know how that song- was that the title? Was it the title first?
Matthew: I don’t remember either.
Trevor: I think we drew on a lot of personal experiences cause there was- I can’t remember which one of us it was that had bought our girl shoes in Chicago, and then we had flown to LA the next day and we were walking down the Miracle Mile with them. And so that becomes a confusing lyric because it sounds like we think the Miracle Mile is in Chicago-
Geoff: Which is obviously not the case.
Matthew: It’s obviously in LA, we did that on purpose.
Brad: But also, that one was the kind of hardest to wrangle in the studio.
Geoff: It was.
Brad: It took forever to finally land on that vibe.
Matthew: And I do remember just incessantly playing that song at sound check trying to figure out-
Geoff: Every possible sound.
Matthew: Trying to figure out how we were going to record that song. Just like every day at sound check we’d play it like 10, 15 times in a row. It was a tough one.
Geoff: What if it’s heavier? What if it’s slower?
Matthew: What if we play it backwards?
Matthew: “My Heart Is A Bar” is another song that we wrote with Josh [Osborne] and Shane [McAnally] on that trip. Same picnic table. I remember it was the first song we wrote- We started to write some idea that Josh had, cause Shane said, “Josh, play ‘em what you were singing to me.” So he started playing this idea that he had, and one of the lines in there was “my heart is a bar.” And that line was so strong that I just kind of sat there for a minute. We were all talking about it, but then I said, “You know, I think that’s the song. I think ‘My Heart Is A Bar’ is the song we should write.” And so we kind of dove in to what that could mean, and it’s one of my favorites on the album.
Brad: “Midnight Mess Around” is a song- It’s a relatively old song I think in the scheme of things for this record. It was written in the back of the bus one day with our late, great friend Andrew Dorff. He’s also been on several Old Dominion songs, and we’ve had hits on other writers with him, he’s a great dude. That was one of his titles I think, we just kind of all gathered up there in the back of the bus and wrote the song.
Matthew: He always had interesting titles, very unique to Andrew. So I remember him, you know, “Man, what about like ‘Midnight Mess Around?’” I was always like, “That’s weird man. How about we take your weirdness and make it a little bit more palatable?”
Trevor: And then you start playing something and adding it in and Adam would go, “Oh ok, that is pretty cool.” That song is cool too because we’ve had it for a long time and we really love the demo. I think maybe we had tried to play it a couple times and hadn’t really found it. We had liked the song for a long time, it just hadn’t found its way on an album, but this time around, the way this album was shaping up with how it was sounding, with a lot of our throwback influences, I think it really fit. We gave it sort of a Rolling Stones vibe, and we’re really proud of how it came out. It really fits the album well.
Matthew: “Do It With Me” is another old song, reaching back into the catalog. That song could’ve been, and was in contention for, our first album. And it’s come up every single time, and we just haven’t done it. Trevor is like the champion for “Do It With Me,” he was like-
Brad: I wonder what the next “Do It With Me” is going to be.
Matthew: He would always start playing it at sound check. He would always bring it up when it was time to talk about songs we were recording. He was just like, “We really should try, we really should try, we really should try.” And so the nature of making this album, it was so loose that sometimes we were just in the studio like, “What are we going to do next?” And there was his moment to say, “We really should try ‘Do It With Me.’”
Trevor: Well you know, for me when there’s a song, cause we write thousands of songs right, and I mean there’s songs that we’ve been sitting on for 10, 12 years. When there’s a song that keeps poking its head, and there’s a song that I still can throw on and the second it starts I go, “I want to listen to this song,” then there’s something to be said for that, so I’m glad that it finally made it on our album.
Matthew: “Hear You Now” was the second song, second day of our experimentation with writing and recording a song in the same day. So first day was “Make It Sweet,” on day two we went in and we started writing “Hear You Now.” It was at first a very slow, kind of piano ballad type of thing. Lots of times in a writing session you start to mumble things and sing things that are nonsense to see if words come out. And he [Brad] started singing “Hear you now, hear you now.” And we are in the room together and we were like, “Keep doing that, keep going and see where that goes.” And then we landed on “I hear you now, now that you are not talking to me.” And then as we were almost done writing it, Shane [McAnally] said, “Just for fun, let’s try doing it more like a Fleetwood Mac type of feel.” And it completely changed that song. The song would not have made it on the album if we hadn’t done that.
Brad: I mean the song was written completely in this half time feel.
Matthew: Right.
Brad: And then we played it double time and it was like “Holy sh-”
Trevor: Well you had played that hook too. Because throughout the day we were trying to write a song from scratch- I think we had started a few different melodies and then ended up writing that song. But that little signature guitar lick in the beginning, you [Brad] had been playing that earlier. And then when we decided to play it faster, I think you started playing that lick and it was like, “Oh that’s the signature lick for the song.” For me that’s what jumped it off the page.
Trevor: “I’ll Roll” is a song that we wrote with our friend James Slater and it was another one of the songs on this album where we didn’t necessarily have the list of songs that we were going to create. So sometimes we would be sitting there in the studio and go, “Alright what should we try next?” That was one that I just brought up. It was a song that I had loved for a while. And I never necessarily heard it as an Old Dominion song, but I love when that happens, when we try something that we don’t necessarily hear as an Old Dominion song, and we play it and we go, “That’s actually really cool,” and it stretches what it can mean to be an Old Dominion song. And that one just sounds a lot different from anything we have recorded, and it just sounds so cool. It’s another one that the second it comes on I am sort of sucked in to whatever landscape that song creates.
Matthew: Yeah it really paints a picture. There are a lot of visuals that happen in that song. I remember the first time I heard it, it was Trevor and Brad playing it, they had written it with James and they were playing it on the bus. It was when we were making Happy Endings that you guys were playing it, and I was walking through and they were playing it and I was like, “What is that? Send that to me.” I just wanted to listen to it, because like he [Trevor] said, we maybe never really considered it as being an Old Dominion song. I was just a fan of that song. I wasn’t necessarily thinking about it being an Old Dominion song. I just wanted them to send it to me so I could listen to it. So when he [Trevor] brought it up in the session, it was a cool experimentation to try and make it fit with what we do.
Matthew: “American Style” we wrote with Jesse Frazier again. It was Trevor and Brad and myself and Jesse in his studio in Nashville. And it was your [Brad] title, right? I think so.
Brad: Uh-huh.
Matthew: And that was just fun, you know we were just having fun that day. There are songs on this album that we wrote that are straight up emotional journeys and this one was the one where we were just kind of like, “Let’s just have some fun. You know, let’s just throw out some fun, quirky little lines and put this weird Beach Boys bridge in there and just really goof off quite honestly.” And once we took it in the studio and get that big drum fill-
Whit: The world’s stupidest drum fill.
Matthew: But it is awesome man! It’s a nice, light moment to have on a sort of heavy album, subject matter-wise.
Matthew: “Paint the Grass Green” was again Trevor, and Josh [Osborne], and Ross [Copperman].
Brad: And me.
Matthew: And Brad.
Brad: Don’t forget about me!
Matthew: Well I was pointing at you when you Ross I think. The five of us wrote that song. That was a title that I had just about- It’s like a desperation song. It sounds happy, and I think when I thought of it, my angle was I will do anything to keep you. And I’ll paint the grass green, whatever you need me to do, don’t leave. And I think people hear it the other way sometimes. I think people hear it like, “I love you so much, I’ll do anything for you,” which is great. It’s really cool that you can take either side of that and the song works from either stand point.
Matthew: “Some People Do” was written with Thomas Rhett, and Jesse Frazier, and Shane McAnally, and myself. And it was actually the second song that we wrote that day. The conversation that we were having, I forget what we were saying, but it was like, “Nobody likes that.” And someone went, “Well some people do.” And I think Thomas Rhett was like, “That’s a cool title, ‘Some People Do,’” and he just sat down at the piano and he started playing those chords. That piano part just immediately changes the room and makes you sit there and listen for a minute. So that’s what happened from the first time he played it, and we started thinking about that. It’s a breaking point song about- I don’t care who you are, if you are in this business you are hurting people, or you wind up hurting people that you love, and whether that be just with your travel, or maybe you are drinking too much. So the want to change is there, and I think inherently we’re all good people and want to be good people and it’s about that want to the best person for the people that you love.
