You have to love a young songwriter who has guts enough to say she’s bored with “people’s diaries entries made song.”

But that remark perhaps underscores why Tristen Gaspadarek—known only as Tristen in music circles—is one of the bright new lights in Nashville music. Tristen was never one to write and perform songs that seem like sonic issues of True Confessions magazine. Ever since she began writing as a young teen, Tristen would step back, observe the human condition and share her musings in songs much the same way as do her musical icons including Emmylou Harris and the Indigo Girls.

“No Doubt’s ‘Tragic Kingdom’ rocked my 13-year-old world,” said Tristen of some of her early influences. “When Lilith Fair hit, that was also the time when you were listening to mainstream music and there was a lot of attention paid to women in music. I was pretty into that.”

Yet the world is full of rabid teenage music fans whose passion for the art fades as they mature.  Credit her father’s love for music that gave her access to his home studio or her own tendency to throw herself fully into beloved pursuits, but it wasn’t long after Tristen graduated from DePaul University in Chicago that she decided to fore go graduate school and a traditional career path, instead moving to Nashville to develop her musical artistry.

“I didn’t know anybody there but I’m kind of the person that once I make up my mind about something, I throw myself in,” she said. “I was ready to get out of Chicago andstart something new and it was really exciting to get to make music. I realized I didn’t need all the thing a lot of people are trying to acquire in life. It’s a lifestyle choice you make.”

Now as she and her band travel in a van to play at various club dates in support of her just-released album Charlatans at the Garden Gate, she reflects a bit on how she began to develop her musical chops in Music City.

“I played with anybody who would play,” she said. “Lots of people in Nashville do the same thing.”

As she played more and joined singer-songwriter circles, the songs she wrote shifted and matured as the stack of completed tunes grew. Although her observations and influences vary widely, Tristen has always been true to her style of songwriting. That’s likely why the song on Charlatans, though penned at various times, meld perfectly into an album.

Although the record has just been released, Tristen’s already gained critical praise for the songs that seems deeply personal yet are universally understood. One stand out track is “Matchstick Murder” in which she sings about the pain of losing love while “Heart and Hope” concentrates more on the physical side of love while steeling oneself against the emotional ties.

“I’m the person who likes to talk to her friends about life,” she said. “That is sort of the same way I am about movies. If the story isn’t compelling, I can’t watch it. I have a hard time with action movies. I can’t suspend my disbelief. I try but it doesn’t work. Then I go through phases where I’m listening to an artist, like Dolly Parton, and I think ‘Oh, I want to use ‘Cheatin” in a song.’”

The path to major musical success may—at this time, anyway—may revolve more around songs as diary entries, but Tristen is content with the path she’s taken. It’s not a stretch to believe many will continue to join her as she examines the many facets of love and life.

“That’s what I love about old country, the topics and the twists and turns in the songs,” she said. “A lot of that you can hear in more modern country music but it seems less sophisticated to me. I like to look at [situations] and try to figure them out.”

Find out more about Tristen and her tour on her MySpace page.

Just when you start to yawn over proclamations that various critics have found the “next big thing” in country music, along comes Joanna Smith and shows you—yes—that is clearly true sometimes.

You’ve likely heard Smith’s new single “Georgia Mud” that had its radio debut February 7th, or read critics at Billboard Magazine, Variety and Roughstock proclaim her musical potential.

But we all know that the airwaves are filled with one- or two-hit wonders so we decided to find out if Smith is the real deal. The bottom line—Yep, she has her head on straight, knows her stuff and has the chops. But don’t take our word for it. Check out some of her straight talk in the interview below:

OS: So how does it feel to have all these major music critics single you out as an up-and-coming musical powerhouse?

JS: You know what? It sounds so cliché, but I’m just enjoying the moment. I really don’t have time to celebrate because I’m so busy, but I do want to savor it. This is what I’ve waited for, the opportunity to play music. This business is filled with fleeting moments and I’m just trying to strike while the iron is hot. That means I need to stay as busy as possible. When you love what you do, it makes it fun.

OS: I’ve read that you grew up in Georgia on a pretty steady diet of Reba McEntire, The Judds and Dolly Parton. I think you were so brave to move to Nashville and try to make it big. How did you start?

JS: When I first moved to Nashville, I was too young to get into the honky tonks. I thought writing would be my way in. So I took odd writing jobs and looked for publishing deals. I competed in a talent contest (in 2006) and got to open for Glen Campbell at the Ryman. Then I got a regular gig at Tootsie’s. I started playing down there and it was quite an experience.

OS: The talent contest had to be unnerving.

JS: The talent contest wasn’t quite as bad as signing at the Ryman. I was very new to town, relatively speaking. I had experience performing but to sing at the Ryman—I didn’t feel worthy. I was so nervous, but my mom and dad said it didn’t show. It was such a whirlwind.

OS: How did your parents react to you pulling up stakes, leaving behind a college scholarship and moving to Nashville?

JS: My parents freaked a little bit. My mom more than my dad. My dad was a little calmer because he had his own [musical] dream. I had to leave a scholarship at Auburn University to do this. But I have always known this is what I’ve wanted to do and my parents have been extremely supportive.

OS: Did you know anyone in Nashville when you arrived?

JS: I really didn’t know a soul. I knew one person, Luke Bryan, and at the time he wasn’t as well known as he is now. He is from the same place that I am. When we were younger, he’d come over [to my parents' house] to go fishing with my dad. He thinks of me like a little sister. He was wise about the music business and he wouldn’t let me get in any trouble. He’d be honest when I asked him about opportunities and people, but he let me fend for myself.

Luke let me come over to his publishing company and showed me around, introduced me to people. That’s how I did it—I built my circle and met more and more co-writers and wrote better and better songs and signed a publishing deal.

OS: Tell us about your new single “Georgia Mud.”

JS: I love that song. It is one of those songs that has a very fresh melody and is enjoyable for a singer to perform. I never get tired of singing it. It’s about where I’m from and about lingering love and first loves that are hard to get over. I think everyone can relate to it although it is set in Georgia. It’s written sort of like a mini movie.

When I sat down with the two co-writers to write the song, they wanted to write a song about Georgia. I was sitting there politely trying to figure out the best way to tell them that I couldn’t write another song about Georgia. But then one of them threw out a riff and it went from there. This might be the best Georgia song ever.

OS: Was the song easy or difficult to write?

JS: It was super easy. Sometimes you have to work really hard at them but we didn’t with this. I am very lyrically minded. I love words and love to read and so [when my co-writer] started saying “bare feet hanging off a tire swing,” well, I used to have tire swing in back yard that I loved. It went from there.

OS: Perhaps a good way to wrap up a bit is to compare the first time you played the Ryman to last November when you sang your own song “Getting Married,” and the classic Tammy Wynette tune “Stand By Your Man” at Tootsie’s 50th Anniversary celebration there. Tell us about that.

JS: Things moved so quickly. They had a full red carpet out and flashbulbs going off everywhere. I just figured I’d strike a quick pose and then try to figure out what celebrities are there. I met Kris Kristofferson and Mel Tillis, which was so great.

When your career takes off and you’re just getting started you don’t have a lot of time to prepare (before you go on stage). You get there, get your eyelashes on right and it’s time.

I just figured I was there and I’d savor the moment! I loved it.

Joanna is scheduled to perform with Kenny Chesney and Carrie Underwood on April 30th at the Stagecoach Festival in Indio, CA.

For more information about that concert, her upcoming album or other news, check her website.

Only two days after its release, Eric Church‘s new single “Homeboy” isn’t his anymore.

That might seem odd since Eric carefully birthed the February 15th release right from the nugget of an idea to fruition, but he feels strongly about his attitude.

“Once they’re released, they aren’t mine anymore,” said Eric just before leaving Nashville for the latest leg of his concert tour. “It’s really weird because of the way I wrote the songs and recorded them, but once people hear them they belong to those people. It’s almost like the songs are kids.”

That’s likely even truer now for Eric than it was for past songs.  When the time came for Eric to begin to write his upcoming album, he rented a cabin in a secluded part of North Carolina. Then he spent several months in seclusion developing ideas and writing songs. “Homeboy” is the first song from the album Eric hopes to release later this year.

“When I went up there, I got a fairly good handle on it,” said Church of writing the songs for his album. “It takes me a while for the songs to start telling me what they’re about. It’s a very intriguing process.”

Even those in Eric’s inner circle often have to wait until Eric is comfortable with a song to let them hear it. He doesn’t do demos anymore, he said, instead letting the cuts speak basically stand on their own.

Now out on tour—both headlining and sharing bills with Jason Aldean and Toby Keith—it’s clear that Eric’s style works well for him. Even though this leg of his concerts is just underway, fans are as rampant as they were when they forced last year’s Country Throwdown organizers to move him from the Outlaw stage to the Main stage.

“Our fans are just great,” said Church. “They are always right there, pulling [other fans] up out of their chairs.”

That’s especially true now that Church is nominated for the Academy of Country Music Award for Top New Solo Vocalist. In his competition against Easton Corbin and Randy Houser for the award, Church released a video “Everyone Is Doing It,” that features a host of people in different settings talking about voting for the awards or, in the video’s vernacular “doing it.”

Although Eric said he laughed out loud when he watched the video— that also features a guest appearance by Luke Bryan, who last year received ACM’s Top New Artist award—he said his main goal with music isn’t to win such award.

“I just want to make an epic record,” said Eric. “That’s what making music is all about.”

Watch Eric’s ‘Everyone Is Doing It’ video here

Eric is on tour. His next scheduled concert is February 24th in Florence, SC with Jason Aldean.  For a complete list of concert dates and locales, check here.

Would Taylor Swift write Taylor Swift songs if she didn’t tap into personal heartbreak over her failed romances? She doesn’t have to face that challenge right now— for good or for bad—but David Nail does.

The GRAMMY Award nominee for Best Male Vocal Performance for the song “Turning Home” has plenty of hits—such as the beloved “Red Light”—but many of those songs were inspired by his own failed romances and resultant broken heart. So what’s a now happily married man to do if he still wants to pen the tearjerker songs—such as those on his debut album I’m About to Come Alive—without the inspiration despair breeds?

“I have been just such a miserable person all my life ,” says Nail, noting the sour ending to past romances until the starsaligned and he found his very own fairy tale ending that culminated with his 2009 wedding to Catherine Werne. “I think, at least for me, the majority of my songs come from life experiences. It’s always been really hard for me to try to look at a lyric as fiction or try to put myself into what would I would do in a scenario.”

Yet that’s just what Nail is teaching himself to do now that he’s run out of recent grist from his mill of personal experience, at least on the heartache side.

Take the song “Let It Rain,” the February 8 release that Nail co-wrote with Jonathan Singleton. It was when talking about the Zach Braff movie The Last Kiss—you know, the one where the man cheats on his pregnant fiancee and she kicks him out of the house and viewers are left with a cliffhanger ending—that Nail started to think of what he’d do in such a situation. Call the last scene of the movie—which is literally and figuratively stormy—the eureka moment that brought Nail and Singleton the inspiration to complete the song.

Yet there are only so many movies to be watched and Nail does have his own archive of stories, so he’s tapped into them for musical inspiration. The result are songs for his new album, one of the most eagerly anticipated releases of this year.

“I have managed to do it,” says David of tapping that fictional and historic emotional wells. “I told my wife ‘Now, you can’t get mad and ask me who these songs are about. I’m thinking of old mistakes’…At the end of the day, I’m a story teller and I just took a while to use my past as a reference point. It’s easier to write when it’s true.”

Attention fans of the JaneDear Girls: There will be no cover of “Cherry Bomb,” the song made popular by The Runaways, forthcoming.

The fan request for that particular 1970s-era song notwithstanding, Susie Brown and Danelle Leverett have garnered a strong, some would even say devoted, following for their brand of country rock. That’s evidenced by the fan-generated Academy of Country Music Award nomination for “Top New Vocal Duo or Group,” and the nod from the ACM in the form of the “Top Vocal Duo of the Year” nomination. The recognition was spurred by the duo’s self-titled debut album that was released February 1. The album’s first single “Wildflower” has already reached the Top 20 on the country charts.

“You just have to follow your heart in life and if you do that, the hard work will pay off,” said Leverett. “We are excited about the album and getting our fans more music. We just want to connect with everyone.”

Despite the nixing of a “Cherry Bomb” cover, the duo’s first meeting does have a hint of Runaways’ flavor to it. As fans know, producer Kim Fowley introduced Joan Jett and Sandy West who went on to form the all-woman band in the 1970s. Brown and Leverett were introduced by a mutual friend at a Nashville club at which Brown was playing. They swapped phone numbers, met to go swimming and a few weeks later found themselves writing and playing music together.

“We wrote our first song and [our friend] helped us finish it and said ‘You guys are a duo,’ said Leverett. “We just went from there.”

The teaming of the two—who are each multi-instrumentalists that play eight instruments between them—attracted industry interest particularly from country royalty John Rich, who went on to produce their album. Leverett had met Rich when she first arrived in Nashville, and he took a professional interest in the young woman who also hailed from Amarillo, Texas.

Leverett and Brown have written songs together for about five years now, and have a good feeling for each other’s style and taste. Perhaps that’s why selecting the eleven songs for the debut album was fairly straightforward.

“We sat down with [John Rich] and listened to a bunch of songs,” said Brown of the selection process. “Every day is a holiday is the theme that really kicked it off. All the songs are fun, high energy and very feminine.”

That is how the individual songs evolved, too. Consider “Wildflower,” which Brown co-wrote.

“I had an electric mandolin that I had bought in Utah…and I went to a guitar center and got this little amp,” said Brown. “We started jamming on something and I had this little flower in my hair. One of my friends said ‘Let’s call the song ‘Wildflower.’ I said ‘That’s perfect!’ so we started jamming and had the song [written] in about two hours. Now it’s the first single.”

Leverett has similiar stories to tell including about “Shotgun,” which she wrote because she enjoyed the traditional sense of  ”riding shotgun” in a truck and also sees the term as an example of bonding with a life partner.

“I started playing a solo riff on an acoustic guitar,” says Leverett of the co-writing process. “We wrote the entire song with different lyrics and decided the first line was our favorite. We rewrote lyrics [so they would tie back] to that lyric. At the time, I was dating someone with a truck and my favorite thing to do was ride in the big truck. But both Susie and I come from families…where [parents and grandparents] are partners for life. That’s what Susie and I want.”

Although they are both still moving toward that personal goal, professionally their music partnership couldn’t be sweeter.

Find out more about the JaneDear Girls and their debut album on their Web site.

The JaneDear Girls are opening for Jason Aldean on his “My Kinda Party Tour.” For a complete list of those and other scheduled JaneDear Girls’ appearances, check here.

Ricky Skaggs is going back to his pure country roots.

Any day now, he plans to announce the “Treasure Chest Tour” that will take him across the country showcasing the country and country pop tunes he saw become hits before he turned his attentions to bluegrass and became a major hit maker in that genre.

“Scriptures talks about a man that goes in his treasure chest and pulls out things old and new,” said Skaggs. “What I will do is have a tour that will encompass Ricky Skaggs from the early days. The band will be [his long-time players] Kentucky Thunder but we’ll also add a drummer and a piano player and do my old country hits that fans haven’t heard me do since 1997 when I got into bluegrass.”

The Treasure Chest Ricky will open is chock full of material. When he was sixteen, Skaggs became a professional musician with the legendary Ralph Stanley and was soon a well-respected singer and mandolin player.

“Waitin’ for the Sun to Shine” took him to the top of the country charts.Now that he’s won a plethora of awards including fourteen GRAMMY Awards—which may soon be sixteen depending on the outcome of this year’s nominations—Skaggs is using the tour to metaphorically wrap all of his music in one package.

“It’s almost like a celebration of forty years,” said Skaggs noting he will play bluegrass and the Christian-flavored songs from his latest, GRAMMY Award-nominated album Mosaic on the tour. “This will be a tour people will want to see.”

Not that his current bluegrass concerts, that also include some songs from his album Mosaic, isn’t selling out at almost every stop. At a recent concert at the legendary Birchmere in Alexandria, VA— the first of two sold out shows at the venue—the audience’s cheers and hearty applause underscored they couldn’t get enough of Skaggs.

Besides the lightening fast precision with which he and his band played, Skaggs has an extremely casual stage presence. He treats his fans almost as if they are family, taking the time to tell behind-the-scenes stories about the songs he plays and respond to requests. From a young age Skaggs was a fan of Darrell “Pee Wee” Lambert, so he exuded a special joy when telling the audience that the mandolin he was playing had originally belonged to Lambert.

What better instrument to play during a show when Skaggs and his band played some classic bluegrass tunes including several Stanley Brothers’ songs such as “On a Lonesome Night,” and Bill Monroe’s “I’m On My Way Back to the Old Home.” Prior to the show, Skaggs reflected on his musical treasure chest. Although he calls Mosaic “the most important album I’ve ever made,” he stressed that he’s not a Christian artist. His music belongs to the people and the streets, he said, and that shows in the songs on this album.

“There’s something in the sound that is so different than [more traditional] gospel music,” he said. “If you did a mix of what we have and took the vocals out you would enjoy just hearing the music. You wouldn’t think so much that it was a gospel, Christian, spiritual or any time of sacred record. That’s what drew me into it as well. I’m a musician. I love music, and I love to play music, and I love to create different sounds of music.”

Dates for the Treasure Chest Tour have not been announced. Check here for updates.

Growing up playing board games and listening to country music with my older sister, I had a pretty fair idea of what the genre was all about. Or so I thought. Little did I know that country is — in many ways — the foundation of rock and the wellspring of rich subsets including bluegrass, alt-country, and Americana. Join me in conversations with both established and up-and-coming artists as tell us about themselves, their music, and how it fits into today’s country sound.

A vicious belt slap across the bare stomach of a woman who had miscarried thirteen times. A five-year-old so terrified that violence would erupt at an alcohol-fueled New Year’s Eve party that he shoots a gun to disrupt the scene. An ugly fistfight in a honky tonk between two women— including one suffered severe epileptic seizures for decades—over one of their husbands.

These are among the real-life images that much-honored singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell recalls from his East Texas childhood in his just-published book Chinaberry Sidewalks. Although it’s easy to assume the verbal and physical violence in the book means the story is one step away from reality television, nothing could be further from the truth.

Instead Crowell, a member of Nashville royalty who has written, produced, and otherwise collaborated with Vince Gill, Bob Seger, Emmylou Harris, Chely Wright and many others— including his ex-wife Rosanne Cash— centers the story around his parents’ love story that started and ended (in the book, anyway)

www.rodneycrowell.com

with the couple’s love of country legend Roy Acuff.

“To write something that personal I had to walk a fine line,” said Crowell from his Tennessee home just before the book’s January release. “I wanted its nature to never be cloying, never [appear that I was] trying to get sympathy. As a friend of mine said ‘It’s not who took the worse beating, it’s how they look standing.’”

And thanks to the brilliant writing and vivid details brought to life by Crowell, the couple that physically lived in Jacinto City, Texas, but emotionally dwelled in the music of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, look pretty darned good.

Just before the book was released, Crowell spent some time talking with OurStage about his parents—Addie Cauzette Willoughby and J. W. Crowell— and just what their loves story means to him. Here’s some of what he had to say:

OS: Why did you choose to write this story about your parents and part of your childhood instead of writing something about your career?

RC: When I got the idea to write it, I pretty quickly I realized I’m a songwriter and there are people that know about me, but I’m not a personality that people would be interested in knowing about my career. Really, from the get go I was interested in writing something that would have to stand and create an audience based on the quality of the writing and not what I [have done professionally].

OS: It had to be difficult to write something so raw where you talk about violent encounters your parents had, your dad’s drinking and the verbal abuse.

RC: Occasionally I would get a little cold sweat and think “Wait a minute! My mom and dad aren’t living and they are not here to defend themselves.” Then I thought “Good!” (laughs). But I know my mother would have approved, and probably my father would have, too. I wrote a song “The Rock of My Soul,” that pretty much exposed in song form what this book is about. When my mother heard the song—at the end of the song I use poetic license and the narrator goes to jail—her remarks were “I don’t mind what anyone knows about me in this song but I don’t want anyone to think you went to prison.” I said “If I didn’t have a guitar and your gift of gab, I would have wound up in prison.”

OS: You’ve always been revered for your vibrant writing. How did writing this book differ from songwriting?

RC: The process was continually peeling away, revisions, revisions, revisions, revisions.

A lot of what I understand about the English language is guess work until I use the key and unlock something that clarifies the images I’m trying to chisel out. The process I love. It’s daunting and exhausting but by the same token I’m very happy in that routine. I’d work six to eight hours, ride my bike a couple hours, then my wife and I would figure out what we were going to eat. That process and routine suits me fine. I’m a strange character…I enjoy the solitude and I enjoy getting out on the road and performing. I think it’s a pretty healthy schizophrenia I hone.

OurStage: How did you choose the segments of your life—and your parents’ lives—that made it into the book?

RC: Part of it was when I thought the arc of the story was really that of my mother’s and father’s love affair. I’ve said to people “If we were standing in this room right now and sending my 18- and 19-year-old mother and father out into the world, we’d both say they’d never make it.” That was the arc for me—I considered myself narrator, referee and participant.

Although they were self destructive, hitting myself over head with Dr. Pepper bottle was a really sound way to break up their fight [as told in one story of the book]. That’s pretty extreme but also in service of the arc of their story in that something as drastic as me cold cocking myself stopped them for a moment. If they had not stopped, the arc of the story wouldn’t be the same.

www.rodneycrowell.com

OS: Did you share pieces of the book with others as you wrote it?

RC: I read it aloud to a few friends. I’d call a friend of mine and read a paragraph or read a chapter aloud if I had one. It took seven years of writing to figure out how to write it and then over a couple years I produced a manuscript that my editor received and we worked on. GREAT credit goes to my editor. He really helped me raise it to a level I couldn’t achieve on my own. I had some superb help.

OS: As you reviewed your childhood, did it make you think about how you raised your own children?

RC: Isn’t that true with each generation? Lo and and behold, come to find out with my grown children I did things worse. I think it gets thrown at you—part of the slings and arrows of parenthood are that eventually it comes back to you what a shitty job you did and also what a great job. I think parenthood is like a drive-in-movie-size mirror reflecting back.

OS: One of the most personal parts of the book to me was reading about your wife and daughter preparing your mother for the funeral. I felt a bit like a bit of an intruder reading something so personal. Why did you choose to include it?

RC: I included that because it was about sisterhood, about my daughter and my wife. In my contribution to that scene I’m sort of bouncing around nervous as the undertaker keeps coming down to check. Yet these two women had dropped into this genetic memory or this midwifery that has been passed down for ages and ages. My wife and daughter were dressing and bathing this woman. My mother had given [my wife] Claudia instructions for what she’d want. It is part of the female archetype. They were channeling that archetype that dress bodies of loved ones to send them into the afterlife.

Fans will be able to find out even more during Crowell’s “Chinaberry Sidewalks Tour” that combines his music with stories from the book and beyond. The tour began January 18th. You can order the book and get a complete list of tour dates and venues, here.

The Grascals just can’t stop touching fans’ hearts with their music.

No sooner was their cover of “The Last Train to Clarksville” heralded as an instant classic that they turned their much-lauded bluegrass talents to The Grascals + Friends —Country Classics with a Bluegrass Spin. The thirteen tunes on the January release — that features duets with a bevy of guests including Charlie Daniels, Tom T. Hall, Dierks Bentley, Brad Paisley, Joe Nichols, Terri Clark and even actor Steven Seagal— are generally a merry jaunt through some much loved tunes including “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” and “Mr. Bojangles.”

The one notable exception is the emotionally charged “I Am Strong,” written by Grascals’ co-founder Jamie Johnson, his wife Susanne Mumpower-Johnson and fiddler Jenee Fleenor. The idea for the song came to Johnson on one visit to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. Although he’d visited many times in the past, a public display of children’s words after the preface “I Am” caught his eye. There in the middle of the board was one child’s words: “I Am Strong.”

That’s what prompted Johnson to co-write the song that the Grascals recorded two times. One version is with the Grascals and many of the guest artists on the record. The second version is with the Grascals and their long-time mentor Dolly Parton. Some proceeds from the song and album—available through Cracker Barrel—benefit the hospital.

“We want to get the message out as far as we can,” said Johnson speaking of the work done at St. Jude’s. “Everybody has been touched by cancer in some form or fashion. When we told [the guest artists] what we were doing to raise money for St. Jude’s, everyone was on board. It was amazing.”

Although country legend Charlie Daniels spends countless hours each year working for charity, he said the chance to work on the album and song were something he would not miss.

“It was a joy to do it,” said Charlie Daniels. “They are a very talented band…I have been involved with St. Jude’s for a long time—I call it the ‘Miracle on the Mississippi’—and I [want] the world to know more about what goes on there.”

So just who is the co-founder of the Grascals who writes such powerful songs? OurStage lured Johnson away from his busy schedule for a few minutes to ask him eleven off-the-wall but hopefully insightful questions that’ll tell us more about him. Here’s some of what he said:

OS: What’s the best piece of advice given to you that you’ve actually followed?

JJ: Easy. Dolly Parton’s: Give the fans every bit of your heart and they will give theirs back to you.

OS: What was the first concert you ever attended.

JJ: The first concert I ever saw was Garth Brooks (who opened for Ronnie Milsap). This was before I knew about country music except the old stuff. I looked at my roommate when Garth was jumping around and said ‘That guy is gonna amount to nothing.’ There goes my prediction! I ended up being great friends with Garth and what an entertainer he is! But when I was young, I thought [an entertainer was] supposed to sit there and be like a bump on a log. That was in college though. The first real concert I ever attended was a bluegrass festival with the Osborne Brothers.

OS: What is the one thing that you always take with you on the road?

JJ: Pictures of my family, my little boy Cole Train and my wife.

OS: What is your guilty pleasure?

JJ: Michael Jackson, believe it or not. I was a huge Michael Jackson fan growing up. I have [the video This Is It] and the new album [Michael]. Not a lot of people know this but I did the Moonwalk and won the talent show when I was in the sixth grade. I can still do it. I’ve done it for the band.

OS: What is one thing that stresses you out?

JJ: The business side of the music. Everyone in America is going through a lot financially right now. Music is a lot of very hard work. The thing is, people normally see you on stage and think ‘Wow, they are living the life.’ You are because you are very grateful to play music for a living. But at the same time you have a mouths at home to feed. Trying to survive, especially in our genre of music, is difficult. We’re not full-blown country. It’s not like every theater in every state invites us to perform. But we’ll change that!

OS: Do you have a favorite perk that comes from being a celebrity?

JJ: Playing on the Grand Ole Opry. That is a perk as not every other celebrity gets to do that. Only a select handful of people get to do that. Also, getting to know all the famous people. I’m friends with Dolly Parton, Hank Williams Jr., Vince Gill, Brad Paisley, [the actor] Steven Seagal—they are my friends. That’s a huge perk. I still say playing the Grand Ole Opry over anything, though. I got to meet little Jimmie Dickens. Porter Wagoner, I was on stage the last time he played the Opry.

OS: Who is the most famous person’s cell number you have?

JJ: I don’t have Dolly’s personal. I have her office number. Dolly doesn’t really talk on the phone; she faxes. She won’t email. Personal numbers, I have Steven Seagal’s. And Hank [Williams] Jr., I have his, but he only texts.

OS: What old TV show do you miss the most?

JJ: I don’t have to miss it! The Andy Griffith Show—they still play it on [the cable television station] TVLand.

OS: Is there anyone in country music that you know isn’t honest with their fans?

JJ: Yes, there is. It’s in the bluegrass world. But not many. Very, very few.

OS: What’s the strangest thing a fan ever said to you?

JJ: I get that all the time because of my Native American heritage. They think I’m Mexican or that I look like Wayne Newton. I always say ‘Wayne Newton. You’re kidding. He’s cool, I guess.’

OS: If you could spend a day with any other singer or songwriter who would it be and why?

JJ: Paul McCartney—I love him as a songwriter and I love The Beatles. He’s left handed and I think that’s cool. So am I. I like how he plays guitar.

Nora Jane Struthers may be a new solo Americana artist, but you’d never know it by the sound on her just-released, self-titled debut album.

With tour dates starting this month in Nashville, taking her from New York to California and back again, this well-kept Americana secret—whose sound is a swirl of folk, bluegrass and roots— will likely soon have her album on many people’s “heavy rotation” list.

“My sound isn’t bluegrass and it isn’t folk,” she said. “It’s a mix. It’s Americana.”

Her brand of Americana comes from a deep well of knowledge including a graduate education in English, and experience as a high school English teacher. When Struthers led her class through the works of Jane Austen, Shakespeare and other classics, she was struck by how many of the themes mirrored the story telling by her favorite artists including Doc Waston and the Louvin Brothers. She used that knowledge to fine tune her own songwriting.

Of course, Struthers is relatively new in the Nashville music scene but she’s something of a music veteran. Born in Virginia and raised in New Jersey, she spent her childhood singing with her father, Alan,  a well-known figure on the Minneapolis bluegrass scene. She and her dad also went to Fiddlers’ conventions which were among the events that inspired them to form the Dirt Road Sweetheart and cut the album I Heard the Bluebirds Sing.

“It’s a really honest record,” Struthers said. “It’s just my dad playing banjo and singing and me playing guitar and singing. We did it live with no overdubs. It’s bare bones. We wanted it to literally  be a record of what we sounded like at the time.”

That’s much like Struthers’ solo release that included the top-flight musicians.

“I wanted songs that would go well together and did not sound exactly alike,” she said. “I want diversity….Brett [secured] my dream team of players and they made it happen. The musicians are the ones who made it magic.”

Although some would argue that was Struthers’ songs and vocals that drive the record, her point is well taken. The album sets a tone that reflects Struthers’ creative vision.

“I am there [in concert to be] entertaining and charming. If you bring it back to reality too much or make negative remarks, that really takes away from the most beautiful part of seeing the show,” she said. “I appreciate music and shows…that harken back to a different era of entertainment.”

In 2010 hundreds of thousands of artists entered our monthly competitions, and millions of music lovers ranked their favorite tracks, positioning the Top 100 songs across thirty or more music charts every month. As a proud connoisseur of independent music, I’ve always made it a point to turn my family and friends on to new talents that “I” discover. With a talent pool as rich as the OurStage music charts, there is a never ending reservoir to tap into.

The “Lilith Local Talent Search” brought droves of female artists, “Your Next Record with Keith Urban” brought the country, Drake’s “Thank Me Later” Competition represented hip hop and promotions with Bon Jovi, John Mayer, Train and the Goo Goo Dolls rallied legions of pop and rock artists. While there were many winners who earned career-enhancing opportunities, editorial coverage and cash money, the front-runners only scratched the surface of artists whose talent need to be heard.

Press “Play” to hear songs that have been in heavy rotation throughout 2010 then continue reading to find out why these artists made this list.

-KB

Editor at Large and Director of Community & Content for OurStage.com