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The Country Music Association’s 55th awards ceremony was a night to remember with show-stopping performances and surprise winners. It was Luke Combs who took home the nights top prize, Entertainer of the Year award – a much deserved win after his rollercoaster ride to the top of the genre in recent years. Nonetheless he seemed overwhelmed as he accepted the award. Chris Stapleton was the night’s biggest winner, taking home four wins for CMA Album, Single, Song and Male Vocalist of the Year, while also being recognized for his work as a producer on his album and single. In addition to Stapleton, producer Dave Cobb and mix engineer Vance Powell earned two awards for CMA Album and Single of the Year, while songwriter Mike Henderson earned a trophy for CMA Song of the Year. Brothers Osborne won CMA Vocal Duo of the Year, as T.J. Osborne graciously took to the stage to proclaim, “It really does feel like love wins tonight.” Nine months ago, TJ came out to the world and last night the cameras filmed him kissing his boyfriend as the brothers made their way to the stage. Many took to social media to applaud his actions, saying how, though it may have seemed a small gesture, it was a big turning point in a genre that has had it’s struggles with homophobia. Jimmie Allen, who performed “Freedom Was a Highway,” received CMA New Artist of the Year, tearfully taking the stage to share that five years ago, he spent his last $100 to purchase a ticket to attend “The 50th Annual CMA Awards,” just to see his hero Charley Pride perform.  In one of the most emotional acceptance speeches of the night, Carly Pearce was brought to tears upon winning CMA Female Vocalist of the Year for the first time, as fellow nominee Ashley McBryde helped her to the stage. Old Dominion continues their reign as CMA Vocal Group of the Year, having now won four years in a row. Mickey Guyton, Brittney Spencer and Madeline Edwards shared an empowering performance of Guyton’s new song “Love My Hair,” which received a standing ovation. The performance was introduced by 14-year-old activist Faith Fennidy, a young Black girl who, in 2018, left her 6th grade classroom in tears after school officials complained that her hairstyle violated school policy. In true CMA Awards fashion, artists delivered once-in-a-lifetime collaborations throughout the night. Pearce and McBryde performed their heartachingly beautiful duet “Never Wanted to Be That Girl,” while Chris Young and Kane Brown brought the crowd to their feet with their chart-topping, smalltown ode “Famous Friends.” Jason Aldean and Carrie Underwood delivered the world television premiere of their recent No. 1 hit “If I Didn’t Love You,” and Dierks Bentley welcomed BRELAND and HARDY on stage for “Beers On Me.”  Keith Urban took to the streets of downtown Nashville, performing his new single “Wild Hearts” while walking down Broadway into Bridgestone Arena. It was a fantastic night that really showcased everything that country music is.

Over the past decade, Sarah Reeves has carved out a beautifully unique career, signing a contract aged just 18, and honing her writing talents with collaborations for other artists, with her creations ending up on ‘American Idol’ and UFC and on television series across major networks like ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and Netflix. A proficient pop singer-songwriter, Reeves is able to adapt to every genre, as she blows everyone’s mind on tracks alongside high-profile DJs such as Laidback Luke, GATTÜSO, Justice Skolnik. Now with the More The Merrier EP, Reeves creates what she terms to be “my favorite project of my career thus far… After a year that made Christmas hard for many, this year is a time of celebration again. I hope this song brings people together. This is what Christmas is about – welcoming everyone, making traditions and priceless memories.” Priceless memories will indeed be made to the tune of Sarah Reeves’ expert vocals, absolutely guaranteed to get you in the mood for fireplaces, eggnog and Christmas cheer. Not a moment too soon, eh? More The Merrier includes classics like ‘Holly Jolly Christmas’ and ‘Winter Wonderland’ featuring Clark Beckham. The title track opens up this jolly collection of Christmas cheer, with Reeves sounding better than before. Her sweet crystalline take on the classic carols is more than worthy of any Christmas must-haves.

Ziggy Alberts has released a new single titled ‘I BELIEVE’, a complimenting track to his 2021 ARIA Top 5 Album ‘searching for freedom’. Alberts’ says “I wrote I BELIEVE as a mantra to remain strong through hard times…I deeply needed a song to sing that would keep my eyes out to the horizon, beyond the storms we face…It’s a reminder to celebrate our differences and see that love really does bridge the gap between them.” Alberts’ signature guitar melody, coupled with his uplifting lyrics, make ‘I BELIEVE’ a magnetic earworm track. Accompanying the new single, is the official music video, where Alberts’ nostalgically takes us on a visual journey of touring over the years. Leaning in on the power of friendship and human connection. In the first week of release, ‘searching for freedom’ landed #1 on the AIR Album Chart (Independent Labels) and #5 on the ARIA Top 20 Australian Albums chart. ‘searching for freedom’ has received praise from the likes of American Songwriter, Atwood Magazine and Rolling Stone France. Ziggy has been recently awarded another nine new Aria Accreditations in April 2021.This brings his accredited repertoire total to six Gold Singles, one Gold Album, seven Platinum Singles, one Double Platinum single and one Platinum EP. Read our chat with Ziggy HERE!

I wondered if you could tell me when you guys first met?  Dave: We started singing together nine and a half years ago now. We were all friends before we started as a band, we’ve known each other around fifteen years.  Do you remember the first time you all sang together and did you know how special it was?   JD: It was a strange set of circumstances. We were just chatting about what music we’d been listening to and we’d all just happened to have listened to sea shanties at the same time. So we thought we’d give it a go, we knew all the words and thought it’d be easy to pick up so we sung one at a party we were at. It sounded alright so we sorted out, I’ll do the low bit, you can do the high bit and it’s kind of gone from there. We sang it at an open mic night that night, and that was the start of everything. We recorded some videos in one of our ex members kitchens at the time, stuck one on YouTube a week later and that was the start of the band. We just love the sound and the feel of the music so decided to crack on and keep finding more and learning more and having a great time with it.  You have a nice mix of traditional and originals, what’s the writing process like for you?  Dave: Sometimes it comes from something from history that I can discover or get interested in. I listen to a couple of podcasts that kind of talk about interesting things from history that people might not know – there’s a lot of inspiration there. Sometimes it’s trying to relate personal experience into the genre. Obviously, using a lot of metaphors, because none of us are actual sailors or anything like that.  Tell me about the attention you received on TikTok, did that take you by surprise?  JD: It had been taking us by surprise for about a year and a half by the time that happened, weirdly enough, because we released the song ‘Wellerman’ back in 2018. It was just like any other song we’d done at that point. We did a video on YouTube which is one of the first videos we did. We used ‘Wellerman’ in the first video we did, we were playing the game Sea of Thieves. We played the game being pirates, but instead of fighting people, we went in and sung at people instead and made friends. That video did really, really well and every couple of months, it seemed like it would suddenly go viral again on a new platform. So it had a moment in the sun on Reddit and Tumblr. It started to gain its own life and traction from then. Every now and then our listeners on Spotify would have suddenly doubled. So we’ve been in this constant state of oh, this is amazing, I can’t believe this has happened. When January happened, we’re like, oh, this happened again. Then suddenly, the phone started ringing all the time. It was all these major record labels and agencies and media outlets, trying to find out what was going on. We realised something different happened here.   What made you decide on the single ‘Hard Times Come Again No More’?  Andy: It’s a popular American traditional song, we really liked the lyrics and melody and I think it’s quite apt for today as it’s all about overcoming problems and looking for the joy in things.  What’s the strangest thing you guys have ever written a song about?  Robbie: Well Dave’s got a pretty strange one about a giant duck.  Dave: Yes that was definitely a title first and song after kind of write, it’s called ‘Moby Duck’.  When you’re on stage and you’re all performing are you completely focused or do you let your mind wander?  Robbie: The mind wanders terribly. It’s almost not a Longest John’s gig if it doesn’t. We’ve got very good at digging ourselves out of holes like forgetting lyrics. We like to take it professionally now but there was a fair few years where a decent amount of alcohol would be imbibed before a show and some shows would be great, sometimes they wouldn’t be so great.  JD: If you don’t let your mind wander it’s harder to remember the words, you overthink it and think what have I been singing all these years. You’ve just got to relax and enjoy it, it’s more fun that way.  If you were to describe your personalities as a flavour of crisp what flavour would you all be?  Robbie: JD is cheese and onion because he’s a vegetarian but you’re also a solid British staple and a bit cheesy.  Dave: Robbie’s a pickled onion monster munch.  JD: Andy’s a smokey bacon, just really great and a bit mysterious. Dave is salt and vinegar.  Robbie: No he’s a weird one like sage and turkey that only comes round at Christmas.  Finally, you’ve got the album coming out but what’s next for you guys?  JD: There’s a lot of interesting singles coming out from the album but a lot of the things we have planned are built around the pre-order campaign for the album. It’s custom built from the ground up with loads of interesting things, so the more people take part in different activities on the website  the more things can happen and unlock, which is very exciting.  ‘Smoke and Oakum’ comes out January 28th.

The Last Inklings have just released their debut album ‘The Impossible Wild’. Themes of folklore, myths and legends  dominate the record whilst sonically the Cello and Mandolin take centre stage.   Though it may be the pair’s first release they have been playing together for a while now. “We started off with like a covers band with lots of different members,” Leonardo begins. “One day just a few of us showed up for practice and we were trying to decide what to play. We had a shared interest in storytelling and folklore, certain books which we’d all read like Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Tolkien, that informed our own songwriting and then we kind of grew from there as a duo.” Musically the pair have eclectic tastes but meet somewhere in the middle, sharing a love of singer-songwriters and composers. “I first got into music through people like Damien Rice. He had a cellist and a good friend of mine was a guitarist, so we could do covers of his songs. I’ve got a classical background too, we kind of meet in the middle with composers like Max Richter,” Leonardo says.  When it came to writing for this record the pair began searching for stories, “We start off with a story and make the song serve that story instead of coming up with a riff and trying to make things fit that music” David says. “Sometimes we come up with short stories or poetry and we try and match it with a piece of music that we’ve written, that complements the theme of that story.”  One such song that began as a piece of poetry was ‘Sleeping Giants’, “They were sort of based on the theme of using an extended metaphor to describe an emotion and that particular emotion was one of grief. The metaphors were forest creatures. A newborn mouse has very distinct connotations of being fragile. It brought these feelings forward that I wouldn’t be comfortable talking about in real terms. Then we matched that with a mandolin riff we had that was delicate, a little bit whimsical before adding the moving cello parts underneath.” David explains. “ It does fit the the undercurrent for the album, which is kind of one of environmentalism or conservation.”  A stand out track on the album comes from ‘The Unkindness of Ravens’ which perhaps shines a spotlight on their clever lyricism. Leonardo’s face lights up as he begins to tell the story behind that track. “There’s a hill fort near where we live called Badbury Rings, there’s a national trust property nearby and what connects the two is an avenue of beech trees,” he enthuses. “There’s lots of local legends as to why there are a certain number of trees, what might happen if you count them correctly on a certain night of the year and the song is the tale of what might happen if you stumble upon the right night of the year and you managed to count the trees. Live we’ve got two versions of it one where the ending is very happy or the second one they get cursed and they get turned into a raven. A group of ravens is called an unkindness.” David adds with a grin, “We like to stoke the fires of these local legends to keep them alive.”  Their songs are well thought out sonically, with the textures of each track unique. Leonardo – who has crafted some of those interesting, moving Cello parts, explains his influence on that, “I spent a lot of time in lockdown burying myself in new kinds of music theory, getting some jazz under my belt. Quite a lot of the melodies are born out of the chord sequences. If David’s written a chord progression, quite often I’m feeling my way through those chords. As you start to connect those notes up, the melodies sort of come from that. Then they’re mimicking bits of maybe the vocal melodies as well. They’re almost in a gypsy jazz way embedded in to what we’re playing.” David adds, “Almost exclusively, the songs are written with mandolin and cello, and then layered up from there.”  Since their first EP came out just before lockdown, The Last Inklings now have a lot of music to get out and tour with and with the world opening up they’re getting the chance to take this unique record out on the road!