10 Questions with ... Old Dominion’s Matthew Ramsey

BRIEF CAREER SYNOPSIS:

Since breaking onto the music scene in 2015, Old Dominion has scored eight #1 singles at Country radio, surpassed one billion on-demand streams, earned several Platinum and Gold single certifications and headlined arenas and amphitheaters. They have also scored numerous industry awards, including three consecutive wins as the Country Music Association’s Vocal Group of the Year, plus multiple ACM, CMT and ASCAP awards. The band is heading into the March 14th GRAMMY Awards with their first two nominations, both for their hit song, “Some People Do,” which is up for “Best Country Song” and “Best Country Duo/Group Performance.”

They recently released their latest EP, “Old Dominion: Band Behind the Curtain,” which consists of the band’s own versions of #1 songs they wrote for other recording artists.

Old Dominion consists of lead singer Matthew Ramsey, lead guitarist Brad Tursi, multi-instrumentalist Trevor Rosen, bassist Geoff Sprung and drummer Whit Sellers. Ramsey recently sat down with All Access to chat about their career, the pandemic, their next album and those “meow mixes.”

1. The band has been on a roll when it comes to industry awards, and now you’re nominated for your first two Grammys. Does it kind of feel like your time, your season, or is every win still a surprise?

The wins are a surprise to us. We feel good about where we are, and [when] we get nominated for things like Group of the Year, those are a little less of a surprise now. We feel pretty confident that we deserve that nomination. The win is icing on the cake, but things like Album of the Year and all of the attention that “One Man Band” got for Song of the Year, those are huge, huge, huge awards for us, and it’s still kind of a next level for us to be included in those conversations beyond just Group of the Year. So it’s really an awesome time for us.

2. I read an interview where you said that the CMA nomination for Album of the Year gave you chills. I’m probably leading the answer

with this question, but is there one particular award nomination that always means the most to you guys?

Well that one obviously was a huge deal just for all of us because we put so much of our hearts into this album and we weren’t sure if it was the type of album that everyone either expected or wanted to hear from us, but we loved it, and that scared us.

There’s the songwriter instinct in you that goes, “Okay, we know how to craft what we think is a hit song. And we can do that.” We’re also coming into this era where we’re learning to break down our own walls and show our hearts a little bit, and that’s a little bit scary. So we trust our instinct on writing a hit song, but then we also kind of expanded ourselves a little bit and said, “Let’s not worry about the hit song. Let’s just [say], ‘I love this song and it moves me,’ and put that on there.” That’s the scary part, loving it so much that it was a little frightening to us.

3. But in terms of hit songs, it seems like you guys can do no wrong. You write smash after smash for yourselves, and lots of hits for other people. Is there a secret sauce to a hit at Country radio these days?

I think the secret sauce is doing it for 20 years. You just have to put in the time and the work, and you have to love it and just keep going. There’s a little bit of hard work and a little bit of luck that goes into it, and [a fear that] one day if we stop working hard, it’s not going to happen anymore. Hopefully the luck continues.

4. When you guys write a song, what’s the determining factor on whether you keep it for yourselves or let your publisher pitch it elsewhere?

It used to be different because we spent so much time trying to develop our own writing careers. We achieved that success right around the time that the band started to have success, so there was this weird time where we didn’t know how to balance the two, and we didn’t know what we should be holding on to and what we should be pitching. So, we were just kind of pitching everything. We just kind of dug through the pile of what was left.

Now, it’s a little less like that. Now we hold on to everything that we write together. If there’s three of us [band members] on the song that we wrote together, we’re not going to pitch it. But if I write a song with Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne, it’s probably not going to make it into the band world because I’m the only one that’s on that. We have a stronger voice of who Old Dominion is together, so we tend to hold onto the songs that we all write together.

5. The band seems to enjoy a great relationship with radio, which has made almost every single you’ve released a hit. How vital has that relationship been to the band’s overall success, and how have you managed to maintain those relationships during the pandemic, when you’ve been off the road?

It’s been extremely important to our success. We’re, I think, one of the few remaining stories where radio sort of broke us in a sense that we didn’t have a record deal, and there were Country radio stations that were playing our music, which just doesn’t happen anymore. Everything has become much more corporate and controlled, but back then only, what, five years ago, people started playing “Break Up With Him” without us even having a record deal. That’s what got us the record deal. So, the fact that they continue to play our music, it’s just so important to us.

We’ve had sort of an unconventional relationship with radio because a lot of artists have to do radio tours where they’re introduced to all of these guys, and we kind of backed into this thing. We were already on tour ourselves [when we signed with RCA] and were touring over 150-175 shows a year, and we just didn’t have the time to do a radio tour. So we had to sort of build it into our normal touring schedule. Then we got added to the Kenny Chesney tour, which helped, too, because he does such a great job of including radio in his tours. So we got to meet all those guys there too. It really helped us kind of put names and faces together and create those relationships.

[But] it is tough during this pandemic keeping in contact with those guys, and things are changing so much at radio. It’s just hard. Like, you’ll have a [programmer] friend here that moved here, then she’s over here, and then she’s fired … It’s been crazy [keeping up].

6. You’ve had eight #1 hits, but when you do them as a medley in performance people sometime seem surprised there are so many. Is that a fairly typical reaction where people don’t quite realize the volume of your hits because you guys kind of snuck up on us a little bit?

That’s a pretty typical response. We see that every night, that little part of our show where we kind of go through it and we play the songs that we’ve written for other people and all of our hits, and people do typically go,

“Man, I didn’t really realize that.” It’s funny. We seem to somehow have fallen into that category. We’ve been here for a while, so it’s more that people forget that we’ve had some success.

We get asked to play medleys a lot on award shows because producers are like, “Man, you guys have so many hits. We want to remind everyone of how many hits you have.” And we’re like, “Okay, we’ll remind them again.”

One of my favorite things playing music live has always been surprising people, whether that be they see us and think we’re going to sound one way and we sound another, or whatever. That’s a really fun way to continue to surprise people at our shows to kind of show off a little bit and then show them the body of work that we’ve created, and maybe that they didn’t realize.

7. Speaking of playing live, how has quarantine been for you guys, especially with this whole period of being off the road?

It sucks. We really built this band on the road, and all we’ve ever done is tour. We were looking forward to a little bit of a lighter year [in 2020], which meant probably about 85 shows. That was the “light” year, and we were like, “All right, we’re going to have time.” And then this [pandemic] happened and we were not ready. It’s really tough to be away from your guys and look back at videos and remember that life. It feels like so foreign now. So, we’re ready to get back, but also accepting that it might be a while.

8. Have there been any internal discussions in your camp about when that might be? Summer? Fall?

Yeah, there’s always conversations about it and we’re always planning for it. We have to be ready for when, hopefully, something opens up and things get a little bit better. So we’re always counting on it. We have some dates in May, I think. So hopefully they’ll come through, but we have to be ready to move those too.

9. Because you were songwriters first, I would imagine you’ve just filled your quarantine time by falling right back into doing that full-time. Have you been writing up a storm, and how’s the Zoom writing for you? Are you into that?

No. Personally, I’m not into that and I chose not to do that. I tried it a couple of times, and that’s not what songwriting is to me. I am fortunate enough that I have reached a point in my career where I don’t feel like I need to write another song if I don’t want to. So, if I’m not getting what I want out of writing, then there’s no need for me to do it. I can enjoy something else that day, rather than staring at a screen and trying to create the next Country hit.

But I have been writing by myself some, which has been nice. And then we also took a trip to Asheville, NC, the whole band with Shane [McAnally]. A couple of writers came out here and there, but we spent three weeks in Asheville, and we wrote and recorded our entire next album.

10. Oh, nice! I was just going to ask you if there was a fourth album underway.

It is done, except we’re in the mixing process now. It was an amazing experience to go out there. We brought a couple of songs with us that we had written, but we never touched them because there was something that we were capturing there. We would just wake up in the morning and have our coffee, write a song and then go into the studio and record it. We would spend 10-12 hours a day just hammering out this new music, and what we came away with [was], like 13-14 songs. So it was a really awesome experience. They had a house there for us to live in and we all just kind of hung out in the house and then got to work in the studio.

Everyone that was involved, whether it be us, or the engineer or the writers that we had coming out, everyone just kept saying, “Man, this feels like so magical. Whatever is happening here is amazing. We couldn’t have done this in Nashville.” Whatever was happening in that moment, we couldn’t have done it if we had stayed in Nashville because we were free from all distractions and we were just there living and breathing the music. So, we’re really excited!

Is your label still scratching their heads over your 2020 “meow mixes” project, where you re-recorded all the songs from your last album using only cat sounds?

They finally came around. Once everybody latched onto it, I think they came around. I did promise Randy Goodman [Chairman/CEO of Sony Music Nashville] that we would not do that again.

Did people just think you lost your damn minds? Was that the reaction?

Yes, including Randy. He thought we’d probably lost our minds, and maybe we did. People think that [project] was a product of quarantine boredom, but it’s actually something we did long before the pandemic hit. We carved time out of our busy schedule to go in and record a bunch of “meows” one day, and we turned it in to our label and they looked at us like, “Are you kidding me?” And we said, “Look, you’re always asking us for different versions of songs. So here’s a whole album.”

People did think we lost it there for a minute, but it was just a great ... When we turned it in to the label, they were like, “Okay, look … you made a really great album. Can we not, like, make fun of it yet? Let’s let the album kind of live and breathe for a while before we put this version of it out.” So we were like, “Okay, that’s fair. We’ll wait, and pick the right time.” And then all of this [pandemic] happened and we were like, “Now is the perfect time to put it out.”

I would imagine it’s harder than most people would think it is to re-sing all your songs with “meows.”

It took us about four hours to get in there and get it all done. But there were times where everybody had to leave the room because if somebody started laughing, I would start laughing, and then we would never get through it. When I left that day, my mouth kind of felt weird because I’d said “meow” so many times. It was quite a trip.