OMG, the Zac Brown Band are on the cover of the latest issue of Billboard Magazine! Best known for hit singles such as Chicken Fried, Toes and Highway 20 Ride, the band is days away from the release of their sophomore album, You Get What You Give, from which spawned their latest single, As She's Walking Away. The song tells the story of a man who is too shy to approach a girl he loves and ends up "falling in love as she's walking away". But then the older man beside him, who turns out to be Alan Jackson, tells him to "throw the dice and have some faith". Their blend of voices is simple amazing on the song, and I wish they'd collaborate more after this.
Back to the previous topic, this is the first time the Zac Brown Band appears on the cover of Billboard. But for a group who defeated the likes of Ke$ha for the coveted Best New Artist Grammy, what's impossible for them?
Cover story taken from Billboard Magazine ;
The massively condensed career bio for the Zac Brown Band goes something like this: Talented Georgia musician with instinctive head for business and mad kitchen skills ditches college, makes music, opens a restaurant, works with a wide range of musicians before settling on an alchemic lineup, conquers Atlanta, signs a recording deal with a concert promoter which then dismantles its fledgling label division-all not necessarily in that order. Aided by a highly competent promotion team, infectious debut single shoots up the country charts, musician and band sign to a major label, which, incidentally, didn't have a Nashville office at the time. Hit after hit follows.
Hank didn't do it this way, nor have many others. Brown, 32, acknowledges that his band's mix of styles-country, roots, reggae, Southern rock and soft rock, among others-and its route to the top of the country charts have been anything but routine. "But it's been good the whole way," he says. "We wouldn't be ready if we hadn't gone that way."
Now, after eight years on the road, 1,000-plus shows, three studio albums, three live records, a few different labels, sales of 2.2 million (according to Nielsen SoundScan) of the breakthrough 2008 album "The Foundation," multiple Country Music Assn. (CMA) and Academy of Country Music award nominations and one highly coveted 2010 best new artist Grammy, the Zac Brown Band will release on Sept. 21 what's sure to be the biggest record of its career, "You Get What You Give."
"We want the people to hear what we spent all this time working on," Brown says. "We bled writing these songs, we bled in the studio, and now we're out bleeding getting them right live."
The Zac Brown Band-Brown (guitar, lead vocals), Coy Bowles (guitar, Hammond organ), Clay Cook (guitar, Hammond organ, piano, pedal steel, vocals), Jimmy De Martini (violin, vocals), Chris Fryar (drums) and John Hopkins (bass, vocals)-is managed by Los Angeles-based ROAR, whose principal partners are Will Ward, Bernie Cahill, Jay Froberg and Greg Suess. When ROAR first caught wind of Brown a few years ago, the band already had a manager, but as it was looking to make changes, ROAR got the nod. Artist development firm Bigger Picture was an early partner.
"Zac had created a buzz with what he had going down in Atlanta, and he was getting attention from New York and L.A., but his record wasn't getting a huge response in Nashville," Ward recalls. "One prominent executive at a record label in Nashville said to me, 'When I saw that beanie cap he wore, I knew that guy would never fit in the country music world.' I think Zac was sort of flattered by those comments, because he had always seen himself as a real original."
While Nashville labels weren't biting, Live Nation, in the midst of signing massive multirights deals with acts like Madonna and U2, briefly ramped up a label infrastructure and stepped into the artist development waters with the Zac Brown Band in 2008. The foray was short-lived; even as "Chicken Fried," the first single from "The Foundation," began gaining traction at radio, Live Nation folded its label division with the exit of then-chairman Michael Cohl.
With Bigger Picture, led by partner and veteran promotion exec Michael Powers, still onboard, the band briefly became a free agent, and "The Foundation" returned to its Southern Ground (formerly Home Grown) homestead before the band signed with Atlantic Records. Atlantic chairman Craig Kallman says his first exposure to the group came when A&R rep Gregg Nadel handed him the finished recording that became "The Foundation." "I was like, 'Is this for real? How is this unsigned?' I was so impressed by the quality and craftsmanship of the songwriting."
Kallman says Atlantic was immediately interested. "We then went down a path of trying to sign it and competing with, of all people, Live Nation. We got outbid, unfortunately, by a very significant offer, and we made a very significant offer."
Atlantic stayed in touch with Brown, waiting in the wings when the opportunity arose. "We were able to figure out a way to transition that from the Live Nation implosion into a partnership with Zac, Bigger Picture and Atlantic Records," Kallman says.
CHICKEN FRIED STAKE
Ward says his team didn't initially see the Zac Brown Band as a radio-driven act. "We looked at it as a touring act in the way that the Dave Matthews Band had built its fan base, getting out there and putting on a show that creates this viral buzz so that every time you come back into a market you're growing and growing," he says.
As with most aspects of the group's development, the promotion of "Chicken Fried" to radio was anything but smooth. Though Brown penned the song, BNA country band the Lost Trailers was first to take it to radio and had already begun promoting the song before Brown reclaimed it. "Michael Powers and his guys had a real uphill battle," Ward says. "You have to understand, these guys were no longer on Live Nation and were working on their own independently to push this record along, without the muscle of a label behind them."
Powers, a former Universal Music Group radio promotion exec well-known to programmers, says that taking the Zac Brown Band's version of "Chicken Fried" to radio was indeed challenging. "We came out there on the heels of a band [the Lost Trailers] that had already done the promo and had some friends at radio," he says. "Of course, Zac was not your traditional country star-he came from South Georgia, not the streets of Nashville, and challenged the system [by] working a song that somebody else had already released."
In the end, radio listeners voted for the Zac Brown Band version of the song. "Once we got through all those battles, the snowball started rolling downhill, and country radio quickly made the transition from, 'This guy looks and sounds a little bit different,' to, 'Wow, people are really responding to that sound.' " Powers says. "That paved the road, and down the line they had a lot more confidence in swinging at a Zac Brown single."
Radio swung hard at five of them. Powers says it took 26 weeks for "Chicken Fried" to reach the top of the chart, with that time decreasing with each subsequent single, to 15 weeks with "Free." "If you can get more hit singles in a year's time, it really helps the touring," he says. "So far, off that first record we had 600,000 total detections on five singles and 4 billion to 4.5 billion audience impressions."
"Chicken Fried," "Toes," "Highway 20 Ride" and "Free" each topped Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart, while "Whatever It Is" reached No. 2. "The Foundation" eventually moved 2.2 million units in the United States, and a Cracker Barrel-exclusive version has sold another 42,000, according to SoundScan. Numerous industry accolades have followed, including the best new artist Grammy. The band was also recently announced as a nominee for the CMA entertainer of the year award.
"We were playing in front of 18,000 people the other night," the group's De Martini says. "I was looking out at the crowd thinking, 'I can't believe how many people came to watch us play.' "
ZAC'S PLACE
Well before the group became a radio darling, it was an Atlanta sensation. After attending the University of West Georgia, Brown opted for music and food, opening up a restaurant in 2004 near Georgia's Lake Oconee called Zac's Place. He recorded a couple of albums himself and built a following around Atlanta with a series of musicians that eventually evolved into the Zac Brown Band.
"The first few years were a grind just like with any new band," says De Martini, who has been with the group for six years. "We had a couple of house gigs around Atlanta, then Zac started the restaurant and we'd play there on the weekends. We got to the point where we decided, 'We need to take this on the road and start trying to expand our audience.' "
The band tooled around the Southeast in an airport shuttle bus, "barely making enough to get gas to get to the next city," De Martini says. "We were starting to get well-known in Atlanta, but any time we'd play out of town there'd be 20 or so people going to the show."
Even so, the band plugged on, making decent money in Atlanta and then losing it on the road. "We couldn't break even doing that, and it got kind of tough on everybody for a while," De Martini says. "But we knew we had something special, so we had to just stick with it. Zac always made enough to survive and he always helped us out, even when the band wasn't making money. He'd do what it took to fix up the shuttle bus or whatever we needed to do to keep going."
The band cut "The Foundation" and released it on its own Home Grown label, now Southern Ground. It even had a CD release party out by Lake Oconee before Live Nation came calling.
Relatively new to the band, Cook wasn't involved in "The Foundation" but joined as the band transitioned to headliner status. "The second I stepped onto this train, they'd already had a No. 1 with 'Chicken Fried,' so things were already starting to move, even though we were 13 people and a dog on a bus pulling a trailer," Cook says, adding that touring personnel has evolved but the dog remains.
Like "The Foundation," "You Get What You Give" was produced by Keith Stegall (also a partner in Bigger Picture) and Brown and will arrive on Atlantic Records/Southern Ground. The new record builds on the '70s-style country rock of "The Foundation"-more Marshall Tucker Band than Lynyrd Skynyrd-shifting between bouncy midtempo ballads to hard rock to reggae, sometimes all in one song. While some heartache crops up on songs like "Colder Weather" and "Cold Hearted," the music is, as on "The Foundation," generally positive and upbeat on such tracks as "Let It Go," "Knee Deep" and the epic, jam-oriented "Who Knows." Call it good-time music for hard times.
The band has a knack for balancing intricate and elongated instrumental passages with tight songs that sound at home on the airwaves. "That's kind of our thing," says Cook, formerly of Sugarland's touring band. "If something needs to be tight, we'll sit there and work on it and make it right. But it's a big part of us to be improvisational. That's why we kind of don't fit the mold of a country band."
Brown wanted to take advantage of the momentum built by "The Foundation" and release some new material quickly. "That's why this new record is so important-it's stuff we wrote about two years ago, while the 'Foundation' material is 6 or 7 years old," he says. "This catches us up. There's no way we can record studio records at the pace we write, so we just have to try and keep putting it out, do a live double-CD every year and a studio CD, have the versions down and get it all recorded."
The band gets the versions down live, where it plays both albums "start to finish" in its marathon headlining concerts. The group augmented headlining shows with supporting stadium dates for Dave Matthews Band, and Brown calls the group an inspiration.
"The way [Matthews] has no rules and no boundaries for what he puts on a record, I've learned a little bit of that from him. I try to mix it all up," says Brown, who doesn't have a problem inserting reggae beats into a country framework. "I love reggae music. I love Bob Marley. I love the rhythm of it, the way the spaces are inserted into the music so they're almost more important than what's being played."
De Martini treasures the freedom in the studio. "We're not too worried about making singles," he says. "We just write songs and then we decide which ones we think will live best on country radio."
The new album features guest appearances from Alan Jackson on the debut single ("As She's Walking Away") and Jimmy Buffett ("Knee Deep"). "James Taylor is next," Brown says. "I just haven't done it yet. I have to track him down. JT is probably my No. 1 influence."
FROM THAT TO THIS
Bigger Picture's Powers says it's amazing that the new album's lead single, "As She's Walking Away," was released to radio the same week that "Free," the fifth single from "The Foundation," was heading to No. 1. "We secured No. 1 while also getting a substantial amount of airplay for a new single," he says. "There are things I was able to try with Zac Brown because of the strength of the music and their momentum at radio that I hadn't previously been able to try for some time." "As She's Walking Away" is No. 19 on the Hot Country Songs chart.
Moving seamlessly at radio from one album to the next doesn't overly concern Powers. "I think that radio is going to tell us, at least from a radio promotion standpoint, at what pace to give them singles, just as the fans will tell Atlantic/Southern Ground the pace to release at retail," he says. "Radio has not given me any indication at this point to slow down or to stop."
The band has also attracted the attention of blue chip brands. A multimillion-dollar cause marketing program partnering the band and Ram Trucks called "Letters for Lyrics" launched at Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram Truck dealerships nationwide with the goal to deliver 1 million letters to U.S. soldiers in return for 1 million "Breaking Southern Ground" CDs. The CD offered three new, exclusive tracks, along with songs from the artists on Brown's Southern Ground label. Consumers visited either Ram dealerships or Zac Brown Band concerts to write a letter to a soldier and exchange it for the compilation album.
Creative Artists Agency sponsorships agent Laura Hutfless, who helped broker the deal, says country music appeals to middle America-and middle America buys product. "The 'Letters for Lyrics' program exemplifies the type of interactive blending of cause marketing and band/brand/fan connections we're seeing more of today," she says.
Radio and branding notwithstanding, it's through its live shows that the Zac Brown Band connects most strongly with its audience. Booked by John Huie at CAA, the group's touring growth has been explosive. Attendance this year in markets like Raleigh, N.C. (11,445); Charlotte, N.C. (17,224); and Camden, N.J. (15,785) have more than tripled over 2009, and the band moved 10,000-plus tickets in markets like Virginia Beach, Va.; Boston; Hartford, Conn.; Detroit; and Cleveland the first time in as a headliner.
"Attendance numbers as we come back into markets are staggering," Ward says. "A lot of that can be attributed to radio, but a lot can be attributed to word-of-mouth. Looking at the numbers we're doing now, we'll be selling out a lot of shows next summer."
With a new baby on the way for both De Martini and Brown (his fourth), the band will take most of the rest of the year off, returning to the road as a headliner in mid- to late spring of 2011. Even though he says he's a dedicated family man and "full-on Dad" when home, Brown won't call the touring break time off. "I'm going to be working," he says. "The Southern Ground warehouse is rocking and rolling in Atlanta, with a T-shirt shop and a leather shop; everything we're selling at our shows we're making or publishing ourselves. You can outsource it and not have to deal with it, or you can employ your friends. You've got to be willing to put the time into seeing who's got talent and who's going to do a great job."
There is very much a businessman under that beard and beanie cap. Brown's business ventures are many, from artist development at the Southern Ground label (Levi Lowrey, Nic Cowan, Sonia Leigh) to a product line that includes his Southern Ground Grub spice rub and brown sauce. His new Southern Ground cookbook is available online, at shows and at Cracker Barrel restaurants. It's all based in Atlanta, where the still-expanding Southern Ground operation nicknamed "the Hive" will eventually be home to an even wider range of projects, offices, rehearsal space and a full commercial kitchen.
Early on, Brown began hosting "eat-and-greets" on tour, inviting as many as 75 fans at each show to join the group and chow down on Southern specialties made by Brown. He'll expand the concept to include everyone on next year's shows.
"We're fabricating a state-of-the-art concessions system for our touring, so we can feed the people and give them everything they need without having to wait on it," Brown says. "We're talking about smack-your-grandmama-in-the-mouth Southern gourmet."
Atlantic's Kallman says he's been impressed by Brown's vision and "dexterity" and sees more branding opportunities on the horizon. "From every level, from clothing and merchandising to television and film opportunities, as well as restaurants, he has a deep understanding of how it all can connect."
Running the business side is "a fun part of it for me," Brown says. "We all work hard to do what we do. We use each other's eyes and ears, we batten down the hatches, and we make sure we're a bad-ass traveling business," he says. "Then we can party when all the work is done."
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