Old Dominion Admit They’ve Gotten ‘Spoiled’ By Kenny Chesney
Old Dominion have been fortunate enough to go out on the road with Kenny Chesney not once, but twice: The five-man group -- made up of Matt Ramsey, Trevor Rosen, Whit Sellers, Geoff Sprung and Brad Tursi -- joined Chesney for both his 2015 The Big Revival Tour and his 2016 Spread the Love Tour. When Chesney decided not to a stadium tour in 2017, Old Dominion admit they were disappointed -- until the "All the Pretty Girls" singer invited the band to play back-to-back nights at his only stadium shows of the year, at Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts.
"We’re becoming spoiled at this point," Ramsey shared with The Boot and other reporters at a recent media event. "Gillette in Boston is the birthplace of the No Shoes Nation, and they sort of adopted us, so it really feels amazing to be able to go back. We were kind of bummed that we weren’t touring with him this year, but then we got the call that we get to go play Gillette with him, so it’s really going to be like a big family reunion to go back there."
Old Dominion now count several artists, including Chesney, among their closest friends, but they admit that wasn't always the case. Although they were musicians and songwriters for some time, it took gaining fame as a band to really form those relationships.
"It wasn’t really until we got into this world that we started to develop relationships with other artists," Ramsey says. "It is very cool to be in a room at some of these awards shows ... you see all these people that have been doing it for years ahead of you. For them to recognize you and to speak to you as a peer and as an equal, it’s very validating and helps us feel like we actually belong here."
Old Dominion have plenty of hits to draw from when they take the stage now, including their current Top 10 song "No Such Thing as a Broken Heart," the debut single from their upcoming sophomore album, Happy Endings. The tune's eclectic, '80s-inspired video, was one of the more labor-intensive videos they have put together, but they insist their hard work was worth it in the end.
"It was pretty hectic to make. It was a lot of fun, but it was two 12-, 14-hour days. We spent more time on the video than we did on the entire album, I think," Ramsey jokes. "It was insane. And it was fun and exhausting, but at the end, when something like that comes together and you can see this whole piece from beginning to end -- sometimes when you’re filming, it doesn’t really make sense the way you have to shoot it, so it is really cool to see it all in one piece. It’s a blast."
Old Dominion's good friend Steve Condon directed the "No Such Thing as a Broken Heart" video. Ramsey says the credit for the concept goes entirely to him.
"He knows our personalities and he knows what we’re going to like and what we don’t like," adds Ramsey. "So he called me and he was like, ‘What if we did a literal interpretation of every single line in that song?' I said, ‘That sounds cool.’ He wrote a thing up, and we all read it. I don’t know if we even read the whole thing, because it was just so insane. We were like, ‘Okay, let’s do that.’ We put our trust in him, and he did a great job."
Happy Endings will be released on Aug. 25; the record is available for pre-order on Amazon and iTunes. A list of all of Old Dominion's upcoming shows is available on their website.
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