Burning The Day
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RANDY ROGERS BAND
Burning the Day
A classic return to form and a brave new direction, Burning the Day refuses to be put on pause, stays in your car for weeks on end, and the songs cannot be turned on low. The album feels like a late, warm summer’s afternoon drive with the top down that ends up lasting long after the sun goes down. Burning the Day is their third release on UMG Nashville, and Randy Rogers Band is out to leave a lasting mark with collection of 11 rock-country fire-branded songs.
The Texas-born-and-bred crew, who earned their road-warrior reputation in bars and dives across the American West, still spends more than 200 days on the road a year, breaking attendance records at venues on each tour. But they aren’t just hitting red dirt dens anymore, they’re opening for the likes of Willie Nelson and The Eagles, and landing spots on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno and Late Show With David Letterman. Their two previous albums debuted at No. 1 on the iTunes Country Chart and in the Top 5 on the Billboard Top Country Albums Chart. They earned two ACM Vocal Group of the Year nominations and were named Country Album of The Year in Playboy magazine for their last studio effort. All of these signs point to success, but on the road map of the band’s career, their route has yet to take them to a major win on country radio—that changes with Burning the Day.
Randy Rogers Band lays it all out on the line with this album. “This is an important album,” Randy Rogers reiterates. “I wrote more songs for this album than on any previous record. The rest of the band was writing a song a week as well; we really made an effort to bring as much to the table as we could before going into the studio.” On top of songwriting, they continued their relentless touring schedule, while several of the band members, including Randy himself, started families.
Teaming up with Grammy-award winning producer Paul Worley, RRB carried their work ethic and friendships into the studio to be tested. “Paul really put me under the gun,” Rogers says, “He pushed me to focus more than ever on my songwriting.” Worley also embraced their style, “Paul was pretty excited that we were actually a band. He was fired up about our approach; with everyone in the band writing and filling out their-own parts.” Rogers exclaims.
In the studio, Worley often threw out the adage, “if you think too much, you stink,” to the guys and encouraged the band to bring the electricity of their stage performance to the studio.
RRB never shies away from a challenge. We went to a practice studio to work up the songs with Paul for 6 to 7 hours a day at SoundCheck in Nashville. After a few weeks, we took ‘em back to the road and started to play them live—the roots of this band are in the road,” Rogers explains.
Burning the Day is an album built not only with sweat of the band, but also alongside their fans. Anyone familiar with the group knows of their dedication to the people they tirelessly tour in front of. It’s natural, almost reflexive, that RRB would want to see what works for their community of diehards before hitting the studio again.
“Interstate” (R. Rogers & S. McConnell) kicks off the album like the magic hiss of a lighted fuse before a burst of summer fireworks.
“Interstate” stands out as a driving song that scorches the blacktop with Brady Black’s signature fiddle and a Rogers led anthemic chorus and harmonies. The crowd’s response was immediate. “Crowds are already singing along to it,” the band reports. “The day after Sean and Randy wrote it, we knew we had something special,” says guitarist Geoffrey Hill.
“Too Late for Goodbye” (R. Rogers & S. McConnell) makes a strong run at “break-up song of the year.” It’s a tune that will howl through many car stereos on their way out of the driveway, kicking up clouds of dust and gravel. The song’s raw and direct storytelling are pushed upward by the energy of one of the band’s best studio performances to date. “Too Late for Goodbye” signals a theme for the rest of the album in terms of songwriting making it the perfect choice as the lead single for the record.
Rogers and the band set out to write an album filled with real country songs from start-to-finish. Their aim is true, to write about relationships, about loves lost and regained, about joy and sorrow and the poetry of life that unfolds in front of us everyday. They’re songs that cause synapses to fire, especially at their shows.
“Steal You Away” (J. Middleton, M. Mulch & M. Mulch) elicits yet another unique reaction from the crowd. Bass player Jon “Chops” Richardson illuminates, “We heard this song, and we were blown away. It was something we didn’t have written for the record; we had rockers, two-steppers, but this is a great ballad: a guy sees a girl with guy who doesn’t deserve and think, ‘I should just take her away.” The band attests they’ve seen it happen—during the song, from the stage—a number of times already. Any song that’s gets under folks skin like that is a keeper.
“Just Don’t Tell Me the Truth,” is quite possibly one of Rogers’ proudest moments on Burning the Day because he got to write it with one of his heroes, a master songwriter if there ever was one, Dean Dillon. Sung from the perspective of a man who can’t let go, but knows it’s over, sends chills and tugs all the right heartstrings; it’s like it fell off an old jukebox.
Yet Burning the Day’s strength rests not solely in the individual songs, but again, on the entire album. It’s an album that can be started any point, and you’ll keep on listening till the very end, then hit repeat.
An authentic country band like RRB doesn’t rely on radio singles or a good run of download and ringtone sales, they create traditional country albums overflowing with narratives and emotions, and songs that stand up on their own; It makes for an album stacked with songs that could each be released as singles, rather than easily forgotten fluff. It’s a traditional way to look at writing albums; it’s a way that often times can be more time-consuming because the process requires weaving strands of heartache and elation through each song, rather than bookending an album with a couple singles.
Burning the Day is an album meant for old and new fans alike. It offers a taste of their live show: moments where a chorus sweeps you away, singing along word for word, and verses with consummate attention to personal imagery and songcraft.
It’s all on the line here. Randy Rogers Band put everything they’ve got into Burning the Day. It represents the years of hard work, hard livin’ the band members have put themselves through to make genuine, unflinching rock-country music. Everything is under the hood in this machine and waiting for the listener to turn that key—RRB guarantees a wild ride.RANDY ROGERS BAND
When the Randy Rogers Band’s last project debuted as the most-downloaded country album on iTunes, plenty of the industry “insiders” on Music Row were left scratching their heads: Who are these guys?
The Nashville elite may not have known about the five-piece band, but much of America already did. Rolling Stone magazine ranked them alongside such artists as U2 and the Stones in its list of Top 10 Must-See Artists in the summer of 2007. They earned $2.5 million—a staggering total for a still-developing act—on the tour circuit in a single year. Willie Nelson, the Eagles, Gary Allan and Dierks Bentley all picked them as opening acts for their concerts. And more than 2,200 people showed up and bought the bands album at an appearance at Wherehouse Music.
The fans’ exuberance was shared by USA Today, which praised the band for having “loads of grit, swagger and heart.”
The Randy Rogers Band built its audience by combining forces: It’s a dynamic live act centered around songs that fit the rowdy, party vibe of the concert circuit, but their songs also say something.
That’s particularly true in the new album, The Randy Rogers Band, in which a dozen persuasive tracks give the listener plenty of reasons to want to down a celebratory brewski. But the songs also maintain a depth that makes them powerful and provocative even beyond their edgy arrangements and tough-guy sound.
Invariably, the songs are about people making choices and dealing with the consequences they bring. That’s the case in the opening “Wicked Ways,” in which a string of wild endeavors leaves an out-of-control adult in need of redemption. It’s true in “When The Circus Leaves Town,” where a performer comes to terms with the emotional crash that accompanies the conclusion of a pumped-up show. It’s even a tenet in “One Woman,” a ballad that finds a former playboy recognizing his old choices and behaviors were a shallow pursuit next to the promise and solidity that stand before him.
“These songs are definitely true, and they’re relatable to many different life situations that I’ve either gone through in the past or will go through in the future,” Rogers, the lead singer and primary songwriter, says. “I just tried to create believable characters and relatable characters. I hear from fans that we really have helped them in real-life situations when they’ve applied the songs to their everyday life. That’s what I strive for in the songs that I write.”
“We’re not old, but we are getting a little bit more mature,” bass player Jon Richardson asserts, drawing laughter from the rest of the band. “We’re trying to be more mature, anyway. And that’s something that we can write about a little more naturally now instead of ‘Here’s a song about how much fun I had’ or ‘Here’s a song about a girl.’ That’s probably just a natural progression of our own lives being reflected in our songs.”
Indeed, the Randy Rogers Band is confronting the same questions about relationships and identity that face many of the college students and young adults that form the centerpiece of the group’s audience. The balancing act between work, home and recreation is a difficult one—even tougher for an ensemble that spends more than 200 days annually on the road.
“All the guys, except for Jon, are married or soon to be married,” guitarist Geoffrey Hill observes. “Les [drummer] and I both have kids. So sometimes it feels like you’ve really gotta struggle to fit all that into your life, I guess, but it’s kinda part of the game. I always said that I play music for free, and I get paid to leave the family behind and go on the road.”
That requires a constant rededication to the group, a commitment the five members have repeatedly made since the current lineup coalesced in 2003.
The Randy Rogers Band’s status as a group has occasionally confused its audience, which sometimes assumes Rogers is simply a solo artist. It’s the same issue that acts such as Huey Lewis & The News and Edwin McCain have battled, though one that doesn’t concern RRB all that much.
“I don’t think it’s an issue at all,” fiddler Brady Black asserts. “I think when we got together, Randy had already had a band, and his name had been out a little bit, and so we just kind of went with it.”
“That,” Black smirks, “and he owned the van…”
Actually, the name came rather innocently. Rogers had developed a following, he played open-mic nights, impressing club owner Kent Finlay enough to offer Rogers his own regular night, as long as he found a band to back him.
That group might have taken his name, but Rogers—who’d had previous experiences as a guitar player in another band—had no interest in being just a one-man show.
“I always wanted everybody to be equal, not only financially but also input-wise and creatively,” he says. “When we started the band, I pledged to them that I would work every day as hard as I could and try to get us down the highway a little further if they would sign up with me and share in some of those sacrifices, and I think from that day on, everybody pretty much quit their alternative jobs, and kinda gave 110 percent to the band.”
The Randy Rogers Band took the same slot that George Strait and the Ace In The Hole band had once occupied at Cheatham Street, appropriate since the band used the same sort of inner motivation in building its sound as Strait did a generation ago.
Their music is hardly the same. In contrast to Strait’s pure-country aesthetics, RRB combines that traditional country sound with a rollicking, swagger influenced by rugged sounds from such diverse sources as Waylon Jennings and Stone Temple Pilots. But, as Finlay recognized, there’s an authenticity and honesty to the band that parallels Strait’s personal manifesto.
“In a way, George was a little bit out of the box for Nashville when he debuted,” Rogers notes, “I think George Strait, when he first hit town, he knew who he was, and I think that’s partly why he has been so successful throughout his career. If there’s a correlation between the two of us, I think that we definitely have a sound and we know who we are.”
The Randy Rogers Band further distinguishes that identity in its self-titled album, the band’s second release since signing with Mercury Nashville. Produced by longtime admirer Radney Foster, who’s successfully maintained alt country integrity while writing mainstream hits for the likes of Sara Evans and Keith Urban, sessions for The Randy Rogers Band took place at Dockside Studios, a bayou location in Maurice, Louisiana, that’s also been the breeding ground for projects by B.B. King, Mavis Staples, Keb’ Mo’, Levon Helm and Mark Knopfler.
“We shut ourselves up for 10 days and had a band-camp set up,” Richardson observes. “There weren’t any distractions. It wasn’t like we were all goin’ home every night and comin’ back the next day. We were just living and breathing it for 10 days or so. We were just completely absorbed by it.”
The consequences of that choice are just as absorbing for the listener. The album ranges from the hypnotic country of “Buy Myself A Chance” and the first single, “In My Arms Instead,” to the propulsive buzz of “Never Be That High” to the painful conclusion, “This Is Goodbye.”
Rogers’ various performances reflect the wide-ranging influences that snapped together in the process, evoking at times the sneer of Steve Earle, the soul of Bakersfield’s Monty Byrom (formerly of Big House) and the vulnerability of Keith Urban.
With its infectious hooks and daring attitude, the album underscores the iTunes popularity of the Randy Rogers Band, its critical appeal and its significance on the nation’s concert circuit, where they’ve broken attendance records at numerous clubs across the heartland. Even Kenny Chesney, who consistently places among the top-selling tours, saw the group’s blue-collar connection when he covered Rogers’ “Somebody Take Me Home” for the album The Road And The Radio.
Each of the five members recognizes his contribution to the Randy Rogers Band’s overall unity, and they repeatedly make choices—creatively and personally—that keep that all-for-one-and-one-for-all solidarity intact.
