Latest news with #LukeCombs
Newsweek
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Newsweek
Luke Combs Teases Music Video With NASCAR's Dale Jr. and Richard Petty
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. American country singer Luke Combs has teased a new music video, featuring NASCAR drivers Dale Earnhardt Jr. and seven-time Cup Series champion Richard Petty. Titled 'Back in the Saddle,' the track will be released on Friday, July 25. Combs shared images of the song on X. One image of a checkered flag has photos embedded inside the black and white blocks. Two photos of Dale Jr. can be spotted from his racing days, including his number 8 car. An image of Petty's belt bearing his racing number 43 has also been featured. One detail that can't be missed from the photo is NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt Sr.'s quote. It reads: "You win some, lose some, and wreck some." Further details of the song will likely be available after its release on Friday. Music video will be out with the song this Friday. Can't wait for y'all to see it — Luke Combs 🎤 (@lukecombs) July 21, 2025 Dale Jr. has been making full use of media to ensure his father's stories go out to NASCAR fans. As well as his popular Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s Dirty Mo Media, the former driver has launched a podcast series titled 'Becoming Earnhardt 1980,' which is based on stories about Dale Sr., obtained from scrapbooks that Dale Jr.'s aunt preserved. Singer Luke Combs poses for a photo in the pace car prior to the NASCAR Cup Series Ally 400 at Nashville Superspeedway on June 30, 2024 in Lebanon, Tennessee. Singer Luke Combs poses for a photo in the pace car prior to the NASCAR Cup Series Ally 400 at Nashville Superspeedway on June 30, 2024 in Lebanon, series focuses on NASCAR's 1980 Cup Series season, showcasing lesser-known details of the events that unfolded, eventually leading to Dale Sr.'s championship victory. Speaking about the new series, Dale Jr. said: "It's just a show that I started. I got these two scrapbooks from my aunt when my grandmother passed away. We went to her house, we were kind of looking through some of the things - photos and all kinds of stuff - and there were these two scrapbooks that my aunt made. "They are literally, one is from the '79 year and one's from the '80 Cup season. She cut out every article and everything. So right there in front of me, man, is basically this kind of book of, like, 'here's what happened to Dad.' "I just never really dove into that real deeply to get details about that particular couple of years when he drove for Rod Osterlund and landed his first full-time ride in NASCAR. "So we decided to make a series, Becoming Earnhardt, to detail what's in those scrapbooks and the things that we learned. It's pretty interesting." Addressing a controversy that will be highlighted in the podcast series, Dale Jr. said: "1980 is what this particular season of Becoming Earnhardt will be focusing on, and there is a high-profile split with crew chief Jake Elder. How Jake handles that in the media is wild—Jake goes off the rails, Jake comes back on the rails—it's just wild. "And Dad and Cale get nippy in the media late in the year. Cale actually is real critical of Dad on the racetrack. Just watching that whole thing—kind of reliving it, putting yourself in the moment of going back through that particular year—I think it's really fun for me. "I'm a nostalgia freak. I love the history of the sport. So it is a great time for me, a good excuse for me to dive more into learning about that particular part of Dad's life. I lived a lot of the late '80s and the '90s. I wasn't even in Dad's life in 1980. I was not living with him yet."
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Urban cowboys, harmonica wizards and queer trailblazers: 100 years of the Grand Ole Opry, country music's greatest institution
It's the only American radio show that's been on the air for 100 years, an institution that launched the country music industry as we know it and a stage production that made country fans flock to Nashville in the first place – and keeps them coming for a singular experience today. 'I somehow understood the weight of what I was stepping into,' says Marty Stuart of the Grand Ole Opry, specifically the first night he played in 1972 as a mandolin-playing prodigy sitting in with bluegrass star Lester Flatt's band. Stuart went on to become a country star, and Opry member, himself, and has now embraced the role of elder on the show: on 26 September, he along with Luke Combs, Darius Rucker, Ashley McBryde and Carly Pearce will take part in the Opry's first-ever overseas broadcast at the Royal Albert Hall, as part of a year-long 100th birthday celebration. 'A hundred years of anything, especially in show business, it's just unheard of,' he marvels. It has been a centrepiece in Stuart's life for most of his 66 years: as a kid in small town Mississippi in the 1960s, he listened to Opry radio broadcasts from Nashville. By the early 90s, he was scoring hits as 'a rhinestone-wearin' country rock'n'roller', and the Opry's longtime legends – particularly fiddling balladeer Roy Acuff and comic personality Minnie Pearl – were nearing the end of their lives. Stuart sought their approval: 'They had spent their lives building that institution, and I wanted to know that I was on the good side of the line with both of those folks.' Both did give him their blessing, but Pearl made him sweat first. She looked right past the armful of white roses he brought her, critiqued his attire – 'Look at those tight pants!' – and admonished him to maintain the Opry's good image. He kept the pants, but took her wishes to heart, and the basics of a night at the Opry's downhome variety show have remained much the same. 'It is not, on paper, the makings of a successful show,' laughs Dan Rogers, the Opry's executive producer. Recorded and broadcast live in front of an audience, announcers project a mixture of folksy intimacy and professionalism as they welcome everyone, read sponsor ad messages and introduce world-class performers who do a few songs each, prioritising old chestnuts that they know fans want to hear. Any given night, the lineup may include mainstream country stars of the present and the distant past, bluegrass bands, gospel vocal groups, singer-songwriters, hotshot instrumentalists, down-home comedians, square dancers and more. Lineups often span several generations and are often described as one big family: back in March, the Opry's most veteran member, 87-year-old Bill Anderson, appeared the same night that Stuart and his band the Fabulous Superlatives backed his bassist's rockabilly obsessed, 10-year-old son. The Opry has absorbed a century's worth of technological, musical and cultural evolution at a very measured pace. Its leadership has apologised for employing blackface duos in its early days; its traditional barn backdrop is now comprised of video walls and its stage has welcomed artists bringing hip-hop, gen-Z folk and TikTok virality to the genre. 'You have to evolve,' says Rogers. 'It's a must for survival and for creating really interesting shows – but you do it in a way that's really respectful of this institution.' Today, membership of the Opry, awarded to a small cadre of musicians – just 76 living artists – has become one of the industry's greatest honours. The Opry was originally almost incidental programming on a radio station, WSM, launched in 1925 by National Life and Accident, a Nashville insurance company looking to promote its business. Station managers filled the airwaves with a hodgepodge of locally available acts, professional or not, and people soon began showing up to watch the broadcast. 'It was a matter of: let's see who we can get to come in here,' says historian Brenda Colladay, a longtime curator of the Opry's collections who has helped to research a thorough 100th anniversary book. There was no such genre as country music when the show launched, just regionally specific versions of old-time music, dance tunes and folk songs. Over time, the sheer variety of performers featured in Opry lineups helped forge a cohesive identity out of those disparate styles, fundamentally shaping how we understand country. Alongside light classical fare were acts such as Uncle Dave Macon, a banjo-playing vaudevillian, and DeFord Bailey, a young Black harmonica wizard whose family string band had long played area dances. The Opry was essentially a barn dance on the radio, an already popular concept – they poached their master of ceremonies George D Hay from a rival show in Chicago. But the Opry initially faced local opposition from upper-class residents who fancied Nashville 'the Athens of the South', complete with a replica of the Parthenon, then under construction. 'It made some people ashamed that [Nashville was] associated with hillbilly music,' Colladay says, including Tennessee governor Prentice Cooper who declined an invitation to attend an Opry celebration: 'He felt like it was really hurting Nashville's reputation.' Cooper was vastly outnumbered by the listeners who heard themselves in the show. As it went nationwide, it developed a massive, devoted following among rural and small-town listeners, as well as southerners who had migrated to industrialised cities. It got so popular that National Life and Accident executives got annoyed with rowdy fans clamouring to watch the live broadcasts at the company offices, and the Opry eventually moved to Nashville's Ryman Auditorium in 1943. By then, it was no longer free to get in, and WSM had established an in-house booking agency that sent performers on the road. Staff and stars saw opportunities to capitalise on the show's dominance in other ways, starting a recording studio, music publishing houses and enough other businesses to entice New York-based record labels to set up local operations. The presence of the Opry ensured that Nashville became home to the emerging, professionalised country music industry. It was where the thrillingly hard-driving new style of bluegrass was fleshed out, and where honky-tonk singers and folk-friendly troubadours alike found a home, but the show was sometimes too cautious to embrace trends. Take Elvis Presley: when he wasn't invited back after his first Opry appearance, he moved on to a rival show in Louisiana. Stuart says the Opry might occasionally overcorrect, and points to its early-80s focus on the slick 'urban cowboy' movement: 'From time to time, I would tune in to the Opry, and when they introduced somebody, I kind of knew what song they were about to sing and what joke they were going to tell. It was a little weary.' Splashy additions like the Opryland theme park and regularly televised broadcasts on the Nashville Network brought in new listeners, as did the 2010s TV drama Nashville, set in the city's country songwriting scene. But because the Opry was home to many generations of performers at once, there were times when some of the dedicated members felt they were denied opportunities to appear – Stonewall Jackson brought an age discrimination lawsuit, which was settled with undisclosed terms. And of more than 230 acts granted membership over the years only two Black country stars, the late Charley Pride and Darius Rucker, have been inducted since Bailey – and Bailey was fired during a copyright-related dispute in 1941, an injustice the Opry recently apologised for. But Rogers reports that for the last few years a double digit percentage of Opry's performers have been artists of colour, making it much more diverse than contemporary country radio; according to leading researcher Dr Jada Watson, radio devoted less than 3% of its spins to artists of colour in 2024, despite Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter coming out that year. Rogers' team began tracking performer demographics internally a few years back, 'because it is right for this community and right for this show'. Equal Access, a DEI programme that helps businesspeople and music-makers of underrepresented identities navigate the country music industry, has forged a friendly relationship with the Opry. Programme manager Chantrel Reynolds says she and her colleagues made sure it was a safe space for discussing the Opry's complex history with race before they began arranging visits with Opry leadership, and she finds that acknowledgment refreshingly 'different from a lot of spaces' in country music. The Opry, she says, is 'actively trying to programme these things, not just in Black History Month, but all year round'. With the help of Equal Access, contemporary country artist Angie K got her first chance to play the Opry last year. 'I was the first person from El Salvador to play that stage,' she says. 'I needed to be not just good – I have to be great, so great that they think, 'We need to do this again with another Latin artist.'' She had scoured Opry history for predecessors who are queer and Hispanic like she is. 'I'm very aware that there's not many. What I love about the Opry is there's still room to grow – they're making a very intentional effort to change.' On the show, she sang originals addressing women as romantic interests, and she was 'very grateful that a lot of people came up and said, 'I'm so happy that you said those pronouns.'' For his part, Stuart marvels at how the Opry always finds its way back to varied vitality after weathering all manner of growing pains: 'The thing that the history books tell me is that every institution goes through that from time to time'. The Opry expects decorum: there's no alcohol backstage, just tea and lemonade, and in keeping with Federal Communications Commission rules, no cursing on stage. But Rogers sometimes dispenses reassurance to first-time performers who assume they should be at their most traditionalist. 'That crowd out there is really full of all kinds of people, all walks of life,' he tells them. 'Bring what you do to this stage. We wouldn't have invited you to be on this stage if we weren't up for what you bring.' Grand Ole Opry: Live in London is at Royal Albert Hall, London, Friday 26 September
Mint
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Mint
Lollapalooza to Complex Con: Check your 2025 US music festival guide
This is the time to get ready, book your tickets, and block your weekends in your calendars for the impressive line-up of top music festivals which are set to take place in the US in 2025. It doesn't matter if you are a fan of indie, pop, metal, hip-hop, or house beats; the crazy lineups of upcoming music festivals in the country have something for everyone, with top artists coming out to perform this year. Here's a complete list of seven must-see music festivals that are going to be bold, bright, and full of life. Lollapalooza (Chicago, IL, August 1-4) Nothing matches the immersive experience of Lollapalooza when it comes to a large-scale and multi-genre music festival. The colourful event takes place in Grand Park, Lollapalooza. This year is set to have an electrifying lineup of artists including Tyler, The Creator, Luke Combs, Olivia Rodrigo, and more. Taking place over four days, Lollapalooza has a history of attracting music fans from around the globe who get to experience hip-hop, rock, and K-pop, all in one place. Tickets for the festival begin from $189 for a single day and $415 for four days. Outside Lands (San Francisco, CA, August 9-11) Gracing the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, Outside Lands is known for being a hub that offers a variety of music, food, and drinks all in one place. Plus, the natural beauty surrounding the venue will make you temporarily forget all your worries as you will groove to the beats of Tyler, the Creator, Doja Cat, Vampire Weekend, Doechii, and more. Ticket prices for the three-day event at Outside Lands begin from $529. Louder than life (Louisville, KY, Sep 26-29) The Louder Than Life music festival in Louisville is the best place to soak in unforgettable moments away from the daily stress of life. The four-day festival is set to bring the likes of Slayer, Deftones, Avenged Sevenfold, Rob Zombie, and more on stage. In line with other music events, the ticket prices for the Louder Than festival begin at $159 for a single day and $419 for the four-day event. Hard Summer (Inglewood, CA, August 3-4) Looking for some short fun? Well, if your boss isn't allowing a four-day leave, California residents can visit the Hard Summer music festival in Inglewood. Kaytranada, Fied, Dom Dolla, Juvenile, Sean Paul, and more will be making the visitors dance to their beats in a high-energy environment. Tickets for the Hard Summer start from $149 for a single day and $222 for the two-day event. Ohana Festival (Las Vegas, NV Oct 4-5) Ohana Festival offers another beautiful weekend of music where audiences get to enjoy musical beats in a chill, beachy vibe. The soulful environment near the Doheny Beach will be graced by Eddie Vedder, Green Day, Kings of Leon, Hozier, Leon Bridges, and more. Get the tickets for Ohana Festival beginning from $198 for one-day tickets and $530 for the three-day pass. Rise Festival (Boston, MA, May 23-25) The Rise Festival is more than just a simple event in the US. You will get to experience a spiritual desert experience featuring stars like Ben Böhmer, Calvin Harris, Disclosure, John Mayer, and more. Moreover, the best part of the night is the sky lanterns being released to symbolise hope. Tickets for Rise Festival begin at $189 per day. Complex Con (Las Vegas, October 25-26) Looking for something planned for youth? Complex Con in Las Vegas can be your destination, where the organisers include interactive elements like installations, brand exhibitions, and pop-up shops for an immersive experience. Not only will you get a closer look at the latest trends in music, but it is also an occasion to celebrate culture and art with Yeats and Friends, Peso Pluma, Central Cee, Young Thug, and more. Grab your tickets beginning from $150 for a one-day pass and $250 for a day pass. Since you know about the best Music festival lineup in the US for 2025, why are you waiting? Book your ticket, grab your wristband, and get ready for unforgettable nights with music. The top 10 music festivals in the US include Coachella, Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits, New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, Hard Summer, Outside Lands, Louder Than Life, and more. It is difficult to name one best festival in the US, but Mardi Gras in New Orleans has earned a name for its unique cultural experience. According to Amberstudent, the biggest music festival in the USA is Coachella, which takes place in Indio, California. It spans over two weeks in April. The top 5 biggest music festivals include Glastonbury (UK), Tomorrowland (Belgium), Coachella (USA), Rock in Rio (Brazil), and Fuji Rock Festival (Japan).
South Wales Argus
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- South Wales Argus
Country fans watch out - a day of foot-stomping fun is coming to city
Country Day Party is landing in Newport on Saturday, July 19, at Fire & Ice! Running from 3pm to 8pm. It promises five hours of feel-good energy, country bangers, and a buzzing crowd. There will be a mix of modern hits and timeless classics from the likes of Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs, Dolly Parton, and Shania Twain. Tickets are £17.50 or £15.50 each for groups of 10 or more and are available at The event is for over 18s and photo ID is required for entry. Tickets are non-refundable but can be resold or transferred.
Yahoo
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Bailey Zimmerman Announces Album ‘Different Night Same Rodeo'
Bailey Zimmerman had a special announcement during his Spotify House set Thursday night: His new album, Different Night Same Rodeo, drops Aug. 8. During the CMA Fest performance, the singer also debuted a new track from the project, 'Comin' in Cold.' 'For the last two years, I've been wokring really hard on my new album,' Zimmerman said, explaining that he pushed back his album after his mom got 'really sick' but that he was really glad he waited. 'This album is something different… Everybody around me feels like it's the album I'm supposed to put out.' More from Rolling Stone Riley Green, Shaboozey, Kelsea Ballerini Lead 2025 Spotify House Lineup at CMA Fest Morgan Wallen's New Album Is Already Spotify's Most-Streamed Country Album of 2025 Spotify to Add Over 50 Audiobooks About Albums, From Kendrick Lamar to Britney Spears and More Zimmerman also teased that there are two new collaborations on the record, including one with an artist 'not from country, from another space.' 'We cooked on this thing. Y'all are gonna love it, I know it. Just be waiting because you guys are gonna be mind-blown when you hear this song,' he said, before acknowledging 'Backup Plan' with his 'idol' Luke Combs. The singer shared the album cover — which sees him in a tank top and ripped jeans sitting on a truck bed — on his Instagram. 'Thank y'all for being patient while I made this album perfect,' he wrote. 'I HOPE THE WAIT IS WORTH IT.' A press release for Different Night Same Rodeo teased 'rock-powered country anthems' that are produced by his collaborator Austin Shawn. The LP will also feature his singles 'Backup Plan' with Combs, 'New to Country,' 'Hell or High Water,' and 'Holding On.' The record follows his debut Religiously. The Album, which dropped in May 2023. 'With this being my first album, it's like, 'Oh my gosh. This could be my Traveller,'' he told Rolling Stone at the time, referencing Chris Stapleton's breakthrough. 'I'm excited to see how I grow as a person. What am I going to discover about myself that I didn't know? What am I going to learn this year?' The musician is set to kick off his New to Country tour in Indianapolis on Friday, with shows in Arkansas, Florida, Northern California, and Nevada. Along with the new songs for his album, he also joined hip-hop act BigXThaPlug on 'All The Way' back in April. As for Spotify House, the streaming service will host performances from Brothers Osborne, Kelsea Ballerini, Dasha, Rascal Flatts, Lainey Wilson, Shaboozey, Carly Pearce and more throughout the weekend. Zimmerman's performance came after Sam Barber and Gavin Adcock took the stage in celebration of the streaming service's Hot Country playlist, which turns 10 years old. Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
