Fresh off their ACM Award win for Vocal Group of the Year, Old Dominion announces they are extending their Happy Endings Tour, adding more dates to an already busy 2018, due to fan demand.
“We’re on track to play about 200 shows a year,” lead singer Matt Ramsey tells Billboard. “The story of this band is based around two things — songwriting and touring. We really didn’t know how to do anything else other than write songs and play them, so we just kept doing that as much as we can.”
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The five-man group still tour together on one bus, finding a way to make the most of their time on the road.
“We write and record a lot on the bus,” says Ramsey. “The overdubs and background vocals we did on our [Happy Endings] album were mostly recorded in dressing rooms and in hotel rooms — we do a lot of work on the road.”
Old Dominion’s current single, “Written in the Sand,” their fourth No. 1 hit, was written by Ramsey, along with band members Trevor Rosen and Brad Tursi, and producer Shane McAnally, and part of a planned writing session. But their previous hit, Ramsey says was just the result of having a good time on the bus.
“For ‘Written in the Sand,’ I brought that to the guys with the idea being a song about how most people have to define their relationship at some point, and we built the song around that premise,” Ramsey recalls. “But for something like, ‘No Such Thing as a Broken Heart,’ we really had no idea what we were doing that day, just writing and jamming on the back of the bus when I blurted out the first line of the song ‘I wonder if Jack and Diane ever made it.”
Old Dominion will continue to headline their own Happy Endings Tour this summer, and also join Kenny Chesney on his Trip Around the Sun Tour, making it one of the busiest – and most fulfilling – times of their career.
“I think we always sort of have a fire under us,” Ramsey says. “We’ve had a fire lit under us to prove that we could do something like this. And now that we’ve got it, and we’re looking at a big tour this summer, we’re looking at a big headline tour in the fall. Yes, we are not a bar band anymore, and we now know that. We have to step up a little bit. So that’s something that excites us as a band, as musicians, and as performers, and as songwriters, all that stuff. We welcome that fire.”
Dates for all of Old Dominion’s upcoming shows can be found on their website.
Photo Credit: Instagram/olddominionmusic
