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Chris Young is scheduled to have a busy year and it’s to no surprise since he finished 2013 off strong with the release of his fourth studio album “A.M.” which debuted at No. 3 on Billboard’s Top 200 chart, marking his highest charting album ever.

Young spent much of 2013 out on the road redefining what it means to be a supporting act both on and off stage — being named one of the summer’s top tour openers by Entertainment Weekly. When he was not performing his set during the Brad Paisley’s “Beat this Summer Tour,” one could catch the 28-year-old country singer out of Murfreesboro, Tenn. signing autographs, taking pictures at his meet-and-greet or giving the tour support massages (which ultimately probably lead Paisley to keep Young on the tour for the for the final leg of the tour which was renamed the “Beat this Winter Tour”).

“I thought it was pretty cool for Brad to let us stay out with them,” said Young “because sometimes when people extend the tour they don’t necessarily bring the same people out.”

Booked through the first half of the year, Young will join George Strait’s “Cowboy Rides Away tour” for a weekend in April once he is done touring with Paisley in Europe. “As soon as we are done with that we have a few shows on our own before heading out with Dierks Bentley this summer,” he said.

Extensive touring is no stranger for the 2006 winner of TV reality show “Nashville Star.” During Young’s time in college, he was “still playing 100-150 shows a year on his own,” he said, as he recalls falling a sleep in class due to the long nights of putting the band together and playing acoustic sets.

“I remember being in a 12-passenger van and loading all our gear in the back, while we all took turns driving to gigs. The fact that I’m out here with multiple buses and a truck, and people are walking up taking photos in in front of our tractor trailer — that’s just pretty wild.”

Dating back to the release of his self-titled debut album under RCA records, Young states that he learned early it was important to have the ability to write your own songs. “You never have to search for the song that does what you want it to say if you write it yourself,” he said.

On “A.M.” Young co-wrote six of the album’s 11 songs, including the project’s lead single “Aw Naw,” which is certified gold. Under his belt he has a “CMA Triple Play Award” — an award that recognizes songwriters who have written three number-one songs within a 12-month period — for “Tomorrow,” “You” and “Voices.” Out of his past five top consecutive country radio records he has helping out with the writing on four of them.

“When people put in the CD they want to listen to the whole thing. If they download it to their iPod I want them to have it on repeat for weeks,” said Young.

As the country music brand continues become more diverse and grow overseas, one can expect one of the genre’s rising artist to help front-run the movement.

Country music is just life and everyday stuff, says Young. “Yeah we have some sad songs in there and some songs talk about serious stuff, but beyond that, if you come out to a show you are going to hear big party songs, love songs and a whole variety of stuff.

“I think that’s what makes country music great, it touches everything.”

By OBK

Prior to assembling what is now Walk off the Earth and obtaining more than 150 million views on Youtube for a cover to Goyte’s “Somebody That I Used to Know,” Ryan Marshall was just another student in college who played music as an hobby.

“It was never really a switch,” said Marshall. “You use your education to get a job and pay the bills so that you could do music as a hobby. We were lucky enough to reach a point that our hobby could become our main form of income.”

During Marshall’s “eight years to get a two year degree” in Economics at the University of Guelph, he spent time performing and playing shows with a band called PinkBelly throughout the Guelph area. While the band eventually separated, he and the group’s drummer, Gianni Luminati, built up a bond and continued to work together.

“We’ve been together since 2006 — Gianni and I — he’s like my brother,” said Marshall. “We spent so much time together in the studio, and writing songs together and building Walk off the Earth.”

While Luminati was working as an sound engineer in the Burlington, Ontario area, he and Marshall begin recruiting talent for Walk off the Earth, eventually leading to the reconstruction of three other bands.

Walk off the Earth: Marshall, Luminati, Sara Blackwood, Joell Cassidy and Mike “The Beard” Taylor are all multi-instrumentalist who combined efforts in 2006. They spent time touring the regional area, until it finally clicked that the group could be so much bigger if they decided to try something new.

“We got to a point early in our career that we realized that we didn’t want to be touring across Canada — which is this massive country — in a small van with a trailer,” said Marshall. “We did a couple of Warped Tours, and those things and thought ‘we got to find a different way to get to people because no one is going to help us do it. We got to do it ourselves.’”

This is when the band thought it would be good idea to try viral route said Marshall, who remembers putting out a few videos and getting more than 10 thousand views in a month and thinking “holy crap, we never played for 10,000 people ever and we just hit 10,000 people across the world with one video.” While all members collaborate on the project idea, a big part of the creativity in them comes from Luminati.

“He [Luminati] has this brain that just creates wild things — that grabs people’s attention in the videos,” said Marshall. “He will bring an idea to me and Sara about a video and we will kind of add things to it.

“It’s almost like, let’s think of something impossible and bring it in.”

The group begin building a fan base thanks to their wacky, yet innovating covers of popular songs.

Walk off the Earth gained their most views and exposure in early 2012 thanks to their cover of Goyte’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.” The video shows all five members playing on one guitar, and gathered over 127 million views in four months.

The group also received positive responses from both Gotye and his co-singer on the record, Kimbra. They went on to use the song on their album “R.E.V.O.,” their third studio album, and first on a major record label.

The full length also contained nine original tracks, including a song titled “Sometimes” which was based off something that Marshall had came up with in 2005.

“It was cool for me and Gianni because we had a demo from four years ago and it was finally coming to life.”

As “R.E.V.O.” goes into it’s one year anniversary, the group is gearing up for their sophomore major label album. As they near the end of the recording process, they would like for it to come out early 2015 and love for it to come out late 2014.

In the mean time fans can catch Walk off the Earth breaking instruments at their “Gang of Rhythm Tour,” live or through the group’s Vlogs.

“It’s pretty fun. We did a European show last year with the same type of crowds,” said Marshall who admits the group breaks one-to-two ukuleles a week.

“When you’re in it (the show), you don’t really feel how epic it is until you go back and watch the videos,” said Marshall. It’s cool because you get to see the fans flipping out. When you’re on stage, you’re thinking where do I got to be for the next song and got to make sure I duck so I don’t get hit by that guitar flying across stage.

“You don’t always see the reaction of the fans is what I’m trying to say, so it’s good to be able to watch videos like that because it gives you that much more reason to want to get back on stage the next day and kick butt.”

By OBK

Have you turned on your TV lately and thought something was wrong with your antenna — thought maybe you went to sleep and woke up in the early 1900’s — because everything was in black and white?

Have no fear, you were probably just watching a music video by breakout rock group The Neighbourhood.

Don’t let their name fool you, The Neighbourhood is not a band out of the U.K. In fact, the band who plans to be the biggest group of all time reigns from the West Coast. California to be exact.

Members Mikey Margott, Jeremy Freedman and Zach Abels were best friends growing up and started a hardcore punk band in high school. Through that they met Jesse Rutherford in his band — became best friends and never looked backed on anything else.

“I personally couldn’t do college,” said Abels, one-of-the-band’s-two guitarists. “That whole thing doesn’t make sense to me. I’d rather work my ass off in something else that I was interested in.”

The Neighbourhood sound mixes your traditional alternative rock sounds with a genre that has not even been created yet. When the guitarist biggest influences are Metallica, the Beatles and failure, and the the lead singer comes from a background that has a big influence on the production and even how he writes his melodies, the group as a whole is set to stick out.

The group has built a platform around the colors black and white, which has become their vision and everything that represents them.

“We make decisions based off of the world we live in which is black and white. So when anyone wants to work with us in anyway they have to have respect with our vision for it to work out,” said Abels. “We selected black and white because it felt right with everything we wanted to do, like the vibe of our music to our artwork. It just made sense to us doing it that way.”

The group broke out into the spotlight in 2013 following the release of their single “Sweater Weather,” which reached the top of the Alternative chart and stayed there for 11 non-consecutive weeks.

While the group is extremely grateful of the success that they have attained, they are not satisfied with their progress and still feels as if they have so much more to prove. Not only to themselves but to everyone who has supported them thus far. “ We’re always thinking what’s next and we won’t stop until we get to the level that we want to be at,” stated Abels.

The Neighbourhood continues to push the boundaries and has no problem being different. In their “Afraid” video, the band aimed to make everyone watching it feel vulnerable.

“Our way of doing it was to literally have someone naked in the video and make the audience feel uncomfortable and be as raw and real as possible with them. And yes I do think it conveyed the message that we were trying to say,” said Abels.

The group made multiple stops in Central Florida in 2013, touring in support of Imagine Dragons and performing in the first ever Coastline Festival presented by Live Nation.

“It was really fun! Our set time was right when the sun was setting so it set a really cool vibe for our performance and the crowd was ridiculously good,” Abels recalls.

Like many of the bands on the Coastline bill, The Neighbourhood had a pretty amazing year as breakthrough artist. With a new year just underway, the sky’s the limit for the Hoodlum’s commanders.

“All I can say is that we’re going to keep moving forward and pushing boundaries as much as possible and we’ll see what comes from it.”

By OBK