It has been 15 years since the release of Josh Turner‘s break-out album – Your Man. Here, we interview Josh Turner about what the record has meant to him in his career and his excitement to introduce the record to a brand-new fanbase.
Hi Josh, how are you doing?
I’m good how are you?
Very well thank you – this is a big week for you. 15 years since the release of Your Man – does it feel like it’s been 15 years?
In some ways, in other ways it feels like it was just yesterday, there’s been a lot of water under the bridge with this record. This year marks the 50th anniversary and there had been some talk – probably a year or two ago – about maybe releasing this record on vinyl for the 15th anniversary, but the label decided to just go with a full blown re-release and do a lot of press and a lot of different fun things surrounding it, so that’s what we did.
It was such a special project and really did change the game in terms of your career and the country music landscape generally, so how special has it been to revisit all these tracks? I know a lot of them you will revisit in your live sets, but there will be a lot which you don’t revisit as much as you’d maybe like to?
Yeah, you know I play ‘Your Man,’ ‘Me and God’ and ‘Would You Go With Me’ every night, but to be able to revisit all of the album cuts from this record is not only good for me, but I think it’s good for that new generation of fans that have grown up literally just with single songs or streaming – they don’t associate those three songs with a full album. I really want to target that audience, so that’s kind of my target with this and I went back and rewrote the liner notes to kind of tell the history of this record and all of the cool things that have happened since it came out. It’s been a fun project to be a part of.
Talking about that kind of new fan base. I know that ‘Would You Go With Me’ has had this huge surge on TikTok – did that take you by surprise and how fun has that been to tap into that newer, younger fan base?
Yeah, and that kind of speaks to my point – TikTok is great and we’ve kind of taken off with that track. There’s so much social media, where it’s just a few seconds, and most people can’t focus on something longer than a few – that’s what I’m trying to tap into, spending time with the record and understanding where ‘Would You Go With Me’ came from. It’s something that a lot of the younger fans miss out on because they’re so focused on singles and their phones.
There’s kind of a movement back in some ways towards the record over the past year and people have kind of wanted to fall in love with a longer project? When you went in to create Your Man initially, obviously it was your sophomore record, did you have an idea in mind of what you wanted to achieve with this record after the success of Long Black Train?
Well, the success of Long Black Train paved the way for Your Man, because when I first got my deal and was making the first record, I heard a lot of talk about the industry and the sophomore curse – basically, a lot of people do come and make a first record, but not many artists get the second record. So, I didn’t want to be subject to that, I didn’t want to fall prey to that. I really worked hard at my first record to make sure it was successful and it was, it achieved platinum status and really allowed me to go back in and make another record. By that point, I knew my way around the studio better, I was more confident, I had a little bit of success under my belt and had achieved some credibility. With the Your Man record, I realised that I had an opportunity to not only build upon the success of Long Black Train, but also show some versatility and show that I wasn’t just a one dimensional artist, I have more songs than just Long Black Train and that’s really the impetus and why Your Man was totally different. It was kind of a sexy love song, but it was still straight up country music and it really might have made a mark and quite an impact on the listeners.
Your sound is so varied but so rooted in the history of country music. Obviously, you did collaborate with a whole load of country icons on this record, what does it mean still to you having those people on that record? I know that’s something that’s important to you throughout your career, collaborating with people?
Yeah, you know, I’ve always considered myself an ambassador for country music. There’s so many people that’ll make the comment, ‘well, I’m not really a country music fan.’ I’m like, well, you haven’t listened enough, country music is so varied and so diverse that if you live long enough, you’re going to find some type of country music that you like, because there’s so many different kinds of music within the country genre. It always irks me when somebody says, ‘I’m not really a country fan.’
I always look at it as a priority – I need to try to introduce these people to people like John Anderson. So it’s always that part of it and then the other part of it is I just want to honour and respect those artists that have gone before me.
Going back again to your experience of revisiting the record, were there any kinds of tracks that you are excited for people to get a bit more focused on again that you particularly wish had had the attention that didn’t back in the day?
Yeah, you know, it was a fun record. There’s a lot of little pieces of information that people don’t realise – John Anderson played with me on ‘White Noise,’ but the second track on the record, ‘Baby Going Home to Mama’ was actually a John Anderson song first, so I actually covered that song. Another piece of interesting country music trivia is that ‘Lord Have Mercy On a Country Boy’ was originally a Don Williams song, I think it was his last number one. That was one of the times that I was paying homage to one of my heroes, but there’s just a lot of different things like that where the fans that might not be familiar with the record, can hear some of that stuff and be like, ‘Oh, man, I need to dig into that.’
That’s the fun part when you listen to an album and want to explore more. Obviously, you’ve got the release event this week and you’ve included a load of live tracks on this record, which is just so nice to be able to hear live versions again. How exciting is it to be able to finally play music live again?
It’s a breath of fresh air to be able to get back out there, from my perspective just to be on the stage and just to be able to connect with an audience. From the audience’s perspective, you know, looking back throughout my career, one thing that I’ve realised is that I’ve actually brought people together in a very special way – they’ve become friends, because they both went to one of my shows, and they didn’t know each other prior to that, and they met each other at my show, and they’ve become friends. Relationships start where a guy meets the girl at one of my shows and they get married. It’s that kind of bringing people together in a special way that we kind of missed out on over the last year.
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more – music really does connect people. So while we’ve been able to release music in the past year, it’s nice to finally be able to sort of see it in the live format. I hope this week goes well. Thank you so much, Josh for taking time to chat today.
My pleasure. Thank you.
