Following their Country-Fest appearance " Hal Ketchum with guitar Legend Johnny Hiland" will be doing an 18 date UK Ireland tour in May 2011.
Contact our office for date availability.
What happens when the greatest guitar player in the world and one of the most respected Voices in Country Music Team up? Everything you can imagine and more. Hal Ketchum and Johnny Hiland together on one stage is pure magic. Ketchum the veteran superstar country music legend, is singing better than ever and with Johnny Hilands Band behind him its an incredible Journey through Hals vast catalog of hit songs and Johnnys ability to raise the bar every show musically.
One of the hottest tickets touring is the Runnin & Gunnin' Tour of Hal Ketchum & Johnny Hiland don't miss it."
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Hal Ketchum's Father Time is the ninth album in a distinguished musical career that includes such indelible Top 10 hits as "Small Town Saturday Night," "Past The Point of Rescue," "Hearts Are Gonna Roll" and "Stay Forever." It may well be his masterpiece. On the 14-song tour de force, the man hailed as "the most exquisite voice in country music" (USA Today) and "one hell of a storyteller" (the9513.com) who "couldn't write a bad song if he tried" (All Music Guide) delivers one hell of an exquisite album that plays from first track to last like the work of a lifetime. It's a musically and lyrically opulent and vibrant opus that is both immediate and timeless.
Father Time was created in two magical days of recording direct to two tracks with a crew of some of Nashville's most virtuosic players and backup singers. It was both arranged and mixed as the music was made, with no overdubs. Like the gems from Sun Studio or Bradley's Barn that still sound as fresh and compelling as the day they were cut, Ketchum recorded Father Time without a net, relying on the strength of his finest collection of songs yet and an almost psychic unity between singer and musicians, capturing lightning in a bottle often on the very first or second take.
The songs on Father Time include some of Ketchum's most recent compositions - many of them road-tested before audiences at his live shows - as well as the first song he ever wrote ("The Preacher and Me") and even one number ("Surrounded By Love") written on a lunch break on the first day of recording, along with some of his favorite collaborations with fellow songwriters that had yet to be recorded. As the title implies, the songs focus on life's essential matters, with characters that resonate with the believability of real people living (and dying). In "Yesterday's Gone," "Surrounded By Love" and "The Day He Called Your Name" family members face mortality with an enriching love and sweetness, and there are cinematic tales about everyday people ("Invisible" and "Ordinary Day") as well as the vividly unique characters that make life a rich pageant ("Millionaire's Wife," "Million Dollar Baby" and "Continental Farewell").
From the Central Texas climes where Ketchum began his career as an artist ("Down Along the Guadalupe") to the battlefields of the Civil War ("Sparrow") to the fertile realms of Ketchum's imagination ("Strangest Dreams"), Father Time transports listeners to those places that only the most artful and compelling songwriting can evoke. And its one cover, Tom Waits' "Jersey Girl," stands head and shoulders with the versions by both its composer and the esteemed artist who also covered it, Bruce Springsteen. And all of the album's stories and emotions unfold within one of the most musically inviting and satisfying recordings in recent memory.
Father Time is the album that Hal Ketchum's talents have promised ever since he burst onto the country music scene in 1991, hitting #1 with his very first single, "Small Town Saturday Night." His almost instant arrival as a distinctive artistic presence reflected a lifetime already immersed in music.
Reared in the village of Greenwich in the gorgeously verdant countryside of upstate New York, Ketchum hails from a family where singing and playing music was part of the daily (and nightly) diet for generations. He was exposed to country music (his father was a fan) as well as the symphonic classics and, one year, even the Newport Jazz Festival at the nearby Saratoga Performing Arts Center.
"It was just a natural thing to be intrigued with music," explains Ketchum, who started playing drums at age nine and by 14 was gigging at local bars and taverns. Anyone looking for a reason why "Small Town Saturday Night" immediately struck a chord with music lovers - and the roots of Ketchum's innate knack for connecting with an audience in live performance - can find the origins in his years of making music for regular people seeking to transcend the everyday on weekend nights.
"It was a great lesson in sociology because the bars would move the pool table over in the corner and put a three-quarter-inch piece of plywood on top, and that would be my drum riser. At 15 years old I'd get to sit up in the corner of these joints and just watch the evening progress. Friday night everybody would get paid from one of the local pulp mills, and they would wander in and be very generous during the first set. Then by halfway through the second set they're dancing with one of the girls. And by the third set they're fighting. I learned never to stop playing during a fight. That was an important part of my education." So it's no wonder that the scene depicted in his very first hit "is tattooed onto my soul."
Ketchum eventually traded one of his two drum kits for a five-string banjo and then traded another banjo for a Martin acoustic guitar, forming a duo with his singing and guitar-playing brother to also entertain at local nightspots. A move to Texas landed him in a house on the edge of New Braunfels in the very heart of the Lone Star State, just a stone's throw from historic Gruene Hall, an old dancehall that is the virtual mother church of the Texas music scene where talents like George Strait, Lyle Lovett, Robert Earl Keen and many others began their rise to fame.
"The house was a fixer-upper, and I had just dried it in and put windows in, and I was moving in one Saturday night and heard music playing from up on the hill," Ketchum recalls. "I had come in from the San Antonio side and didn't even know Gruene Hall existed. I got in my truck and rolled the windows down and just followed this sound. I crossed the Guadalupe River and came up the hill and to the right, and there was Gruene Hall on a Saturday night in all its glory, with Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel playing for 600 drunken stomps and their dates. I was like, what the hell is this? It was like a movie."
He began spending every Sunday afternoon drinking beer and playing horseshoes with the locals at the dancehall, and "listening to Townes Van Zandt or Lyle Lovett staring at his boots playing to nine people or Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore with this guy named Spider on the musical saw," remembers Ketchum. "It was my songwriter school." With the encouragement of Lovett and Gilmore, he honed his craft as a writer, singer and performer and eventually landed the coveted Sunday afternoon slot at Gruene Hall. He then put together a band to propel his story songs with danceable rhythms and rose to become an opener and later headliner at Gruene and other Central Texas venues.
An album he recorded on his own dime and released on a small Austin indie label, Threadbare Alibis, caught the ear of Curb Records, which signed Ketchum and brought him to Nashville to record his major label debut, Past the Point of Rescue. "The label dropped 'Small Town . . .' in early 1991 as the first single. And it went to #1 on August 16th of that year. And suddenly I was a genuine hillbilly singer," he says with a chuckle. His success prompted Curb to shift its base of operations from Los Angeles to Nashville, and CEO and owner Mike Curb refers to Hal as the label's "cornerstone artist."
Since then Ketchum has distinguished himself as a hitmaker with 15 Top 10 singles and five million albums sold as well as a true singing and songwriting artist with a capital 'A' and one of the most engaging performers on the American live music circuit, also winning a devoted following in Great Britain - a natural outgrowth of his Celtic family and musical roots. He has forged his own singular presence in popular music thanks to such qualities as his vibrant talent and creativity, artistic integrity and natural soulfulness.
He has been a member of the Grand Ole Opry since 1994 and often hosts the "Opry Live" show on GAC. In addition to being a master woodworker - which is how he made his living before music - Ketchum is also an accomplished painter who sold out his first show at the distinguished Penna Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He lives outside of Nashville with his wife Gina and their three daughters Rosie, Ruby (who sings with him on the Opry) and Sophia. And Ketchum is likely the only artist in popular music with a tomahawk target field behind the house where he unwinds with a friendly game of "throwing hawks" that reflects the Native American strains in his family background.
The recording of Father Time as a live, direct-to-tape album originated from a conversation he had with some fellow musicians about how artists and players have lost some of the feeling of creative community in this high-tech era of recording apart from one another in separate rooms and booths. "By the end of that conversation, I said, okay, I'm going to cut live to two-track. I went home that afternoon and got a yellow pad and put together a wish list of players. And almost everyone I called was available for the two days I had blocked out."
Ketchum and five other stringed instrument players "circled the wagons" as he calls it, and set up in the main studio room together, with two drummer/percussionists in an isolation booth and background singers in another. He would run through a song and then they would cut it, with the arrangements and the mix coming literally on the fly as the music unfolded. The first three tracks on Father Time are all first takes, and by the end of day one Ketchum had nine completed tracks. The entire album is sequenced in the order in which it was recorded.
"When I went into this project my mentality was that this is either going to work or not," he explains. "As we listened back to the first track, I got this glorious feeling. I was like, wow, I don't know what this is but I really like it."
"I felt like it was time to make a record like the first one I made where I wrote everything on the record," says Ketchum. "I had the good fortune of having some hit records and developing a strong following as a live performer. But it was important that at some point over all my years of making records that people got to see the essence of my songwriting and my voice as a singer and writer."
"It is a coming of age," he says of Father Time. "This is what I do. I do have a desire to be remembered as an artist, and whether somebody discovers this record today or 25 or 30 years from now, that's fine by me. But when they do get there, I want them to listen to this album and go, yeah, I understand. The motivation here to leave a little trail all my own."
Ultimately, Ketchum is "thrilled" by what he has achieved on Father Time. And listeners will also feel that thrill as they listen, as well as being impressed and touched and having their lives enhanced by the songs and stories within and the music that accompanies them with a stunning beauty, power and emotional depth. Because with Father Time Hal Ketchum has made an album for the ages.
"I think Johnny Hiland is the most versatile guitar player I've ever heard. From Bill Monroe to Eddie Van Halen, he can play it all." - RICKY SKAGGS
If you tried, you couldn't make up a story this good: legally blind kid grows up in a trailer home in rural Maine. A guitar prodigy, he tours with the family band starting at age 8, wins local and regional competitions, moves to Nashville, ends up dropping jaws all over town, doing sessions with Ricky Skaggs, Toby Keith, Randy Travis, Janie Fricke and many more, and gets signed by Steve Vai when his manager leaves a demo snippet on Steve's voicemail box.
But indeed, this is true the story of Johnny Hiland, who made his solo debut on August 10 2004 with his self-titled album on Vai's Favored Nations label.
FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS A LEGEND IS BORN.
Hiland, who was born with nystagmus, a condition of involuntary eye movement, grew up in Woodland, Maine and was known as the "blind boy."
According to Johnny, "my Dad was determined to not hold me back from anything I wanted to do. Dad had been a dirt bike racer when he was younger, so I had all kinds of bicycles and snowmobiles and a little Suzuki JR50 that I rode.
My mom was worried sick, but Dad would say, 'Look, just don't kill yourself. And those kids who say you'll never drive a truck?... Baloney! We live on a woods road; we've got a '78 SuperCab, so let's get in and go for a ride.' And he let me drive. I had a ball, but Mom just about had a fit."
She was more supportive of Johnny's fascination with music. Talent ran in the family, but it ran away with Johnny. From the start he felt a ferocious devotion to his instrument, often practicing on it for long hours into the night before being ordered into bed. By the time he was eight years old he was playing well enough to join the Three Js, his family's band.
Under the auspices of the Down East Country Music Association, a regional group dedicated to promoting bluegrass and traditional American music, they began going on tours throughout New England, sometimes playing out of town every weekend of any given month. It didn't take long for the group, and especially its prodigious guitarist, to kindle interest.
"There was a year when I won DECMA's Instrumentalist of the Year for guitar, banjo, mandolin, and fiddle," Johnny says. "Then my sister and brothers and I won Entertainers of the Year. I won Male Vocalist of the Year, my sister won Female Vocalist of the Year ... We cleaned house. Then we got a plaque for Family of the Year; Mom and Dad were like, 'Goodness gracious, we get an award too? All right!'"
Two years after joining the Three Js Johnny made his first national splash by winning the Talent America contest, for which he was awarded a performance in New York City.
Around that same time his parents took him to hear a Ricky Skaggs concert in Bangor; the experience stimulated him to start exploring beyond bluegrass into mainstream country music.
His curiosity whetted, his technique sharpening, Johnny stretched his horizons in high school and started listening to an ever widening range of players: Doc Watson, Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, Eddie Van Halen...
Yet even with all this attention his parents made sure to keep him from being swept away by too much adulation coming too quickly. He learned to be prudent with the money he earned through music, budgeting to pay for his own new strings and supplies.
He kept up his grades in school, which led to his election as president of its National Honour Society during his senior year and eventually to his admission as a history major at the University of Southern Maine.
"Was I going to make something of my life?..."
It took a while for Johnny to realize what should have been obvious from the get-go: Though his head had no trouble digesting the academics, his heart was somewhere else -- specifically, wherever the nearest guitar happened to be.
"For me, going to college was nothing but practicing the guitar," he states. "Ever since I was seven years old I'd been saying that I wanted to go to Nashville and play on the Grand Ole Opry someday.
but my mom and dad always insisted that I have something to fall back on. So I really went only to please my mom and dad."
Fate intruded after a few years, as the cassette versions of his textbooks failed to arrive in the mail until just a week before finals. Racing the clock, Johnny had been squinting at normal textbooks until the eyestrain triggered migraines.
He worked as long as he could on a huge term paper. Then he reached a point where he couldn't do anymore; his guitars, stored in their hard-shell cases under his bed, seemed to be calling him away from the computer.
That's when Johnny knew that things had to change. Drawing a deep breath, he stopped his work, erased the whole project, picked up his axe, and started to play.
"That was my defining moment," he says. "I love my mom and dad so much, but I had to ask whether this was about them or about me. Was I going to be Mr. Blind Boy, relying on his parents, or stand on my own two feet and make something of my life?"
The next morning he gave notice to the school. Chuck McGinty, his outreach counsellor from the state, tried to dissuade him; Johnny invited him back to his room, played for him, and within minutes McGinty was on the phone to Johnny's parents, announcing that he was fronting the money to buy their son his ticket out of town.
Flying to Orlando, Johnny hooked up with a friend and former band mate. Together they drove up to Nashville, determined to chase their dreams.
On his first night Johnny made his way to Lower Broadway, where a cluster of honky-tonks booked some of the hottest players in town. Wandering into the World-Famous Turf, he was told he'd have to wait until midnight to sit in with the band.
Johnny sat patiently, and then took to the stage. It took only a few seconds for the bartender to pick up the phone and start spreading the word that a tornado, with a Telecaster in his hands, had just blown into town.
It was 1996, the beginning of Johnny's residency at the World-Famous Turf. When an actual tornado flattened the Turf in '98, he transferred to Robert's Western Wear with Don Kelly's band.
Roberts Western Wear, where his friendly demeanour and sizzling licks dazzled listeners and sent guitarists running for cover.
Calls started to come in for session work.
He played, as he had always known he would, at the Ryman Auditorium, home of the Opry, with Gary Chapman.
Through his former manager Mac Wilson he scored an opportunity to play for Bruce Boland, vice president of Fender Musical Instruments; a few days later he was invited to become the first unsigned artist to receive a full endorsement deal from the company.
He was making big waves on music row as well...
"I was ready to start absolutely new..."
The last piece in this puzzle would be Johnny's first album -- but unlike the other successes in his life, Johnny Hiland took a while, thanks to the two complex, sometimes frustrating, and ultimately uplifting relationships that became the albums foundation.
The first was with Steve Vai, one of Johnny's guitar idols.
Former manager Wilson impulsively left an excerpt from one of Johnny's rough studio tapes on Vai's voicemail; almost immediately Vai called back with an offer to sign with his Favoured Nations label. That didn't take long, but the two years that followed exposed Johnny to a different pace, one that involved working on his song writing, sending ideas back to Vai and getting feedback that was consistently positive yet kept pushing Johnny further toward finding a writing style that was as personal as his playing had been for years.
"Steve is the greatest rock guitarist," Johnny says, "so I listened to everything he said. But I started to get impatient. For two solid years I kept waiting to hear him say, 'Hey, great song, kid!' I hit the studio day after day, trying to find that voice he was looking for."
Then one day, he got it. "'Truth Hurts' turned the corner," he says. "I'd always written these country kickers or Satriani rock stuff. But this one was a ballad. I had eight bars of a cool melody. I'd written the chord arrangement. I thought about every detail as I was putting it together in the studio. And once Steve heard it and said 'that's it,' I knew I had thrown the old basketball away -- I'd flattened it, put my foot through it -- and gotten a whole new ball rolling. My attitude changed too. I knew that everything I had done to get to this point was in the past; I was ready to start absolutely new, with all I'd learned."
That's when the second critical relationship behind Johnny Hiland came into the picture.
One night Peter Collins, whose production credits include Rush, Bon Jovi, the Indigo Girls, Queensryche, Jewel, and LeAnn Rimes, wandered into Robert's, heard Johnny tear it up, and made it known at once that he wanted to produce the young guitarist's debut.
Their collaboration would be volatile -- "I fought him tooth and nail sometimes," Johnny admits -- but more often it was a matter of each finding inspiration from the other. "I love Peter like I love my own dad," he says. "He's brilliant, larger than life. Once we got to know each other the sessions were like clockwork."
It took a killer band to keep up with Hiland's energy and ideas, which explains the presence of Billy Sheehan, the "Eddie Van Halen" of the bass, Bill Holloman, who played keys and sax behind Hiland's main guitar hero, the late Danny Gatton, and drummer Pat Torpey from Mr. Big.
This is a line-up that can keep up with Hiland's light-speed picking on "G-Wiz," "Swingin' Strings," and "Celtic Country." It can move with him through Western swing, screaming, razor-toned rock, and introspective ballads, and illuminate his soaring melodies on ballads like "Song for Helen" and "Truth Hurts" with sensitive empathy.
In other words, Johnny Hiland achieved something few new artists achieve in their first outing: a blend of taste and flash, in which emotional, solid composition and hair-raising performance compliment rather than compete with each other.
Life for Hiland is, in a sense, like the accelerando he unleashes in his cover of "Orange Blossom Special."
He's playing bigger sessions than ever; look for him on great CD's by Randy Travis, Toby Keith, Ricky Skaggs, Lynn Anderson, Janie Fricke, Rebecca Lynn Howard, Hank III and other headliners.
He's appearing on two tribute albums, to Phish and Dave Matthews. He's shared the stage with Living Colour's Vernon Reid and funk master George Clinton
Vai, Satriani, and Yngwie Malmsteen on their G3 tour, each time more than holding his own. Nobody wants to follow johnny onstage, this has become a common phrase heard backstage at such events...
He's cut "Blues Newburg" and "Red Label," two devilishly difficult Danny Gatton songs, both of which he learned note-for-note in eight hours; each version is available for download through Line 6. www.line6.com
He has now released his self produced CD "LOUD & PROUD" on OIE Records. available online at www.oierecords.com Loud and Proud features a song that brought together some of Johnny's heroes. "Chicken Pickin' Heroes" has Ricky Skaggs on Acoustic, Steve Wariner playing his incredible solo's and Vince Gill laying down the law as well.
Johnny never dreamed he would be playing with his heroes. He has garnered acclaim from every magazine in the music business and from his peers.
The Nashville Predators hockey games now feature the team theme song, "Stick It To 'Em Boys," written and performed by Hiland.
He's even scored and played on the soundtrack for a proposed cartoon show, based -- not coincidentally -- on the adventures of a country band at Robert's Western Wear.
Kids figure in Johnny's ambitions beyond music; a talented amateur artist, he's putting a coloring book together designed to give hope to disabled children.
In spring of 2009 Johnny signed on with new manager, Micheal "Bear" Clair's Nashville Ninja Management Company. With new management came a return to his roots, hardcore Traditional Country with an edge.
Combine that with his incredible Chicken Pickin' prowess and his powerful tenor voice and you have a surefire recipe for success.
In 2010 Johnny made the switch to ERNIE BALL MUSIC MAN Guitars. He joins a roster of the greatest guitar players on the planet who reside with Sterling Ball at Music Man. He was welcomed as part of the Music Man family in January 2010... Not bad company to keep.
For a legally blind kid from Maine the dream has come true...
So, it's true that you could never make up a story as good as Johnny Hiland's - nobody would believe you. And perhaps, more important, you could never make up a person as kind, warm-hearted, determined and talented as Johnny Hiland.
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