Like so many music acts, Old Dominion found their world turned upside down when the pandemic hit and touring was shut down. 

“It just became, every decision and every meeting, it’s tough to connect over Zoom and conference calls, and we just lost that connection,” lead singer/guitarist Matthew Ramsey said in a phone interview. “A lot of those decisions (normally) tend to be made out on the road over a cup of coffee or something, without making it a big deal, just throughout our conversations. And it just became harder and harder to connect. We weren’t getting to do what we love with each other, and it was just a lot of talk and no fun and no creativity.”

The good times are back for Ramsey, guitarist/keyboardist Trevor Rosen, guitarist Brad Tursi, drummer Whit Sellers, and bassist Geoff Sprun. 

They have maintained a busy schedule of touring that will continue right into mid-December. Among that trek is a stop at Memorial Coliseum on Thursday, Nov. 16, with Chase Rice and Kylie Morgan.

Making label take notice

After the layoff, Ramsey said the good times are rolling again.  

“I feel like in a lot of ways we’ve sort of finally gotten our lives back a little bit” he said. “We genuinely love what we do, and the best way to connect with people is to just be authentic on stage and have a great time doing what we love. That tends to rub off on people.” 

Formed in 2007, Old Dominion included a trio of established country songwriters in Ramsey, Rosen, and Tursi.  

As time went on, the band showcased for a variety of Nashville record labels only to be turned down one after another as many of the labels viewed them as songwriters and not as a band that would generate hits of their own and be a compelling live act. 

Finally, RCA Records signed Old Dominion in 2015 but only after the band had independently released a self-titled EP that included the single “Break Up with Him,” which gained some airplay on Sirius XM.

It didn’t take long for Old Dominion to prove the early airplay was not a fluke. 

Shortly before the November 2015 release of the band’s RCA debut album Meat and Candy, “Break Up with Him” completed its run as the album’s lead single to the top of Billboard’s Country Airplay chart. 

Meat and Candy produced two more hit tracks, the chart-topping “Song for Another Time” and “Snapback,” which reached No 2.

The band’s next two albums added five more No. 1 singles to the catalog, including “Hotel Key” from 2017’s Happy Endings and “One Man Band” from 2019’s self-title album.

In all, they have seven No. 1 hits on the Country Airplay chart and 10 top-10 hits.

Along the way, Old Dominion began what is now a five-year string of winning Vocal Group of the Year at the ACM and CMA awards. 

Renewed creativity

Despite their success, there was a period during the pandemic when Old Dominion’s momentum stalled and life got difficult for the five band members.

The rebound that has followed began in September 2020, when they arrived at Echo Mountain Recording studio in Asheville, North Carolina. There, they created a bubble in which to safely be together and set out to rekindle the creative spark.

The musicians agreed to convene with no songs in hand, start writing, and see what happened. 

To their delight, Old Dominion emerged with 2021’s Time, Tequila & Therapy, whose songs mostly have an easy-going blend of pop and country and an upbeat lyrical personality that reflects the fun and creative rebirth that characterized the session.  

“I think it was probably a product of us being together in that little three-week bubble and enjoying what we were doing,” Ramsey said. “It was so much fun, and it was honestly a dream that we’d always had, to be able to go into a studio with no songs and what we wrote and recorded is what you get.”

The burst of creativity that began in Asheville has continued as they released Memory Lane last month.

With that release having given the band a Top 5-single with the title track, Old Dominion are back on the road, bringing out what Ramsey hopes will be a crowd-pleasing selection of songs and visual production that’s suited to the arenas the band is playing.

“We have a really good problem of too many songs. And we have, thankfully, a lot of hits that fill the set,” Ramsey said. “So, of course, we want those in there. And then we try to make space for new material and we have a few spots in our set where we try to make it interchangeable with some of the old material, too, because we want to honor our fans with that.”