Barbara

For a hugely popular, contemporary country music act—especially one with a fine, stately name—Old Dominion sure like to get weird.

That creative impulse goes all the way back to their 2015 debut album, Meat and Candy, which had a cover depicting a waitress presiding over a table covered in a smorgasbord of delicious candy and meat. As a young country act making its first steps into the spotlight, the cover art was oddly surreal. 

Now, in a career that has so far earned nine No. 1 country singles, comes Old Dominion’s sixth studio album, Barbara, out August 22 on Columbia Nashville/Sony Music Nashville. The cover introduces a new character and album namesake: a proudly aging grande dame of the beauty parlor, sitting beneath a hair dryer in a pink dress and costume jewelry, cat-eye sunglasses, a long cigarette burning between her fingers.

While a lot of country acts tend to display traditional portraits of themselves on albums, Old Dominion see record covers mostly as another canvas for their creative whims. Barbara’s fictional cover subject is meant to “embody the entire body of work that we have created, but also reflect the silly side of who we are as people,” says singer-guitarist Matthew Ramsey.

“The character ‘Barbara’ that we created, we wanted her to be sophisticated and trashy at the same time,” he adds. “She looks like somebody that you would want to hang with and listen to the stories and the life lessons that she has.”

Before the album is even out, fans have already been turning up at concerts dressed as “Barbara,” with curlers in their hair, faux fur jackets, sunglasses, and dangling cigarettes. 

“We try to do things a little left to center,” says keyboardist-guitarist Trevor Rosen. “We really love the old school album covers—the Blink-182 and the Cars album covers—and we just try to be a little more artistic with it. Barbara definitely throws back to that spirit and mentality.”

The band were fully involved in the making of the album cover, down to helping cast the actress and being on-site during the photo shoot. The chosen model, named Shalene, had the look down, but didn’t truly share her character’s lifestyle. “She had to practice holding a cigarette because she’d never held one before,” says Ramsey. “She’s a sweet lady.”

Both Ramsey and Rosen are on Zoom from their homes in Nashville, talking about the new album during a short break from their ongoing How Good Is That world tour. The songwriters note that despite the playful cover image, Old Dominion consider Barbara the band’s most personal album.

The 13 songs explore longing and personal losses, celebrate the evolving music scene in Nashville, and tell stories of love gone wrong. “Man or the Song” has Ramsey questioning the impact of success, while “Water My Flowers” describes the search for an eternal love. Produced by the band with Shane McAnally, Barbara was recorded in Nashville, and initial singles released from the album have already made an impact.

Earlier this month, the band posted a video on social media from the summer tour of a little girl named Jordyn holding up a sign covered in photos of her late father and requesting the song “Miss You Man.” During a pause in the show, Ramsey was visibly moved as he spoke with the girl and said, “I had a feeling that was your daddy. Thank you for bringing this sign and showing us. I’m sure you do miss him very much but he’s here. I can feel him, man.”

The song was written originally in tribute to the band’s late friend, songwriter Andrew Dorff, a frequent collaborator with Old Dominion, and songs he co-wrote are still part of the live show every night. The brother of actor Stephen Dorff, he died while on vacation in 2016 at age 40. The song opens, “Sometimes I swear I smell your cigarette in the backseat of my car / What I wouldn’t give for one more hit behind the Jacksonville Walmart / Tonight I broke when I thought of a joke that only you would get.”

It was released as a single at the end of July, but it has become a frequent fan request in memory of lost friends and family. On that night, Old Dominion didn’t have the song on their planned set-list but performed it for Jordyn during the encore. “Everyone on stage was crying. I couldn’t make it through the song,” Ramsey recalls now. “You look over at the side stage, everyone in our crew is crying. There’s all these big roadie dudes that work hard and push cases, and they’re all crying on the side of the stage. It was brutal. But at the end of the day, that’s what you want, man. Especially on a song that was so meaningful to us, to watch it immediately have such an impact on people’s lives, it was very emotional.”

In February, Old Dominion—which also includes guitarist Brad Tursi, bassist Geoff Sprung, and drummer Whit Sellers—played a seven-show residency at the historic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, both to raise money for charity and to celebrate their seventh consecutive CMA Group of the Year award. Choosing its iconic stage for the band’s “Seven for Seven” shows had real meaning for them. While the ancient space is now a venue for many kinds of popular music and stand-up comedy, it is still most revered as “the Mother Church” of country music.

Old Dominion spent four days at the Ryman, playing two shows most nights. It amounted to enough time there for it to feel a lot like home, in spite of its monumental history as the former host to the Grand Ole Opry and generations of country music icons.

“Honestly, that’s one of the things I’m most proud of in this band,” says Ramsey. “When you’re there, you can’t help but be faced with [the history], and accept the fact that you are a part of it. Especially living in Nashville, in this business there’s a lot of imposter syndrome. We constantly tell ourselves we don’t belong, and we’re waiting on somebody to tell us, ‘Hey, you gotta leave the party.’ And a moment like that, where you’re standing on such a historic stage and you’re walking around in the dressing rooms … you can just see the history, you can feel it, you can smell it, and then you realize, ‘Oh my gosh, we are a part of this, the fabric of this town.’”

The band closed the final show with the album’s outro “Goodnight Music City,” an affectionate, wistful tribute to Nashville, with lyrics modeled after the classic children’s book Goodnight Moon. In the song, Ramsey sings of their adopted hometown with love and disappointment. Tennessee’s “Music City” has gone through growth and painful changes in recent years, and seen historic venues and studios swept away for development, even as Nashville remains the place for, as the song says, “Telling the truth with the same three chords…”

“We couldn’t have written the song had we not experienced it for as long as we have,” says Ramsey. “We just wanted to give a good real look at this community that we love—we look at it with such reverence, but also a middle finger sometimes. Like any relationship, it doesn’t come without the dirty side of it too.”

Rosen notes that even as the city’s music institutions and landmarks undergo change, Nashville remains a magnet for musical talent. He says, “Music Row doesn’t look the same as it did anymore. Broadway doesn’t look the same. Midtown doesn’t look the same anymore, but at the heart of it, it’s still a songwriter town, and there’s still great songs being written here every day.” 

Even now, their admiration is most often directed at the gifted singer-songwriters they got to witness in the clubs and cafes of Nashville. When Old Dominion was still struggling to break through, songwriting sustained them. Over the years, Ramsey had his work recorded by the Band Perry, Craig Morgan, Dierks Bentley, and Kenny Chesney. Rosen did the same for the Band Perry, Bentley, Blake Shelton, and William Michael Morgan. And Brad Tursi wrote songs for Chesney, Luke Bryan, and Tyler Farr.

While most of the band members are from Virginia, they only came together as a group once they individually began trying their luck in Nashville. Ramsey got to town in 2002, Rosen in 2003. It wasn’t until 2015 that Old Dominion’s debut, Meat and Candy, landed. That’s a long time between arrival in the city and even beginning to find the popular success Old Dominion is known for today. 

In the early days, Old Dominion crowded into Ramsey’s green minivan (nicknamed “the Green Room”), with a U-Haul trailer filled with instruments and gear, for long drives to nearby states. After years of struggle, the turning point finally came with their first album, which included two No. 1 hits on country radio. It arrived just as some band members were beginning to question whether they wanted to get in that crowded van another year for uncertain rewards. 

From that weariness, Old Dominion were suddenly on the charts and on their way.

“It all happened right about that breaking point,” Ramsey remembers. “So then we’re all looking at each other, watching everything go up the charts. We’re going, ‘Holy crap, did we crack the code?

“I remember, we were driving in the car on the way to our first No. 1  party as a band—it was when ‘Break Up with Him’ went No. 1. I had a bunch of family in town, and my uncle said, ‘Man, did you ever imagine that this would happen?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I had to, or I would’ve given up.’ That doesn’t change the fact that it’s shocking when it does happen. But there is a part of you that has to believe.”