BOMSHEL (Kelley Shepard & Kristy Osmonson)

Bomshel   More CMT Music   More CMT Music Videos

Few young women are equally at ease penning a poignant hit about a friend battling cancer or simply knocking back tequila with Kix Brooks, but then again you can always count on Bomshel to embrace the extremes and---like their name implies---deliver the unexpected.

               Well known for their vivacious personalities and sense of musical adventure, the Curb Records duo displays their more pensive side on the hit “Fight Like a Girl.” The song engaged country radio and served to whet appetites for Kristy and Kelley’s new project, a well-crafted collection that finds the talented twosome hitting their stride as songwriters and vocalists. Several years of touring have given them an extra measure of confidence in what they wanted to say and how best to say it.

               “Bomshel has been such a journey of self discovery for me personally. The whole thing has been amazing,” says Kristy, who first met Kelley when they were both performing at a multi-artist event in Michigan. “Kelley went on right before me and the line up included Blake Shelton, Sarah Buxton and other acts.  I’d been out in the crowd and I was leaving to go get ready for my set when she came out and started singing. I came back in so I could watch her and she had an amazing voice.  It absolutely blew my mind.  She’s like LeAnn Rimes, Carrie Underwood and Martina McBride---all my favorite singers---all wrapped in one.  This girl is an incredible singer and she was owning the stage.”

               The two struck up a friendship that led to merging their talents as Bomshel. “I called Kristy back and we talked to two o’clock in the morning just like best friends do,” Kelley recalls of how quickly things developed after their first meeting. “I’d never really met somebody who became an instant friend like that.  It’s real funny because we are so different, complete opposites, night and day, but for some reason, it totally works.”

               Both women entered the duo with a healthy respect for what the other brought to the party. Kelley began honing her skills in venues around Phoenix and landed her first big break after she sent a tape to the Ellen DeGeneres show that caught the attention of R&B superstar Brian McKnight. He encouraged her to move to Los Angeles, and though her future looked promising, it just really wasn’t where she wanted to be. “I don’t think there could be a better boot camp training ground than working with Brian McKnight, but they wanted me to go more in an R&B direction and I didn’t want to because I’ve always loved country music. That’s what I wanted to do,” she says.

               “When I was six-years-old, I’ll never forget watching a Reba McEntire concert. She had costume changes and danced.  I thought it was so amazing.  She put on this energetic show, but then she could simply stand still in the middle of the stage in that beautiful red dress and sing the crap out of a song. I loved it. I wanted to do that.  For Christmas, I asked for like fog machines and lights. I’d put on my shows and always introduce myself as a Curb recording artist because LeAnn Rimes was a Curb recording artist, and that’s where I wanted to be.”

               Kristy began performing at the ripe old age of four in a group called Fiddler’s Hatchery. “It was a really intense musical experience because we did summer camps and we toured through the U.S and Canada in the summer doing these big shows.  It was a lot of fun.  We got to play these really neat theaters and we did barn dances and all sorts of fun stuff.”

               Kristy’s musical influences were varied and included everything from the Christian music her parents favored to Garth Brooks, Chris LeDoux and the music she listened to with her rodeo friends and then there was the cousin who introduced her to Heart, Def Leppard and Journey. “I listened to Heart over and over and over. I was so obsessed with them. Then I saw Garth and I said ‘I want to do that. I want to be that,’” says Kristy, who moved to Nashville in 2002 and began writing songs and developing her vocal chops.

              Kelley admits she had a few hardcore honky tonk ambitions when she moved to Music City---in addition to cutting hit records. “I was watching CMT and I saw Brooks & Dunn and I thought, “Oh my gosh! I just want to sit and have a beer with them. They just look like so much fun to hang out with’ and that was my goal to move to Nashville and drink a beer with Brooks & Dunn,” she says with a laugh, and admits B&D have been kind to the new female duo, offering advice and even serving up a little tequila.

               Kelley and Kristy’s vibrant vocals and enviable writing skills are earning them the respect of such heroes as Brooks & Dunn, and fans from coast to coast who have been touched by “Fight Like a Girl.”

 “Last year we went to Kristy’s hometown in Idaho and played for this benefit called Celebrate Life in honor of Kristy’s friend, Jenny, who was diagnosed with breast cancer at 26,” says Kelley. “She was expecting a baby when she found out and they thought they were going to have to abort the baby because she had to go through chemo.”

               Jenny gave birth to her daughter, Grace, and fought the cancer for eight years, passing away shortly after her little girl’s eighth birthday. “She said ‘you guys inspire me’ and I’m sitting there listening and thinking this is so backwards,” says Kristy. “I was out running on the river and was really angry about the whole situation and the song title just came to me.”       

               “I really wanted to gear it towards all women,” says Kelley of how they crafted the song. “With our moms, sisters and grandmas and I’ve always really admired their persistence through the tough times.  I think women have an amazing ability to endure. It’s a positive thing to fight like a girl because girls are a lot stronger on the inside. We don’t want to put one meaning on this song.  We want people to take it however they want to take it.  Whether they are a little girl or a woman struggling with something they really can’t control. We don’t want it to just be the cancer song because everyone has their own story.”

               In writing songs for their record, Kelley and Kristy were looking to share stories—things they’d lived or seen someone else live through. “It has to be something that we’re really organically going through or a conversation that we’ve had with a fan or friend,” says Kristy.

               “Kristy and I are about as normal as it comes, so if it happens to us, it pretty much happens to everybody,” Kelley says. “The other day I was trying to have a real serious conversation with Kristy and I said ‘would you stop trying to write a song while I’m trying to talk to you?’  She’ll do that.  I do it too sometimes.”

               Kelley says one of her favorite songs to sing is “Arizona.” “We wrote that with Jack Sizemore,” she recalls. “He asked me where I was from and I said ‘back in Arizona’ He said, ‘that’s a great title,’ so we just wrote it. I wanted to put things that were really very Arizona and things that people in Arizona would know and recognize.  We wrote that song in a half hour.”

               “Canoe” is a song inspired by Kelley’s first date with her boyfriend. “I’d never been in a lake before and I was getting in the canoe and trying not to be prissy,” she recalls with a laugh.

                Both girls say “Love Me for Me” is the most personal track. The lyric about self-acceptance is a message they are happy to preach.  “The song says ‘I lose my keys and I’m constantly late/I’m comfortable if I’m a few pounds overweight/ I’m going to eat while I’m out on a date’” says Kristy. “That song is just like us talking and would be the most personal.”
The girls are roommates and their house served as a songwriter’s haven and as their studio for much of this record. “I love that I can do my own vocals because I’m a real control freak about my vocals,” says Kelley. “The cool thing about it is our record sounds exactly how we wanted it to be.”

               Kristy says the atmosphere was always relaxed.  “The first thing in the morning, we’d sit and get creative, get ideas and get these songs down and then we’d go upstairs and kind of lay down tracks,” she says. “We’d live w ith it.”

               The result is a record that is honest and authentic, pulsating with energy and teeming with artistic integrity.

“Every song you hear it’s going to be us,” says Kelley.  “You’ll hear our fun side and our sad side.  We have some really traditional country on there and some really poppy stuff.”

“When you buy a Bomshel record, you are going to be bringing home a piece of the two
of us,” Kristy says. “All I can say is on this record I played as good as I could have possibly played. I sang as good as I could have possibly sung and Kelly sang as good as she could. It’s a scary experience to now be putting it out there because it’s definitely a piece of our soul.”

BOMSHEL WEBSITE

HOUSTON COUNTY

ABOUT HOUSTON COUNTY BAND
It would have been easy to miss the tipping point in the creation of Houston County. It looked, after all, like nothing more than a conversation between brothers.
Zack and Adam Hooper were working in their family's meat-and-three restaurant after putting their music careers on hold for a time. Adam had begun writing and cutting demos with John Milldrum, whom he had known since the brothers' and John's bands had shared a billing a few years earlier. When Adam realized just how good their collaboration was, he asked Zack to join them.
        
"I know Adam better than anybody,” says Zack, “and I had never seen him so passionate about the music. That's what drew me in."
John's studio was in Dothan, Alabama, a six-hour drive from the brothers' north Georgia homes, but that Friday after work they drove down together. They wrote two songs that night and decided then and there they’d found something magical.
They had indeed, and that Friday-night writing session led ultimately to a Nashville record deal and a debut album that captures the perfect storm of creativity unleashed by the trio. With Houston County, Zack, Adam and John announce themselves as one of country music's most compelling new acts.
That "perfect storm" had a number of elements. For starters, all three are superb musicians who had honed their talents for years in their respective bands. Each entered their new partnership with no other motive than making the best music possible, checking their egos at the door. Adam and John's musicianship and musical sensibilities perfectly complemented Zack's way with a lyric. Perhaps most importantly, the three were able to harness the emotions surrounding a turning point in their lives, spinning uncertainty into hope and restless energy into an album's worth of well-crafted music.
Houston County is anchored by the first songs the trio wrote, songs that reflected a rough period in Zack's life that preceded his re-emergence as a creative force.
        
"I was still talking with a girl I'd broken up with, I knew I wasn't where I was supposed to be in terms of what I was doing for a living, and I wasn't dealing with either as well as I could have," says Zack. "It wasn't so much that I was angry or depressed, but I was really trying to find something new."
        
The outlet he needed came when, after years of trying to write what he thought the industry wanted, he began writing "what was inside, what I was feeling." In the next few weeks, those ideas, tempered by musical and lyrical give-and-take with Adam and John, became five songs that let them know they were on the right track. “Long, Hard Road”, "Three Dollar Cross," "Drink My Way To Happiness," "I Still Love You" and "The Watcher" all came out of those early sessions. Collectively, they are emotionally powerful treatments of loss, confusion, hope, belief and purpose, brought into sharp focus by their collective musical talents.
"What was coming out was unique," says Zack, "and it just came naturally."
        
Those early songs quickly earned the respect of entertainment entrepreneur Ronnie Gilley, who introduced them to Stroudavarious Records president and legendary producer James Stroud.
"They were both on the same page we were," says Zack. "We heard where it could go and what it could be, and Ronnie and James said, 'You've got something really cool and we want to take it somewhere.' It really happened fast."
        
The three spent the following year commuting to Nashville, writing with some of the city's best and fleshing out an album as varied as it is high-powered.
        
The tracks vary from "Workin' On A Suntan," a summer song par excellence, and "Nothing's Gonna Shake Me," a declaration of steadfast love and "I Can't Make It Rain," the album's poignant and emotionally rich first single.
The album caps a long musical journey for the trio.  Zack and Adam grew up in Cleveland, Georgia, with a father who liked Springsteen, Pink Floyd and Bryan Adams as well as country giants like Johnny Cash and Charlie Daniels. "What we listened to mainly," says Adam, "was the guys with great melodies."
Both were sports fanatics in high school--"I was being recruited by colleges for basketball in the tenth grade, but then I never got any taller," Zack says with a laugh--and although much of their extended family played and sang, their formal interest in music came later.
"We loved it, but we never thought about being in a band," says Adam, who learned to play bass by watching his guitar-playing grandfather.
        
Zack finally started a band as he was about to leave high school, and dropped out after one semester of college to concentrate on music. He recruited Adam on bass and a 15-year-old friend on drums and started playing area clubs as Cloud 10.
"We kind of refused to do covers," says Adam. "What worked for us was how young we were, our high energy and great melodies."
        
"We would have 300 or 400 kids line up to see us," adds Zack, "and we were a local band doing original material without a record deal. They were drawn to the live shows. It was amazing."
John, meanwhile, was raised listening to '70s music of all kinds, from Waylon and Conway Twitty to Queen, Cheap Trick and Heart.
"I played football growing up and didn't get into music until later," he says. "I was turning 18 when I saw a local band play and thought it was kind of cool. I wanted to give it a try. Within a year I was out playing little bars, country and rock - basically Top 40 stuff."
        
With a band called Course of Nature, he landed a deal on an Atlantic Records imprint, released a record and toured the country. Course of Nature and Cloud 10 were both managed by Gilley, and when the two shared a bill at the Dothan, Alabama, Civic Center, they set in motion a friendship that reached fruition after all had left their bands behind to regroup.
        
Named for the southern Alabama county where John lived, Houston County brings a decade of musical groundwork to bear on their collaboration.
        
"With this project," says Adam, "we were writing from the heart. That’s something you can do with country music, and it opened doors creatively for us.”
"This isn't about complicated guitar parts or posing," says John. "It's about simple and straightforward music that reflects real life experiences."
        
"I can truly say," adds Zack, "that this album is an honest portrait of the last four years of my life. I'm sure that's true for all three of us. It's something that's real and something we're very proud of."
Houston County serves as an introduction to a world-class combination of superb musicianship, musical honesty and great three-way chemistry. The passion and honesty the trio brings to this collaboration shows through in every note of their debut CD, one that brings an important new act to the contemporary country scene.

HOUSTON COUNTY BAND