Collaboration featuring Big Boi, Maggie Rose & Mannie Fresh available now via Play It Again Records on streaming and digital retail services
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Dallas Davidson has a reputation as a genre-bending country songwriter with an ear for pop hits. Now, as he releases new single “Laid Back,” he’s enlisted the help of hip-hop producer Mannie Fresh, Outkast rapper Big Boi and singer and close friend Maggie Rose to really smear those genre lines.
The first cut from the Davidson-Fresh collaboration, due later this year, points the way to a one-of-its-kind project that features rapper Mystikaland other unexpected artists from different genres. It’s an ambitious leap of faith, crystalizing his feelings about the universality of music that Davidson can’t wait for the Nashville community to hear. Davidson will release the project on his new label, Play It Again Records.
“I’m extremely excited to release this single, ‘Laid Back’,” expressed Davidson. “It’s music I’ve wanted to make for a long time and I’m glad that we were able to collaborate on this project with talented people who each bring something different to the table.”
Known as one of Nashville’s most adventurous songwriters behind the scenes on Music Row with 22 eclectic No. 1s and more than 300 recorded tracks, Davidson also is a recording artist and live performer at the front of the stage. The new release marks the next chapter in that aspect of his career and it’s bound to have Nashville talking.
Davidson met Fresh through BMI Atlanta Vice President of Writing/Publishing Catherine Brewton. The two bonded over their love of Southern music and conceived the new project as a way to show how well all aspects of it can blend hand in hand. It’s not the first time he’s put some zip into a country song with examples like Blake Shelton’s “Boys ‘Round Here” and Luke Bryan’s breakthrough “Country Girl (Shake It For Me)” going to the top of the charts.
There’s nothing halfway about “Laid Back” as Davidson employees Fresh to the fullest of his abilities. The Louisiana native helped define an era as Cash Money Records’ in-house producer for more than a decade, helping Lil Wayne find his voice and the label rise to the top before leaving in 2005. He’s now signed to Def Jam South and has his ears on all aspects of what’s going on down in the Dirty South, even over on those dirt roads that country music’s fixated upon.
You can hear the push and pull of Davidson and Fresh’s different styles on “Laid Back,” a work hard-play hard song that equates smooth good times with the easy glide of a vintage Cadillac. After Davidson opens things up with a declaration about a day spent busting his butt so he can spend the night relaxing, Maggie Rose – an original signee to Davidson’s Play It Again Music Publishing house and a rising solo artist herself – joins in with a soaring verse. Then iconic rapper Big Boi, who once helped define the Dirty South with Andre 3000 in Outkast, blows things up with an off-the-cuff feature that sums up the song’s vibe and unifies the track in a quick run of bars.
The song, recently called “bizarre but catchy mash-up of Bruce Hornsby and Uncle Kracker” by Rolling Stone Country, is the first release from Davidson’s Play It Again Records, a natural extension of his Play It Again Music Publishing venture, launched in 2014. The two-time Academy of Country Music and BMI Songwriter of the Year and the five-time Country Music Association Triple Play Award winner is also a member of songwriting supergroup The Peach Pickers.
For more information about “Laid Back” visit www.dallasdavidson.com.