Mercury Nashville: Last News

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorShania Twain’s “Not Just a Girl,” a new, career-spanning documentary produced by Mercury Studios and directed by Joss Crowley, will be available Tuesday, July 26 on Netflix.According to the announcement, the doc “takes viewers from her humble beginnings in Timmins, Ontario, where she was raised poor and inspired by the story of Dolly Parton, through her initial record label signing in Nashville, and onto her career-defining moment meeting her future husband and rock producer Mutt Lange ahead of writing, recording and releasing her breakthrough album ‘The Woman in Me.’” It features studio session footage from throughout her career and brand new interviews with Twain at home, and discussing her forthcoming sixth album. Among the guest voices in Not Just A Girl are Lionel Richie, Diplo, Avril Lavigne, and Orville Peck.

Johnny Cash, titled ‘Songwriter’, will be released later this year – check out the single ‘Well Alright’ below.The recordings are taken from a series of sessions the country legend played in a Nashville studio in 1993, but which have been shelved ever since.Now, Cash’s son John Carter Cash has unearthed the recordings, isolated the original vocals and recruited a group of Cash’s former bandmates to create the new set of songs.‘Songwriter’ will be released on June 28 via Mercury Nashville/UMe, and you can pre-order it here. Check out the first song to have been released from it, ‘Well Alright’, below:At the time of the original recording sessions, Cash was between contracts, but the tracks were put to one side after he met Rick Rubin and embarked on the now-legendary ‘American Recordings’ series of albums.After coming across the tracks, John Carter Cash and producer David ‘Fergie’ Ferguson brought together musicians including guitarist Marty Stuart, bassist Dave Roe, drummer Pete Abbott, to the ‘Cash Cabin’ in Hendersonville, Tennessee, where the tracks on ’Songwriter’ finally came together.The album is comprised of 11 Johnny Cash originals, one of which, ‘Spotlight’, will feature a guitar solo from The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach.In other Johnny Cash news, Paul McCartney recently credited him for inspiring him to form Wings.“We were in bed one night,” he said, “newly married, when Johnny Cash came on the telly with a new band he’d formed with Carl Perkins, a big hero of mine.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic More than 20 years after his death, there are treasures in the Johnny Cash vault that have remained unmined, despite assumptions that everything interesting might have been brought into the light in the posthumous recordings that came out in the years following his 2003 death. On June 28, Universal Music will issue “Songwriter,” a collection of 11 previously unreleased recordings that Cash demo-ed in 1993, all of them self-penned originals.

Nominations for this year’s Academy of Country Music Awards have just been unveiled!

Thania Garcia Universal Music Group Nashville (UMGN) has tapped Lori Christian and Rob Femia to join its executive board. Christian has been upped to executive VP of marketing, while Femia has been named executive VP of business and legal affairs for the label group consisting of Capitol Records Nashville, EMI Records Nashville, Mercury Nashville, and MCA Nashville. Christian was formerly senior VP of marketing, a role she occupied in 2020 after leading the publicity department at UMG Nashville following the 2012 merger of EMI and UMG. In her elevated post, she will oversee UMG Nashville’s artist development, brands and sponsorship, creative services, international marketing, and media marketing departments for the label’s artist roster. She has previously worked to launch projects for Alan Jackson, Carrie Underwood, Chris Stapleton, Darius Rucker, Keith Urban, and Luke Bryan, among others.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic After being with Mercury Nashville since the beginning of her recording career in the early 1990s, Shania Twain has a new label home, Republic Nashville, and a new song and video to go with the switch — “Waking Up Dreaming,” her first official single in five years. It’s not just a new label for her — it’s a new label to everyone, as Twain’s statement about the signing established that she is the debut artist for Republic Nashville, a division of Republic Records. “I couldn’t think of a better partner than Republic Nashville,” Twain said. “I’m honored and excited to be the label’s first artist and lead the charge of this new and exciting chapter. In this respect, it feels like a new beginning all around, and I’m embracing it wholeheartedly.”