A Thousand Horses isn't just blowing 'Smoke'
On the Verge, Paste BN's spotlight on breakthrough artists, this week looks at country-rock group A Thousand Horses.
Four Horse-men. With single Smoke No. 13 on Paste BN's Country airplay charts and climbing quickly, A Thousand Horses is poised to be the genre's first breakout act of 2015. The band's four-member lineup — frontman Michael Hobby, guitarists Bill Satcher and Zach Brown and bassist Graham DeLoach — expands to nine on stage, bringing to mind the sound and style of Southern-rock forebears like Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Black Crowes. "It's the sound we have on the album," Brown says. "We wanted to be able to recreate it live."
Carolina in their minds. Hobby and Satcher came together in a small but vibrant scene in South Carolina, meeting at the town's music store. "We would go to the music store every day after school." before graduating to playing open mics and battles of the bands," Hobby says. Soon, they'd graduated to playing local open-mic nights and battles of the bands.
Getting together. Hobby and Satcher relocated to Nashville when Hobby graduated high school, with DeLoach, Satcher's cousin, joining them from Georgia a year later. "I lived on an air mattress the first three years I lived in Nashville," he says. Brown — no relation to the Zac Brown Band's Zac Brown, though the band did record Southernality at the other Brown's Southern Ground studio in Nashville — joined a few months later, cementing the lineup.
Five years in. Soon after Brown came on board, the band signed to Interscope Records in 2010, taking its name from a song on the one EP the label issued. Now with Republic Nashville, A Thousand Horses will release Southernality June 9. "They're our stories for the last five years of being a band," Hobby says, "the ups and downs and the stuff you go through."
Where there's Smoke. The band's breakthrough hit — which has sold 114,000 downloads, according to Nielsen SoundScan — came from a writing session Hobby had with Nashville songwriters Ross Copperman and Jon Nite. Once Copperman suggested comparing a relationship to a cigarette addiction, the song's metaphors came quickly. "It just kind of fell out," Hobby says. "It was the last song we wrote for the album, and the first song we recorded for it."
Hitting the road. The group played its first show at The Nick, a renowned Birmingham, Ala., dive that bills itself as the town's "dirty little secret." "They give you each a Pabst Blue Ribbon tall boy, and you go on at 1 a.m.," Hobby says. The band members will play in much better circumstances this summer as support for Darius Rucker. "It's our first big, legit summer tour that, when you're a kid, you dream about," Hobby says. "You see all the bands come to town, and you want to be a part of a package like that."