Old Dominion‘s Brad Tursi has been keeping a secret for a decade.
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Tursi is the guitarist for the group, which has been named the Country Music Association’s Group of the Year annually since 2018. While the band has dominated the vocal group space in country music since Old Dominion launched in 2017, Tursi has worked on his debut solo project.
Ten years in the making, Parallel Love will be out on July 19. Tursi had the full support of his bandmates when recording the project.
Tursi grew up in Connecticut and has been in bands since he was 15. He said his creativity has many iterations. Tursi spent his youth connecting with James Taylor and Neil Young music. He naturally veers to music heavy with those influences when he writes songs. Tursi moved to Nashville to be a commercial songwriter, and James Taylor-esque songs are not typically what other singers are looking to record.
“They want to party,” Tursi told American Songwriter. “They want something up-tempo. But many days, you don’t write those kinds of songs – especially if I’m writing by myself.”
Brad Tursi: “It’s Just Honestly a Passion Project”
Tursi penned much of the album alone, so it closely reflects his influences.
“It’s just honestly a passion project,” he said.
Tursi is a Grammy-winning songwriter. He penned the songs on Parallel Love with other heavy-hitting songwriters, including Stephen Wilson Jr., Dan Isbell, and Jessie Alexander. By its nature, Parallel Love sounds nothing like an Old Dominion album. Tursi explains that Old Dominion decides on songs and hones its sound through a series of compromises—everyone in the band has a voice, and not one gets everything they want.
Of Old Dominion, he said: “You have to respect everyone’s opinion. You have to respect the end product, even if it might not be everything that you dreamed of. Obviously, it’s working out because people seem to like it.”
However, creating Parallel Love was a different process and experience.
Parallel Love Was a Different Process
“It is nice to just express what you want to just exactly how you want to,” he said. “Of course, there’s definitely something very calming and non-confrontational about that process. It was very enjoyable.”
Tursi didn’t know what he would do with the album after he finished it. He was just making it for himself. If he handed it to the band’s manager and label and they didn’t like it, he laughed that he would send it to his mom and call it a day.
“The fact that they liked it and other people have responded well to it, it’s already gone farther than I would’ve thought about,” he said. “It’s not even out yet. It’s like anything you feel strongly about in your heart; it feels nice when other people like it.”
Luke Bryan Tells About Writing “Light It Up” with Brad Tursi from Old Dominion (youtube.com)
Parallel Love is packed with songs that have stood the test of time. Some of them are more than a decade old. Tursi said he knew they were special when he never got tired of listening to them.
“The more I heard them, the more I liked them,” Tursi said of the songs.
A Solo Tour
His favorites are “Church Bells and Train Whistles” and “Crazy Life,” the latter of which is inspired by Old Dominion’s favorite Los Angeles haunt, The Sunset Marquis Hotel. The hotel has a tiny bar that Tursi said is always full of interesting people. The Sunset Marquis has a rock and roll background and he said he never knows who he’ll see there. He recalled meeting Richard Branson, a “Rocky” actor, Henry Rollins and more.
“Even just people that aren’t famous, who knows what they’re there for,” he said. “Because we stay there, we can stay up as late as we want. All we have to do is stumble back into our little room.”
The album doesn’t have a message, but in hindsight, the concept of two people in a relationship giving each other space but moving in the same direction inspired it.
A new one for you #churchbellsandtrainwhistles (youtube.com)
“You don’t have to be attached at the hip for everything that you do,” he said. “Sometimes you’re growing together, sometimes you’re apart, sometimes you’re seen, sometimes you’re not. That was a theme that ran through the music. It sums up the record in a nice way after the fact, but I didn’t have that plan going into it.”
He didn’t have a vision for the album as a whole, but he likes that at seven songs, it’s more concise than the current double-album trend. (One of the songs is pieced out across the project so the track list lists more than seven songs.)
When he thinks about what success looks like for Parallel Love, he quips that he’s already accepted the Grammy for it in his mind.
“I’ve probably run through every possible scenario,” he said. “Just the fact that we’ve already booked a tour for it is amazing.”
(Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images)
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