Aaron Watson Goes From Indie ‘Underdog’ to Country Chart’s Top Dog
For the second week in a row, America’s top-selling country record isn’t a big budget release by Jason Aldean, Florida Georgia Line, Miranda Lambert or any of the usual suspects. It’s Aaron Watson’s The Underdog, an independent album released without the help of a traditional record label or a national radio campaign.
Haven’t heard of it? You must not live in Texas.
For the past decade and a half, Aaron Watson has been one of the Lone Star State’s heaviest hitters. National trends have come and gone during those 15 years — country-pop, hick-hop, bro-country — but his spurs-and-Stetson traditionalism remains unchanged. He’s the kind of country artist you’d take home to mama: a church-going family man whose songs are filled not with AutoTuned vocals and half-lit salutes to Jack Daniel’s, but fiddle solos and PG-rated lyrics that sing the praises of truck stop coffee, Frank Sinatra and marital bliss.
As of this morning, Watson is also the kind of artist who sells 26,340 copies of his 12th album, The Underdog, during its first week of release. That’s enough to place him at the top of the country charts, outpacing his closest competitor, Sam Hunt, by more than 10,000 units. Over on the Billboard 200 chart — which ranks all records together, regardless of genre — The Underdog sits at Number Eight. To help put those numbers into perspective, consider this: last week’s Number One country record, Blackberry Smoke‘s Holding all the Roses, climbed to the top without even cracking 20,000 copies.
“A lot of people call me ‘up and coming,’ but it’s more like ‘slow and steady,'” says Watson, speaking to Rolling Stone Country via cellphone during a tour stop in Texas. Soundcheck is just around the corner, but he’s still happy to talk at length, speaking with the unhurried Texas twang of a man who wants to stop, sit down and savor the moment rather than rush ahead to the next milestone.
“I’ve been doing this for 15 years, 12 albums and 2,000-plus shows,” he adds. “I’ve been with my manager, my booking agent and my distributor forever. We have wonderful working relationships, and what we’re doing right now is pretty much a ‘David versus Goliath’ kind of situation, because I’ve never been embraced by the music industry. There’s only so many times you can be told you’ll never make it. At some point, you have to say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna need to take a different route to get where we’re wanting to go.’ And that’s what we did. If someone shuts a door in your face, you don’t let that stop you; you pick the lock, take it off its hinges or find another door that’s open.”
Watson didn’t pick those doors locks alone. Multiple times during our conversation, he credits the same triumvirate — “my faith, family and fans” — for taking him from the smallest dancehall in Texas to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, where he’ll play next month. Other key players in Watson’s uphill climb include CAA booking agent Aaron Tannenbaum, who’s been assembling his 200-plus yearly tour dates for the better part of a decade, and longtime manager Gino Genaro.