Blackjack Billy Talk About Latest Single “Drinking All Weekend” With Tim Hicks

Jeff Coplan: Tim was heading home after being in town for a week writing and working on his next album with me.  I play adult baseball for fun and right after I dropped him off at the airport I went to play a game.  I was standing out in center field waiting for a ball to be hit to me when the title Drinking All Weekend came into my head along with a melody.  Hey you never know when or where a song idea is going to come.  This was a particularly long inning and I spent enough time out there where I wrote the whole chorus in my head.   I ran into the dugout after the inning and recorded what was in my head just by singing into a voice memo on my iPhone and the rest of the game it was like an ear worm in my head.  As soon as the game was over I called Tim, who had just gotten home and told him ‘I know you just got back but I have this idea for a song I think would be perfect for you so will you finish it with me?…..like right now…..let’s get on Facetime!.’ We did, I sang it to him and he said ‘hell yeah’ and was all over it immediately throwing out ideas. We wrote the verses and bridge in probably 20 min.  It flew out of us.

Later, when I started demoing up the song it just sounded and felt like a Blackjack Billy song.  I played it for Noll and the boys and they loved it.  The idea to do it with Tim was an easy decision.

JC: Making the video was just an absolute blast.  We thank the director Brian Vaughan for coming up with the idea of us as old men and all our shenanigans on the golf course and then at the party.   I personally loved watching my boys Noll, Clayton and Wes just roll with the parts and have their personalities shine in the video.  Noll is actually a great golf player and that one scene where Clay is holding the golf ball on a tee with his butt cheeks while Noll drives it I think is a wonderful example of our band chemistry.  We are brothers who trust each other literally with our lives, we try to bring humor in whatever we do and we definitely are not afraid to take risks.   Tim shares that same spirit and he is a brother to me and our band.

JC: Noll is one my favorite people to write songs with.  Our writing connection is the reason we started Blackjack Billy.  We both have different influences and when they are combined you get something like The Booze Cruise.  He’s a country boy from The Bootheel of Missouri who grew up on 90s country as well as Tupac and Biggie Smalls.  I am from Montreal and New York City and didn’t have much country music in his upbringing but always had a love for melodic harmony groups like The Beatles, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mack and The Doobie Brothers.  I’m also a big rock guy.  ACDC and Led Zeppelin got me playing guitar.  Noll and I do share two big influential artists in common however….Prince and Aerosmith.

You can hear the blend in our music. It is very guitar driven on the rock side while melodically our chorus’s usually go for singable melodies with harmony and then in our verses Noll often comes up with interesting rhythmic melodies and phrasing with lyrical rhyming schemes that pull from his love of rap and Stephen Tyler all while stirring into a pot of soup cooked up in his country boy broth.

JC: I was lucky enough to be introduced to Tim right when he got his record deal back in 2012 and we hit it off immediately both as friends and writing partners.  We’ve been writing together and I’ve been producing his music since.  While writing for Tim’s first album Got A Feeling happened when I brought Noll in to write with us.  We all loved the song and each wanted to record it.  After a little bit of debating we decided to put it on Tim’s Album featuring BjB and then recorded our own version for our first album that came out the following year.

Tim as a writer is incredibly melodic and he is also a lover of harmony.  He wants to make music that is fun, that rocks, that’s energetic, has a soul, and has lyrics that hopefully speaks to his fans.  Most importantly as an artist he doesn’t take himself too seriously.  He has a tremendous sense of humor and knows exactly who he is.  He writes and performs from the heart.  For Blackjack Billy and especially for me he is exactly who we want to collaborate with.  He knows how to throw down (excuse the Tim Hicks first album title pun) but he is a damn good human and a family man.  His influence around us helps keep us from getting into too much trouble.

JC: First time we played Boots And Hearts.  2015 we played the Kick Off Party Thursday night.  Must have been 20K people there going wild and we love to feed off the energy of a crowd.

Our Canadian fans have always been beyond amazing and that night was one of those extra special ones.

“Beyond” – Leon Bridges

“Blow” – Ed Sheeran with Chris Stapleton and Bruno Mars

and

“Blow” – Ed Sheeran with Chris Stepleton and Bruno Mars….it’s so badass you have to play it twice in a row.

JC: Ha!  The prosthetics took 2 hrs to put on and dayum it was itchy and hard to breathe for all the hours we had to wear them.  We were ripping them off of our faces at the end.  Wes got off easy. He didn’t wear one because it couldn’t attach over his beard and he was not about to shave that thing.