Plenty of music artists see television, movie soundtracks and commercials as the new radio. As radio formats have grown more narrow, getting a song placed in any of those media is now the primary way many music artists find an audience.
Trent Dabbs is seeing the power of song placements firsthand.
He will release his fourth studio CD, “Your Side Now,” Jan. 5. That album is getting some pre-release momentum from a song, “Inside These Lines,” which so far has been used in the television shows “The Ghost Whisperer” and “One Tree Hill.” “Inside These Lines” is just one of several of Dabbs’ songs that have been used in television and film.
“When a TV spot happens it helps so much,” Dabbs said in a mid-November phone interview. “It can help virally. It helps like with the video. It helps, when I’m playing Ten Out of Tenn, I can let people know that the song was on the show. People perk up when they hear that kind of thing.”
The Ten Out of Tenn tour is another vehicle that has helped introduce Dabbs to audiences over the past few years. Conceived by Dabbs and his wife, Kristen, the tour features 10 artists from Nashville, Tenn., performing in a songwriter-in-the-round format.
The latest edition of the tour, which has had different sets of artists on each run of dates, is being billed as the Ten Out of Tenn Christmas tour. Artists on the tour include Dabbs, Butterfly Boucher, Andy Davis, Griffin House, Katie Herzeg, Tyler James, Jeremy Lister, KS Rhoads, Matthew Perryman Jones and Erin McCarley.
Dabbs and these other Nashville-based peers recorded a Christmas album featuring a mix of traditional and original songs last year, and the tour is somewhat based around that CD. But the shows, Dabbs said, can encompass other material, including some non-holiday material.
“There are plenty of songs on the album that we play live,” Dabbs said. But he added that with 10 artists each getting to play two songs at different times in the set, each one wants to deliver some variety. “I think they want to make the set more and more exciting every time they play it. So we’ve got several surprises in the set.”
Dabbs believes that Ten Out of Tenn has raised awareness of the artists that have been part of the tour, both with music fans and within some parts of the music industry.
“A lot of these artists will go back and hit the markets that we played collectively and do it on their own and have great turnouts,” he said. “So it’s helped in that sense.”
TV exposure also opens doors, he said. “I just got back from L.A., and some of the meetings I had, my own brand was getting me in the door because people had heard these songs on TV.”
Beyond furthering the careers of the artists on the tours, another priority for Dabbs is to show that there’s more to Nashville than the mainstream country music scene. There’s the thriving singer-songwriter scene that has nurtured Dabbs and his Ten Out of Tenn cohorts.
“There is an underside to Nashville that people are completely unaware about,” Dabbs said.
With the “Your Side Now” CD coming out just a few weeks after the Ten Out of Tenn holiday tour wraps up, Dabbs will soon shift his attention toward promoting the CD. This means working on more television or film placements and playing his own concerts.
“My plan with this record is really to push it more in the same direction that it’s headed,” Dabbs said. “It’s getting lots of TV placements, and that’s helping out a lot. And yeah, I’m planning on playing some solo shows. But I’m just trying to get it to people that will actually sit down and listen to it.”
Dabbs feels “Your Side Now” differs from his first three CDs — 2005’s “Quite Often,” 2007’s “What’s Golden Above Ground” and 2008’s “Decade Fades” — in that he sought to create more of a cinematic pop sound.
“Dear Jane,” “Inside These Lines” and “Nothing Left To Leave” all have an expansive feel that works well with the gracious pop melodies that populate the songs.
“Also it’s a testament to different production,” Dabbs said of his new CD. “There are so many producers in town, and I’ve tried to be intentional on not using the same producer all the time, because I don’t want to chase down the same sound, because I need to be challenged. My songs can have a similar feel, so I want the production to have something else.”
