HostJolene: Thank you very much for agreeing to talk with us today. I guess the big news now is that your album and your song are just eating up the charts. How do you feel about that?
Josh Turner: I feel great, you know. This is actually, technically, my fourth single so it’s good to see a song move up the chart in the way that “Your Man” is doing. It’s just been so fulfilling for me, and its been great too because we put a lot of hard work into promoting a song like this and promoting an album and playing out on the road you sacrifice a lot of time away from home. So it’s good to see a lot of those things that you do out on the road and the things that you do on the phone and everything start paying off. And so it’s been really good to see how it’s been able to compete with the rest of the songs out there.
HostJolene: Do you think it’s changed anything for you as far as your schedule?
Josh Turner: It’s kind of created some demand which is really good. It allows us to be a little more picky, which is not a bad thing. It’s been really good lately. We’ve got a lot of work on the books for this year so we’re not hurting at this point.
HostJolene: When you were growing up who were your big inspirations?
Josh Turner: I usually say there were five main guys. There were a lot of artists influencing me while growing up. Guys like Don Williams and Merle Haggard and all that, but the five guys that really made an impact on me in a special way were Randy Travis, Johnny Cash, John Anderson, Vern Gosdin and Hank Williams. Those five guys just kind of encompassed what I was about in one way or another. And they’re still big heroes of mine and I’m still learning things from them.
HostJolene: A couple of years ago when I saw you, you covered some Johnny Cash in your show. Do you still do that?
Josh Turner: Yeah, we usually, or at least for the past couple years, we’ve been opening the show with “Folsom Prison Blues” and that usually gets the crowd pretty riled up for the rest of the show.
HostJolene: This new album that you have, it’s great start to finish. Did you have more say so in what went into it than you did your first one?
Josh Turner: Yeah, I did. I had a lot of say so in the first one, but being a new artist you don’t really have the credibility to go along with it. You don’t really have the experience or the catalog or what have you, but this go round I was working with Frank Rogers solely as producer and worked with a great head of A & R at the label, Allison Jones and the three of us really worked collectively on what was going to be on this record. And they just really let me spearhead it. They let me guide them because I’m the artist and my name, my face is going to be attached to this for the rest of my life and forevermore, so they let me guide them and they gave me some great suggestions and some great advice along the way. They brought some great songs to the table. They helped me weed through my own songs which is always kind of hard for me to do. It was a great creative experience for me. It was just a great process, I had fun doing it and I’m just extremely passionate about every song on this record.
