If you see a guy driving a motorcycle around St. Louis this weekend that looks like the guy from Old Dominion, chances are that it is the guy from Old Dominion.
“If the weather is good, they can see us riding around,” laughs Old Dominion’s lead singer and guitarist Matthew Ramsey. “On the road, we travel with motorcycles so that myself and [bass guitarist] Geoff [Sprung] can ride motorcycles around while the other guys play golf.”
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It’s a nice life for the country music hitmakers, who will make their way to Enterprise Center on November 18 as part of their wildly successful No Bad Vibes 2023 arena tour.
“The show takes so much energy that I need those moments of solitude,” says Ramsey, mere days after Old Dominion came home once again with the CMA Award for Vocal Group of the Year. “I need to go out and breathe the air out in the city that we’re in and just take it in and not work all day every day.”
Certainly, Ramsey and his Old Dominion comrades Brad Tursi, Trevor Rosen, and Sprung have already put plenty of work in to get to where they are, starting as merely a dedicated group of songwriters for blockbuster songs such as Kenny Chesney’s “Save It for a Rainy Day” and Blake Shelton’s “Sangria.”
“We never set out to do the stuff we did,” reflects Ramsey. “We just were making music that we liked. We were never setting out to win awards or anything like that. It was just like, holy crap, what have we done?”
What they did was end up becoming one of country music’s most consistent hitmakers, churning out a slew of addictive songs such as “One Man Band,” “Break Up with Him,” and “Written in the Sand.”
But come Saturday, they will be bringing much more.
“Every show is truly unique and different,” says Ramsey. “There are always three or four songs that we didn’t play the night before, or maybe we’ve never played in front of an audience. But if they want it, we are going to try to play it.”
