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Gary Allan
www.cmt.com biography
Gary Allan was born Dec. 5, 1967, in Montebello, Calif., with the name Gary Herzberg. He was raised in La Mirada, Calif., and in his teens, he began to play the honky-tonk circuit. After turning down a record deal while still in high school, Allan eventually signed to Decca Records in 1996. Two singles from his tenure there reached the Top 10: "Her Man" in 1996 and "It Would Be You" in 1998. When Decca folded into MCA Nashville, Allan followed, releasing the album Smoke Rings in the Dark in 1999. The smoldering title track and "Right Where I Need to Be" propelled the album to platinum status. Keeping his trademark traditional sound intact, the 2001 album Alright Guy offered two more hits, "The One" and "Man to thumb|300px|right|Gary Allan - Best I Ever HadMan."
Despite his numerous hits, Allan was nominated for the CMA Horizon award -- given to newcomers -- in 2003. That same year, he released the album See If I Care, with the hits "Tough Little Boys" and "Songs About Rain."
In 2004, Allan's wife committed suicide. Rather than retreat, he issued the album Tough All Over in 2005, earning a Top 10 hit with "Best I Ever Had" and the best reviews of his career. He spent much of 2006 touring with Rascal Flatts, playing for more than a million fans.
thumb|300px|right|Gary Allan - Get Off on the PainAllan's first Greatest Hits collection was released on March 6, 2007. A Number One album on the Billboard Top Country Albums charts, the album reprised the greatest hits from his first six albums, as well as two new songs. One of these, titled "A Feelin' Like That", was co-written by David Lee Murphy and Ira Dean (the latter a former member of Trick Pony); the single peaked at #12 on the country singles charts.
Allan's album titled Living Hard, was released on October 23, 2007. Serving as its lead-off single was the song "Watching Airplanes," which spent more than thirty weeks on the country charts, where it reached a peak of #2 and went #1 on the Mediabase Chart. The song's music video was filmed during live concerts, including one at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado. Second single "Learning How to Bend" – co-written by Allan – quickly became another hit song, peaking at #13. The video was filmed during a live performance at the thumb|300px|right|Gary Allan - Watching AirplanesHouse of Blues in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Following this song is third single "She's So California," which Allan co-wrote with Jaime Hanna (of Hanna-McEuen) and Jon Randall, and it peaked at #24, becoming his first single to miss the top 20 since "Lovin' You Against My Will" in 2000.
A new single called "Today" was released on June 12, 2009. It served as the lead-off single to Allan's studio album, Get Off on the Pain, which was released on March 9, 2010.
Title track, "Get Off on the Pain", is the album's second single. It debuted at #42 on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, the highest-debuting single of his career.
"Kiss Me When I'm Down" the album's third single. released to radio in 2010. It debuted at #52 on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Songs chart.
www.garyallan.com biography
“I ain’t really happy,” sings Gary Allan on “Get Off on the Pain,” the down-home masterstroke that begins and provides the name for his new MCA Nashville collection, “until the sky starts driving rain.” Unhesitatingly frank, mercilessly guitar-crazed, it’s the rocked-out country confession of a smart guy drawn to what the rest of the world calls wrong roads and long shots, or complains of as aching bones and stubbornness, or — as Allan sings in a spectacular stretch of drawn-out soulful vowels — underestimates as dark horses. And as the California-born superstar releases his eighth studio album, it’s about the most Gary Allan piece anyone could imagine.
“That’s, like, very autobiographical,” Allan understates, talking about the song. “I feel like I’m living that right now. It’s got a lot of life in there for me: It represents the relentless quality of life on the road. You’ll never hear me singing about tractors or farms, just because I don’t know anything about that stuff. Wrong roads and dark horses I know about. Still, I think the pain can get to be some kind of a positive for me because it connects to everything I’ve ever dreamed of. While it’s relentless, it’s confirmation of the actual existence of this big musical drama, the result of the dream.”
That dream, for Allan, was to become exactly what he has become over the course of a lifetime in the field: a singer and songwriter forever cognizant of country music’s rough and storied past yet never wholly enslaved by its stylistic or social traditions. As a teenager performing in California, he skipped the bars that didn’t want to hear him play George Jones music; as a Nashville artist, he never worried about rocking things out or missing an awards-show red carpet. “It’s almost become a challenge to get into this town. But I’m also really comfortable with where I am, being slightly on the outside.” Allan always has developed and continued to refine his own tattooed power and finesse.
But none of it has ever confused him. “I just wanted to be viable and, I guess, prove that the viable stuff can be necessary,” Allan says, and if his career often has seemed less loud and permanently neon-lit than those of some of his peers, Allan has indeed achieved a robust viability, consistently hitting all the gold and platinum sales benchmarks by which those kinds of determinations are measured. “I remember talking about this when I first got signed to a Nashville major label,” Allan says. “Even then I was able to say, ‘Look, I’m never going to be the latest greatest thing, because that usually goes straight up and then burns out.’ My goal was — and remains — to be like Willie Nelson or George Strait, people who consistently rise. I think because I’ve done this since I was a little kid that I want it to be in my life forever. I want to be like Willie, playing until I’m 70. That’s what I’m swinging for.”
With aspirations like that, Get Off on the Pain sure fits the bill, an eighth album that shows no signs of musical fatigue and, moreover, promises an undeniable future. Songs like the atmospheric “We Fly by Night,” the indestructible title track, and the dramatically cascading, deliberate “I Think I Had Enough” consolidate the strengths of previous Gary Allan music — the Orbisonesque elegance of “Smoke Rings in the Dark” (1999), the brute power of “Man to Man” (2001), the smarts of “Watching Airplanes” (2007). The album strikes out in different directions, too. This is country music from a guy who effortlessly can sing the wry, despondent “Kiss Me When I’m Down,” which imports elements of rock chamber-pop, into the same collection song cycle that contains the rollicking “That Ain’t Gonna Fly,” whose choruses taps the richest harmonic fundamentals of gospel music turning into pop.
Whatever style, these songs, produced by the award-winning Nashville music man Mark Wright, proceed with an unusual confidence. “They’re more focused,” Allan says. “Everybody just knows more of what we’re going for now, because I always use the same players in the studio; I’ve done that since day one. This is nine records, counting our Greatest Hits album, we’ve made together. So I think everybody just knows what I want. It’s just a lot easier. I’ve sat down and played those guys things on my guitar, trying to show what I wanted. I think just with time you just get better with it.”
A couple albums back, Allan did a triumphant version of Jessie Winchester’s “A Showman’s Life”; packing lifetimes of drama and consequence into his performance, he uncovered and demonstrated what it feels like to live your life on the road, day in and day out, to play music. “You beat yourself up pretty bad doing it,” Allan says. “There are lots of sacrifices, mostly personal, but it’s a rush.” Get Off on the Pain, is like a ten-song demonstration of Allan’s version of Winchester’s song. The album sums up and expands Allan’s fifteen years of Nashville music-making as it lately has arrived out of the frenetic pace of his jam-packed touring schedule.
‘I relate to the road,” he says. “It’s a relentless life you live out there. But it’s been my life for the last four or five years. Since Ange passed, it’s been like a healing process for me — a way to sanity, a way of keeping my mind on something else, namely my music.” The reference is to Angela Herzberg, Allan’s wife, who committed suicide in 2004 after suffering from depression and migraines; Tough All Over, Allan’s album from 2005, contained songs that addressed her death. “We were crying,” Allan says, “the whole time we were making it.”
Right now, Allan finds himself in a different although not disconnected place; the new collection climaxes with “No Regrets,” a ballad that retraces and reexamines some of those still-present 2004 emotions. “I feel like I’m always,” Allan says, “going to be writing songs about Ange.”
He returns to the notion of his road album being also his current career summary album. “It’s a consolidation of everything I’ve done, and what’s to come is the settling of Gary Allan,” he says. “I’m still not there. I’m still in a transitional state, healing and partying and trying to find out how we’re going to bring all this home — how to grow up, settle, find a place where I’m content. Some place I can go, I guess, to bring it all home, when it’s all done. I hope to be able to put it all on paper and in the sound waves so you can watch and hear it. That’s what I’ve tried to do with every record before this one. It’s the accumulation of it all. And right now, I feel like the ground is trembling.”