Rising Stars: Meet Randy Ross

Today we’d like to introduce you to Randy Ross.

Randy, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I was born and raised in Phoenix, AZ where I lived for my entire childhood. After graduating high school I decided to attend college at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque which ended up lasting exactly one year. When I was home for summer break after my freshman year I had gotten into jamming with some musician friends from high school and we were having a lot of fun with it. Eventually, we started playing some small gigs around town and that was what hooked me, it felt like I had found what I was supposed to be doing with my life. This newfound discovery coupled with my longstanding loathing for a formal education led to me dropping out of school before I even started my sophomore year. I had decided I was going to make this music thing work no matter what. In what seemed like no time at all I had started writing songs for the first time ever and had put a pretty legitimate band together for more gigs around town.

Sadly, at that time, Phoenix didn’t have much of a music scene. There were always plenty of places to play but it seemed we would always end up on bills that were either full of high school kids or dad rock bands playing Beatles covers. It was a weird type of limbo if you were a young adult trying to make music in Phoenix at that time.

Eventually, the time came for me to leave Arizona as I knew all along what I would have to do if I was serious about a music career. The decision to come to Nashville was as impulsive and immediate as when I decided I wasn’t going back to UNM. One morning in March of 2017, about a month before I turned 21, I woke up and immediately said “I can’t stand living here anymore I’m going to move to Nashville as soon as I possibly can.” It turned out that “as soon as I possibly can” was about three days later.

I quit my job, packed all my gear, my mattress, and one duffel bag of clothes in my car, and started my drive to Nashville with a little more than $1000 to my name. I knew that when I got here I would be in for a rude awakening. I had only started learning the guitar at the age of 18 and from what I had heard about Nashville pretty much all the musicians were gigging since before they could walk. I felt good about that though, I felt if I was ever going to get really good it was going to be a necessary step in the process. Lucky for me I did find those people who made me realize I wasn’t half as good as I thought I was, and even luckier they let me hang around and soak up as much knowledge as I could from them. Those first two years here were pretty much the most formative years of my time playing music. I had become obsessed with songwriting as art and had become friends with some people who I still consider to be on the same level as some of the greatest to ever do it. It was a time of nonstop learning and growth that was a huge part of my becoming the artist I am today.

And I’ll be forever grateful to the mentors I had in Ray Sisk, Jim Martin, and Thom “Lizzard” Case (former owner of Bobby’s Idle Hour Tavern) to name just a few. February of 2019 a pretty was a pretty big turning point when myself and some friends of mine (Jim Martin, Brandon Brindley, and Weston Williams, Olivia Korkola, Ray Duncan, Dylan Cronk) started doing a weekly two-night residency at Belcourt Taps in Hillsboro Village which we called The All Nighters. We play every Friday and Saturday night from 11 to close and that was where I began to learn to really have stage presence and how to work for a crowd. You could almost call it songwriter boot camp. In the early days of the All-Nighters, we felt like outcasts. Not a whole lot of people in the scene we had entered liked us at first. We didn’t play music the same way they did and we certainly weren’t interested in playing along with any of their games. This made it very easy for us to project ourselves as the modern-day versions of our country music heroes and self-justify quite a bit of rowdy behavior and more than our fair share of partying. I won’t go into specifics but you can imagine what I mean. It was a crazy fun time in my life and we were working hard too, but a lot of time was also wasted and soon it was going to be time to get serious.

Winter of 2019 I began working on what is now my debut album. I had just come back from a month in Albuquerque, New Mexico where I was helping my friend Camille Grey make a record and I decided it was time to make one for myself. I went to work on it with a bunch of my closest friends in a studio I helped put together in the basement of a house in West Nashville. We had the thing about 80% finished by March 2020 when, obviously, the entire world came to a halt because of Covid-19. I took a few months to just enjoy the time off at the beginning of the pandemic.

Went to a farm in Southeastern Tennessee with a bunch of my All Nighters buddies where we essentially quarantined in this 100-year-old farmhouse for close to two months. That was a near magical time because none of us were on our phones, and it felt like we lived in a totally different world for a while except for when we had to go into town for groceries. We passed the time by writing songs, doing farm chores, fishing, and really just existing in a place where we really didn’t have much access to modern technology (no wifi, no TV, terrible cell service so essentially no phones).

Of course, I had to bring along some microphones and recording gear and we made a compilation album of some of the songs we all wrote when we were out there which is now called ‘The Farm Tapes’. We recorded the whole thing in the upstairs bedroom of the farmhouse with just a couple mics and acoustic guitars, it’s rough but it’s the perfect snapshot of that little period of life. Once some things in Nashville started to re-open we all had to leave the farm and get back to work in Nashville. Most of us had run out of money and were glad to have our jobs back anyways but it sure was a bummer to have to join back in with the rest of the world after spending the last two months in what seemed like an entirely different world. Eventually, I was able to get back to work on the album and got the thing done by the winter of 2020. I’ll never be able to thank the friends and musicians who made it possible enough (Olivia Korkola (fiddle), Lindsey Isaacson (dobro), Meredith Brownski (fiddle), Jamaine Pitts (saxophone), and Kipper Grey (piano). It was released in June of 2021 and after all the trouble I went through actually to finish it I’m very glad it’s finally out there in the world.

These days I’ve been playing around town with a band I put together earlier this year, still doing The All Nighters on the weekends with Jim Martin and working on finding a way to get back on the road. Which is a pretty tough task for an independent artist right now. I’m also getting ready to start recording a second album in about a month and I cant wait to get back in the studio with my live band and see what we can come up with for these new songs. That’s basically the story of how I got to where I am right now!

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It’s definitely been the opposite of a smooth road for me. I’ve dealt with all the normal life stuff like being broke, being heartbroken, having cars blow up on me that I had no money to fix, lived on friends’ couches for periods of time because I didn’t have a place of my own. There are two incidents that really stand out to me though.

1. One of the first roommates I had in Nashville stole rent money from me and immediately left town. One day the other roommate in the house and I woke up to a note saying that he was going to rehab and would be back in a month. 4 or 5 days later we get a call from our landlord saying that rent hadn’t been paid and wondering when/if we were going to have the money. I was so angry because we had lived with this guy for over a year and we had never had a reason not to trust him. We’d always send him our portion and he would pay the landlord in full on time every month. Until that one day when he left that note and had taken off with our money. Luckily he left some things behind that we were able to sell to cover the month’s rent, but that was definitely a bad situation and almost enough to send me back home for awhile.

2. The worst situation I’ve found myself in since living here was one night after an All-Nighters gig in April of 2019 I was robbed at gunpoint by three guys as I was getting into my car. They pulled me out of the car, all of them shoving guns in my face and telling me to throw everything I had on the ground. This was right after I’d read the story about the couple who had been killed across the street from the Cobra in East Nashville, and another story a couple of months before about someone being killed downtown. The thing about both those stories was the victims of the robberies had willingly given up all their stuff but were killed anyway.

So as soon as I saw the guns, I was pretty sure I was going to die. I remember thinking “Well they’re gonna kill me no matter what, I might as well try to run for it.” So I threw everything on the ground except for my phone (still not sure why I didn’t give that up) and as they were picking things up I backed across the street to get a little farther away from them. When they noticed my phone wasn’t on the ground they looked up and started yelling asking where it was and that’s when I turned and ran for my life down an alley behind some buildings about a quarter mile back to Belcourt Taps where some of my friends were still milling around. I told them what had happened and we looked out down the street in time to see the guys stall my car trying to get it off the curb (it was a stick shift) and then eventually bail and run away on foot.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
To be honest, this is a hard one for me because I’ve never really been great at speaking about what I do. My main mission is just to write good songs. Being a good songwriter is always the number one goal for me. I want to write songs about real life, every day things that hopefully make people think and reflect on themselves a little bit.

I don’t know if there is a sure way one has accomplished that goal, but that is always the goal. There are lots of other things that are very important as well, like being a good performer and putting on an entertaining live show. But for me, it all comes back to trying to write a good song.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/randyrayross/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/randyrayross
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZst1ezhHfk5wpnrmuz8CtA
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1hO1Z6Acm1dY4nT7mliMGJ 

Image Credits
Luis Gonzalez and Katelyn Dowd