October 22, 2006
Miss Howard Stern Andrea Ownbey
The number of country artists who have appeared on Howard Stern’s radio show is small.
Willie Nelson has, and so have the Dixie Chicks. Add rising country star Trent Tomlinson to that short but impressive list.
A native of Kennett, Mo. (also the hometown of Sheryl Crow) Trent Tomlinson scored with his first single, “Drunker Than Me,” a based-in-fact, humorous ode to a woman who drank more than he did on a date.
Miss Howard Stern Dances
While the song peaked at No. 19 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, it received enough airplay to be heard by Andrea Ownbey, a former stripper who holds the dubious distinction of being known as “Miss Howard Stern.” Stern and his crew became aware of Trent Tomlinson’s single when Ownbey sang it at a karaoke contest.
When Trent Tomlinson heard about Ownbey’s performance, he offered to travel to New York to sing a duet with her on Stern’s show.
The Sirius Satellite Radio appearance was a success. Trent Tomlinson says Stern was “a class act. We really hit if off,” he says. “It was like we were two peas in a pod.”
After the July appearance, sales of his Lyric Street debut, “Country Is My Rock,” shot up more than 50 percent. Coupled with the airplay of his current single, “One Wing in the Fire” (which he wrote about his father) sales have remained steady ever since. The single is No. 26 on the Hot Country Songs chart.
Trent Tomlinson’s father, Don, is a former college basketball star who was drafted by the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers before knee surgery knocked him out. He was also a basketball coach and biology teacher at Kennett High School. His problems with alcohol inspired “One Wing in the Fire.”
“In the eyes of our town he was a great guy,” Trent Tomlinson says of his father, who is still living. “But none of those people knew what kind of guy he was when he’d had alcohol and came home.”
Although the younger Tomlinson resented his father’s behavior at the time, he later forgave him. “Once I got thinking about heaven and hell, I realized, what would heaven be without being able to see my dad there? So I wrote this song pleading to God for my dad to go to heaven.”
When Tomlinson played the song at Nashville’s famed Bluebird Cafe one night, his father was in the audience. “He gave me a one-man standing ovation,” Tomlinson says. “It was awesome.”
The song became a bridge between the two men. “We have a better relationship now than we’ve ever had,” Tomlinson says. And while he initially worried about airing his family’s dirty laundry by recording the song, he decided, “It’s my life.”
In fact, Trent Tomlinson says that it wasn’t until he started writing about his own life experiences that his songs began to connect with people.
“How can you expect someone to believe and buy what you’re doing unless you believe it yourself?” he asks. “There’s a lot of things I don’t know about, but what I do know about is my life.”
The yin and the yang of “Drunker Than Me” (”I can’t be with a woman, baby, who gets drunker than me”) and “One Wing in the Fire” (”He’s an angel with no halo and one wing in the fire”) typifies Trent Tomlinson’s album, which alternates between rousing rockers and thoughtful ballads. He wrote or co-wrote all 11 songs on the record.
Meanwhile, Trent Tomlinson is the best-selling solo country artist debut this year to date, according to Nielsen SoundScan, with 87,000 copies sold. In addition, he recently scored a coup with “Why Can’t I Leave Her Alone,” a song he co-wrote intending to record himself. He was beaten to the punch by country superstar
George Strait
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