“One of country’s most promising newcomers,” Capitol Records Nashville’s Caylee Hammack, released the high-energy and soulful live video for her “‘90s-alt-rock-influenced banger” “Just Friends” exclusively with Variety. The track is taken from her forthcoming debut album and showcases the “star power” (Billboard)Hammack emanates. Filmed while on the road opening up for Brothers Osborne, the video has Hammack “sounding like the second coming of Dolly before she goes grunge” (Variety). Watch it here: https://variety.com/2019/music/news/caylee-hammack-video-premiere-just-friends-1203254442/
Hammack shared in a colorful interview with Variety, “The one thing I hate more than burnt coffee is indecisive men. And this one couldn’t make up his mind or make up his heart, and because of it, I felt like I got played with. For a while, I was sweet and sad about it and forgave him. And it was probably a few months after that I started kind of getting angry… I had pulled out my guitar and started playing the first, sad part of ‘Just Friends,’ and then I thought well, this is too sad and way too slow. So I started writing something else and leaning into the anger of it. And that’s when I came up with that ‘You should have never come over’ melody.”
Hammack’s commanding stage presence compliments the songwriter and producer’s all-in approach to music, evident in her current single “Family Tree.” The “exultant” (CMT) track debuted as the most-added single at Country radio by a female artist in over three years and has instantly caught the attention of headliners Dierks Bentley and Miranda Lambert, whom she will hit the road with this summer between sets at some of country music’s biggest festivals including Faster Horses Festival, Seven Peaks Music Festival and more.
Background on Caylee Hammack:
Caylee Hammack constantly felt like a self-described “hippie in a hillbilly town” in her tiny hometown of Ellaville, Georgia. “I used to pray every night as a kid, ‘God, just please make me different. Don’t make me like everyone else,’” she remembers. Hammack is indeed refreshingly different. And at only 25, she has already packed a full life into just a few years, using fake IDs to get gigs around South Georgia, turning down a college scholarship for a love that burned out just a few months later, sleeping in her car when she arrived in Nashville and then losing her home in an electrical fire. “My dad has always said that the most beautiful and strongest things are forged in the fire,” she says. “Iron is nothing until you work it in a fire. Glass cannot be blown without intense heat. You can’t make anything beautiful or strong without a little heat.”
Tested by the fire, Caylee Hammack has been molded into an artist with incredible depth and a powerhouse voice that can effortlessly veer from fiery and demanding to quiet and vulnerable. Her life experience and relentless curiosity have coalesced into a country cocktail that’s rooted in tradition but expands with shards of modern pop and rock. Her self-penned songs tug on her own life story – bad decisions, secret affairs, broken hearts, a quirky family lineage – as she invariably turns the lemons of her daring life into sonic lemonade. Hammack has also been the noted as an “Artist To Watch” by outlets such as The Bobby Bones Show, Rolling Stone and HITS Magazine for her “voice to move mountains” alongside her “clever story telling that keeps it all in motion” (Rolling Stone). For additional information, visit cayleehammack.com.
