Contrary to the popular trend in Music City, Josh Dorr didn’t make the move to Nashville to pursue a lifelong dream in singing or songwriting. Born and raised in Wyoming, Dorr relocated to Nashville after a college football career didn’t pan out due to injuries. Without football in his life, Josh had a void he needed to fill, so in 2010 he packed his bags and headed to Tennessee where everything seemed to fall into place. Fast forward five years and the small town athlete has transformed into a full-blown artist. Dorr’s newest single, ‘Rocket,’ was selected for Sirius XM’s Highway Find and spent some time on The Highway’s Hot 45 Countdown. NECM had the opportunity to talk with Josh about his journey, his single, and more!
For someone who has such a talent for songwriting and performing, it’s crazy to think that this isn’t something Josh has been doing his entire life. He explained how it all started, “I moved to Nashville in 2010 and I just started writing songs in about 2011. More so, I just fell in love with the lifestyle and the people,” he said. Dorr made a lot of friends who were songwriters and could see how much they loved their jobs and how happy they were in their careers. However, he admitted that singing, especially in front of an audience, is something that terrified him at first. “I didn’t start singing really until, if you got me really really drunk, probably like my last year or two in college. But I couldn’t really play the guitar back then, I knew like two songs. I was mortified of being in front of people. I would get sick to my stomach knowing that I had to do a speech in communications class,” he confessed. But his friends and the atmosphere of the city intrigued him enough to give it a shot.
As it turned out, performing gave Josh that adrenaline rush he had been searching for ever since he had to quit playing football. As someone who had played sports his entire life, and was heavy into football in high school and college, Josh craved that rush of being on the field. “All of a sudden when I quit and I was going about my everyday life, you know college football, I started at 4:30-5:00 in the mornings and we would go until 10:00 at night between school and football. So that’s a big part of your life to just cut out abruptly and try to figure something else out to fill the hole, and not get in trouble,” he said. The move to Nashville left Josh with a lot of time on his hands. He found himself wandering around looking for something to fill that void when he started writing songs. It was all just for fun until one of his friends took it upon himself to steal some of Dorr’s songs off his computer. “He showed them to some people around town in the publishing world and the record label world,” Josh recounted. People were really impressed by what they heard and it gave Dorr the confidence boost he needed to take his music public. “So I did little songwriting rounds and I just thought that was the coolest thing ever. I kind of started getting the hint that this could maybe be the void-filler that I’ve been looking for, and then I played a full band show and I was like like, ‘Yep, I’m in. Let’s do this!’”
With his newfound self-assurance, Dorr seemed to be unstoppable. In a city full of creativity and ingenuity, Josh continued to grow as a songwriter, drawing inspiration from everything around him. “I’m very in tune with my friends’ world and I try to feel what they feel and I think that’s just coming from being in Nashville,” he said, adding, “If it’s not an experience straight out of the book of my life, it’s something usually with a friend or a family member.” Josh explained what it’s like to get together with other songwriters, sometimes strangers, and just spill your heart out for a song, “It’s just really weird to think about from an outsider perspective,” he said, “It’s kind of like an unspoken rule, you know, you kind of just keep it in the writing room. So it kind of gives everybody this security blanket and people will just open up to you and it’s really cool that people do do that.” Josh says that for him, the songs he writes are roughly 70% personal while the other 30% is influenced by someone else. “It’s kind of like being a fiction author,” he noted.
Not only has Josh been making headway as a songwriter, he’s started to develop his own personal sound. “It’s been definitely influenced by a lot of rock and kind of Americana, country…” he trailed off, “I want it to be like stadium rock choruses – like Tom Petty choruses that are big but still not sacrificing lyrics.” He continued to explain that recently, in his opinion, music has had either one or the other. There are these big party tracks that are great to jam to but weak in lyrics, and on the other end of the spectrum you have artists like Jason Isbell and Chris Stapelton who deliver lyrical masterpieces full of heart and soul. But with that mega-performance Chris Stapleton and Justin Timberlake put on at the CMA Awards, Dorr hopes that could lead to a momentum swing that could work out in his favor. Since Josh spends some time writing outside of the country genre, he would love the opportunity to do a collaboration like Stapleton’s with Timberlake, but right now he doesn’t see himself abandoning country. “My roots are so grown into the country ground,” he said, “I just love country music and I love the people of country music. I like the lifestyle and the people of country music more than anything and the fans just seem to be like super loyal and so I have no intentions of leaving.” But above all else, he says, “I just love making music and making people have fun and enjoy themselves listening to it.”
Josh’s latest single, ‘Rocket,’ is undoubtedly a song that his fans have fun listening to. The powerful, up-tempo track is about being bold, adventurous, and just living in the moment. The song, written by Dorr and his buddies, Blair Daly and Troy Verges, tells a story inspired by a daydream about taking a girl on an incredible, out of this world date. It’s about a night that Josh wished could have happened in high school, if only he had a different car. “I drove this really lame teal Chevy Cavalier and I just hated it!” he said. “The girl that I had a crush on for like my entire life when we went to high school, she also had a teal Cavalier, so you could see where this could become a problem for a guy. I was already awkward and had the braces and retainers and long shaggy hair,” Josh said. Even through the phone, you sense him cringing as he described it, “All that awkward teenage stuff that nobody wants to go through ever again.” He was telling this story to his co-writers when he said, “Maybe I would have had a chance with that girl if I could have turned my teal Cavalier into something cooler like a Go-Go Gadgetmobile, or a spaceship,” he joked. Then inspiration struck, “Blair was like, ‘or like a Rocket!’” Josh said laughing. It took a while for Josh to warm up to the idea of a song called ‘Rocket’ but as soon as Blair started playing the opening guitar, the lyrics came naturally to Dorr. “I just started spitting out words and almost spit out the entire chorus and I got to the part where it needed a hook and Blair just goes, ‘Like a rocket. I’m tellin you, man. It’s cool. It’s going to be cool.’ and so that’s kind of how it happened,” Dorr explains.
Apparently the Sirius XM Country station, The Highway, also thought it was cool because, as mentioned, ‘Rocket’ was selected as a Highway Find, and the responses that Josh has been getting are incredible. “You always hope for the best and prepare for the worst anytime you put out music or put yourself out there in general,” said Dorr. “The first week we were on The Highway we charted at number 32 on their Top 45 and then we jumped six spots this last week and now we’re at 26, so it’s pretty cool.” But that’s not all, the success of his single on The Highway has also caused an increase in fans streaming his music on Spotify. He’s been keeping tabs on how many listeners and followers he has per month and noticed a drastic increase since The Highway Find. “‘Rocket’ went from 184,000 a few weeks ago to now we have like over a quarter million plays!” he said. For someone like Josh, it’s hard to believe, “It’s so weird thinking about because literally there’s like 500,000 people in the state of Wyoming where I’m from. Two of my songs have over a million plays. Just for me that’s such a weird number because I’m used to very small numbers,” he said.
Even with all the success he’s seen on The Highway, Josh explained that for now, there isn’t a set plan to release it to FM radio, at least until after the new year. But that doesn’t mean Dorr has been taking it easy. “We’re definitely heavy into booking some shows for next year,” he said, “and I’ve just been writing for my new project the rest of this month. But we’re going and playing at the National Finals Rodeo for ten days straight in December in Vegas. So that’s our one thing, our last hoorah before a ticket home for Christmas.” We’re eager to see what 2016 has in store for Josh as he continues to thrive. If ‘Rocket’ gives any indication of what’s to come, then we’re sure Dorr’s music career is really going to take off.
Josh loves interacting with his fans online, be sure to check him out on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
You can purchase Josh’s ‘Rocket’ on iTunes here.