Lauren is doin’ fine travelling her country road
OVER the weekend, country singer and former American Idol runner-up Lauren Alaina posted a Facebook Live video of herself sobbing.
“I just got a call from my label that Road Less Travelled – I can’t even say it,” she said, her voice shuddering as she wiped away tears. She took a deep breath: “I just got a call from my label that said Road Less Travelled is the No 1 song in the country.”
While it’s always special for an artist to land a No 1 song at country radio, the milestone is a particularly big deal for Alaina. Not only is it her first chart-topper, but the success of the self-confidence anthem Road Less Travelled (written by Alaina, Meghan Trainor and Jesse Frasure) comes after years of frustrations and setbacks as Alaina struggled to break through in Nashville following her debut album post-Idol in 2011.
“I just can’t believe it,” Alaina said, crying again as she addressed her fans. “I’m just so humbled and thankful and proud of all of us, because we’ve all gotten me here, and you guys have never given up on me. It took us six years, but we finally did it.”
Alaina’s No1 is also especially meaningful because it comes after five singles that flopped – and sometimes getting a second chance, let alone a sixth one, is a rarity. In country music, radio support is crucial, and you really start to earn credibility (and money) as a song climbs higher up the chart. The more singles that fail, the harder it is to gain momentum, as radio programmers tend to move on if multiple songs from the same artist flounder.
Even though Alaina had a major label behind her (Mercury, owned by Universal Music Group), her singles lagged. Her first album, Wildflower, debuted in October 2011, about six months after she was crowned the American Idol runner-up. It sold about 300 000 copies, but all three singles (Like My Mother Does, Georgia Peaches and Eighteen Inches) moved slowly on the radio charts, unable to crack the Top 25.
In 2013, she released Barefoot and Buckwild, which barely made an impact. Two years later, the flirty Next Boyfriend died around the Top 40. Finally, Road Less Travelled, released in July 2016, started to move, aided by iHeartRadio’s On the Verge programme, in which the company’s country stations are required to play a chosen song a certain number of times. In January, the label had enough confidence in the single to release Alaina’s sophomore album, also called Road Less Travelled.
It’s fairly unusual for a label to keep supporting a singer with such a long lag time between albums – but the timing may have worked out in her favour. As the 22-year-old Alaina explained on syndicated radio host Bobby Bones’s podcast, it was a tough transition going from being a teenager on Idol, where she was treated like a star, to just another Nashville singer in the extremely competitive country industry.
“You’re excited – and then your singles don’t work and then things don’t happen the way you think they’re going to,” Alaina said.
“But it was the best thing that ever happened to me, losing those singles and realising I’m actually not important… I was not ready as a 16-year-old girl for what I have now.”
Since Idol, Alaina has also faced personal challenges, and has opened up about many of them, including the fact that she suffered from bulimia. She was temporarily out of commission after vocal chord surgery. Then her parents got divorced, her father went to rehab, and her mother married her father’s best friend; all of which she sings about her in her opening album track, Doin’ Fine.
Now as Road Less Travelled hits its peak, many in Nashville – and Alaina’s fanbase – are celebrating the achievement, as she’s gained a lot of goodwill.