Justin Moore has plenty to be proud of looking back on his first decade with his label home Valory Music.
He was in Nashville last week celebrating his 10-year anniversary with the Big Machine imprint, which has released all four of his albums including his current collection Kinda Don’t Care. CMT will premiere the video for the title track on Friday (Nov. 3).
Since signing with Valory in 2007, Moore has amassed six No. 1s on Billboard‘s country airplay chart and sold millions of albums. Both his self-titled and Outlaws Like Me albums have been certified platinum, and Off the Beaten Path has gone gold.
“It’s crazy to think about,” Moore said at the private party. “The fact that the fans have stuck with me through a decade in this business is overwhelming. … Let’s do this again in 10 more years.”
Like his career, Moore’s family has grown, too. In June, he and his wife Kate welcomed their fourth child, a son named Thomas South Moore. He joins older sisters Ella Kole, Kennedy Faye and Rebecca Klein at home in Arkansas.
His family has always been his No. 1 priority, but now more so than ever, he says they remain his most significant accomplishment. They came up in conversation during our CMT.com interview while discussing how his relationship with his fans has changed following the tragedy at Las Vegas’ Route 91 Harvest music festival. After the shooting, Moore revealed he thought about canceling the 2017 dates on his Hell on a Highway Tour, and for the first time in his career, he’s hired security.
“My priorities in life have changed since becoming a father obviously,” Moore said. “I used to want to be one of the biggest country music artists on the planet. If that happens, that’s great, but that’s not anything I think about now.
“I love country music,” he added, “but I’m not willing to give my life for it because I’ve got a lot of babies to walk down the aisle.”
Moore added that he views his fans as family, too. He believes he wouldn’t have a career without them.
“The fans, they’re all our friends and family,” he said. “You can interchange those words. … The greatest thing about music –whether it’s a three-minute song, or an hour-and-10-minute album, or a two-hour show — is that it can make you laugh when you need to laugh; it can make you cry when you need to cry and make you forget about something.
“And to be able to help people with that is cool and the fact that somebody would choose to put in one of my albums or songs to help them do that as opposed to all the other great music out there is pretty cool to think about.”
Moore’s Hell on a Highway Tour continues Thursday (Nov. 2) with shows in Kentucky and Illinois.
“What we did for this tour is we asked on social media what’s some old songs that people may want us to play that we hadn’t played in few years,” Moore said. “We’ve added a handful of songs off the first couple of albums that we hadn’t played in five or six years. That’s just been fun for us, and I know the fans have dug it.”
Lauren Tingle
This Article Was Originally Posted at www.CMT.com
http://www.cmt.com/news/1788206/justin-moore-reflects-on-his-first-decade-of-hits/
