Welcome to Country Minute 2.0

At the end of June, we stood in Nissan Stadium in Nashville and watched Alan Jackson play his last show.

We weren't supposed to be there. We don't live in Nashville, we didn't have tickets, and I had mostly made peace with watching it from home. Then an invitation came through in the final days, and we made it work. Twenty hours of driving across three days, and worth every mile to stand in a room with tens of thousands of people watching one of the last living kings of country music say goodbye.

What I didn't expect was how many of them already knew us. Person after person came up that weekend and told us they watch Country Minute.

Being there would have been enough. But we had a feeling the moments we were capturing were something more, and when we woke up two days later to find that content nearing twenty million views, I'm not sure either of us had words for it. It was the highest point of this whole journey.

It also came with a frightening realization. We didn't own any of it. We never had.

Every video, every idea, every one of these relationships lives somewhere we don't control. An algorithm changes, a platform folds, and you're all gone. Four years of work and no way to reach a single one of you.

So we decided to build something that's ours. This is the foundation.

Here's how we got here, if you're new.

It started in an office, in a house we don't live in anymore. I'd spent months making videos about how musicians could promote themselves on TikTok, and somewhere in there it hit me that nobody was covering country music the way I wanted to see it. So one morning I made a video about Ashley Gorley, my favorite songwriter and somebody I still have not met. For whatever reason, it worked.

Then in April 2024 I lost my full time job. We'd just welcomed our first child. We were about to buy our first house. Any reasonable person would have told me to go find another job. Laura told me to do Country Minute full time instead.

The two years since have taken us further than we thought this thing could go. Close to half the country. More artists than I could begin to count. Thousands of country fans, a lot of whom are reading this right now. Then in March, Laura left her job to do this full time too. A real family business.

Now the newsletter. Yes, everybody has one. This one is ours, and it won't be a repeat of what you get from us on social. You'll get the country music news you actually need, plus everything that never fits in sixty seconds. The drives. The towns we stumble into between shows. What we loved, what we didn't, and more honesty than we've been able to give you before. If social is the highlight reel, this is the whole trip.

There's more coming too, including a big expansion of our YouTube channel out of the studio we just finished building in our basement.

People often ask what we want out of all this. Remember when CMT and MTV had VJs, personalities you actually connected with? People who stood next to the artists you loved and still seemed like they could be your neighbor? That's what we want to be. A face for country music fandom, taking your questions to the artists you love and the ones you haven't found yet, in a place where fans get to just be fans and the noise of the rest of the internet stays outside.

Honestly, I don't think we were ready to do that until now.

One thing we will ask of you: Tell us what you want. A community thrives when everyone has a voice. If there is something we need to see or hear or talk about, let us know. We are building this together.

Some of you signed up years ago and waited a long time for us to use this thing. If that's you, thanks for sticking around. For everyone else, we're glad you're here. You're on the ground floor.

James and Laura