Randy Houser

A soulful Nashville star who blends the gruff outlaw songwriting of Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard with Southern rock riffs, Randy Houser has been a firm country-pop favourite since breaking through with album 'Anything Goes' in 2008. Growing up in the small town of Lake in central Mississippi, his father was a professional musician and started teaching him guitar chords at the age of five, and by ten he was fronting bands, writing his own songs and soaking up the region's rich connection to country, blues, gospel and R&B through local radio stations. After his father's death from alcoholism, Houser's songs became more personal and emotionally raw and he would later write the track 'I'll Sleep' about the experience.

He continued to pursue his musical dreams and headed to Nashville in 2003 where he signed a deal with Windswept Publishing and was part of a six-man writing group known as Traler Park which also included future brother-in-law Dallas Davidson, Jamey Johnson and Jerrod Niemann. He gained his first major songwriting credit when he helped pen the crossover top 30 hit 'Honky Tonk Badonkadonk' for Trace Adkins in 2005, and he went on to release his debut album 'Anything Goes' in 2008. Known for his deep Southern voice and strutting, blue-collar anthems, his second single 'Boots On' shot to number two in the Country Charts and Houser found his biggest success when ballad 'Runnin' Outta Moonlight' became popular on mainstream rock radio and helped the album 'How Country Feels' to number eleven in the Billboard Charts in 2013. Follow-up 'Fired Up' was also a commercial triumph, packed with raucous, hard-travelled, twanging country rock jams, but after celebrating ten years as a Nashville-pop favourite, he returned to his roots playing stripped down, raw, homespun storytelling on 'Magnolia' in 2019. Regarded as his most honest and poignant work, he saw the album as a reset and the title is a reference to the beautiful magnolia tree that he remembers his grandmother being buried underneath when he was six-years-old.