HotStar: Thompson Square

Are these the early days for Thompson Square? It depends.

Keifer and Shawna Thompson recently emerged on the national scene with a platinum-selling, No. 1 hit, “Are You Gonna Kiss Me Or Not.” The followup, “I Got You,” is off to a great start.

So, these might be early days, but great ones.

Then again, the Thompsons are not riding around on a turnip truck.

“We moved to Nashville in 1996,” Shawna Thompson told Pollstar. “Keif would be working down on Broadway and I’d be sitting in with a band. That’s when people started saying we should work together. It made sense. I guess we just couldn’t see the forest for the trees.”

Fifteen years ago is also when the “new” artists met their future manager, Shawn Pennington. When Thompson Square had its first showcase, Pennington said he’d be there with the staff of Broken Bow Records.

“Before that showcase, I was emailing him for advice and told him we would be a duo,” Shawna said. “He’d write back, ‘Bad idea. Don’t do it. Bad idea.’ So, obviously, we didn’t follow his instructions.”

That wasn’t the only bad idea of the evening.

“When you’ve been in Nashville and do multiple showcases, you’ll have record labels say they’ll come out and they never do. So we didn’t have a guest list, and they all had to pay $10. And the B-3 organ broke down.”

Still, a week later, Broken Arrow invited the Thompsons to the office and they were signed to sister label Stoney Creek on the spot.

It’s the same story with their agent, Greg Oswald. The couple sang for him and he signed them immediately, without seeing their live show.

“We didn’t expect him to be our agent directly; we thought he’d assign us to some junior agent, so it meant the world to us that he’d want to invest his time,” Shawna said. “So I really can’t say anything bad about the guy. He is amazing.”

Thompson Square is supporting Jason Aldean, with two tours to be announced.