Old Dominion‘s taken home the CMA vocal group award every year since 2018.
But the “Making Good Time” hitmakers put in a decade of work before they started routinely winning that CMA category.
“We’ve been a band now for close to 20 years,” lead singer Matthew Ramsey says. “And we’ve been operating at this level, you know, successfully, for 10 now, so it has been quite a journey.”
Trevor Rosen is quick to affirm that OD was no overnight success.
“It seemed like it took forever,” he admits. “But we spent many years just learning how to write great songs in Nashville before we even thought about trying to go after it as a band. And then when we did decide to be a band, there [were] many years in a van and trailer just building it up fan by fan. So it is always funny to me when people observe it like it happened overnight.”
Perhaps the primary ingredient in the five-man band’s longevity is friendship.
“I don’t think we would have made it this far if we didn’t have such a good time just as friends,” Geoff Sprung says, “talking about the eight to 10 years where we were really kind of slugging it out. The reason we kept coming back was because when we got in that van, it was a lot of fun just to interact with these guys.”
OD will do a medley of their hits during Wednesday’s 59th CMA Awards, which air live from Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena starting at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.
“It’s a nice long performance, too,” Matthew says. “Sometimes those performances, they go by so fast and you don’t really remember what happened, but this will feel like a little mini-show and it should be a lot of energy.”
Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
