• ShopTV Exclusive

Lee Brice is poised on the industry high wire with his long-awaited second Curb Records album Hard 2 Love hitting retail on April 24. After much success as a hit songwriter for a litany of country music’s most virile chart toppers from Garth Brooks and Kenny Chesney to Jason Aldean and Tim McGraw, Brice is now focusing his creative talents on propelling his own emergence as a superstar.

Setting the stage for Brice’s spring 2012 breakthrough, is the new album’s first single, "A Woman Like You" . Curb’s proven delivery system is currently on target in navigating the single into the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, closing in on gold certification with a blazing track record of 450,000 digital downloads already sold.

Hard 2 Love follows Brice’s critically-acclaimed debut album Love Like Crazy, which spawned Billboard’s Most Played Country Song of 2010 by virtue of its title track. Billboard remarkably repeated the honor in 2011 with the Brice-penned "Crazy Girl" hitting #1 for the Eli Young Band racking up “most played” song numbers in the country genre, and recently being nominated by the ACM in the prestigious “Song of the Year” category. Notable too in recent chart history, Brice penned Garth Brooks'"More Than A Memory"— the only song in Billboard history to debut at the top of the Hot Country Songs chart.

Undeniably, Lee Brice’s focus on center stage with the new studio project is built on a massive platform of success as one of Nashville’s hottest hit writers. Add to the mix the obvious facts that pure, authentic vocal talent and rough-hewn good looks are the ingredients for superstardom, and the South Carolina native is a rising talent well-worth the career investment to move his imaging pushpin from Curb Music Publishing hit songwriter to full blown major Curb label artist. His strategic branding with a new legion of fans has produced a solid following on 2010-2011 high-exposure runs in concert with Willie Nelson, Jamey Johnson, Luke Bryan, and Jerrod Niemann.

Hard 2 Love boldly showcases what all the excitement is about. Powerful vocals and top drawer songs provide a stellar collection that invests Brice both professionally and personally with honest, raw emotion. “Everything on the album reflects who I am right now and where I am in my life,” he noted in a recent interview.

Songs such as "Parking Lot Party", "Beer", and"Life Off My Years" portray the nuts and bolts realism of the “man’s man” spin on life in today’s reality series-driven culture. The title track "Hard To Love", "A Woman Like You", "Ring In My Pocket", and "One More Day" shed a more personal insight into the heart of the man and the creative, personal journey he’s on.

Co-produced by Lee Brice, Kyle Jacobs, Jon Stone, Doug Johnson, and Matt McClure, some of Nashville’s finest writers have been marshaled into creative service on Hard 2 Love with Lee’s major league troop “A-Team” writing buddies including Billy Montana, Jerrod Niemann, John Ozier, Jon Stone, and Eric Church. Brice co-wrote eight of the 13 tracks.