Trailer Choir, the duo made up of Vincent "Bigg Vinny" Hickerson and Marc “Butter” Fortney, recently signed a new record deal with Average Joes Entertainment, and their upcoming project for the label will be their first since Tailgate was released on Show Dog-Universal Music in 2010. Much has happened with the duo in those five years -- including work on a record, even without a label to back it.

"We were reaching a point where we had gone several years without releasing new music," Butter tells The Boot. "Vinny and I had a couple lemonade stands and garage sales to raise money and got ourselves in a position to start recording new music. We had just started getting behind "She’s Coming in Hot;" we were just going to put it out on our own, do whatever we could. And your expectations with that have some limitations: You don’t have the team. You don’t have a label. It was just me and him, and we were going to go after social media and anyone who would listen to it or play it or share it. We were just going to go for it."

Enter Average Joes Entertainment founders Shannon Houchins and Colt Ford, who offered the duo a record deal.

"We have always bounced songs off of Shannon and off of Colt," Bigg Vinny explains. "The song we sent them was "She’s Coming in Hot," and one of the lyrics in the song is, 'You got your windows shakin' / Colt Ford crankin',’ and we were like, ‘Oh, we should send this over to them? They’ll probably love it.’ And Shannon was like, ‘Why aren’t we doing this together?’"

Now, even though the guys are working on a new album for a new record company, they make it clear that they have nothing but love for their former label boss.

"We love Toby Keith," Bigg Vinny maintains. "And in no way do we want people to think that we didn’t respect and love those guys at Show Dog. They were great to us. They helped us get started. They helped us get our career. We still have a huge amount of respect for Toby and are still great friends. We obviously don’t get to hang out with him as much as we did when we were on tour with him every summer for three years, but we still stay connected. Butter actually writes with his daughter Krystal [Keith].

"We are very aware that they helped us in our career," he adds, "and we appreciate what they did and always will have love and respect for all those people."

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