Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the 2025 ACM Awards LIVE Blog! As the event transpires, we’ll be following along in real time, razzing on folks for poor performances and life choices, and giving credit where it is due.
It’s ten kick ass, easy-to-love country songs that sound just like country music always has, and always should. But if you want to delve a little bit deeper, you’ll also discover its quiet genius.
Congratulations Eric Church fans, this is what you waited four years for—seven new songs and a Tom Waits cover spectacularly overproduced by Jay Joyce. “Evangeline vs. The Machine” is right…
Would we only get a wine and roses portrayal of the Opry, especially through the modern era? Or would it be willing to present the accurate history, warts and all? Luckily, the latter is the case.
Combining adept flat-picking with top-caliber songwriting and a voice perfectly tooled for bluegrass, Mason Via brings an accessibility and immediacy to the bluegrass discipline.
Why in the world is Willie Nelson still recording and performing music at the age of 91? Or even more perplexing, how is he even still alive, especially after the life he’s lived? The question and the answer are probably one in the same.
The best live country band in the world stopped into Austin’s Radio East on Friday night (4-25) on their current “Unlit Matches” tour to regale fans in the town the band originates from.
Chaparelle is endearing if nothing else, and quickly infectious, appealing to your classic country inclinations, but also tickling some guilty pleasures. Ultimately, it’s hard to not approve.
Pug Johnson explores the regional dialects of Texas and their intertwined nature, resulting in tasty and sometimes unexpected moments that has many buzzing about their next favorite artist.
When you think of Luckenbach, TX, you think of Jerry Jeff Walker’s Viva Terlingua! You think of Willie and Waylon and the boys. Bluegrass isn’t what immediately comes to mind. But for the fourth year.
No record label. No publicist. No big time producer. No problem. They’re still kicking out killer country music. Country Honk might have one the most generic names in the country universe, but you can’t say it’s not accurate.
When word leaked out that Ernest had been spotted in downtown Nashville recently with Snoop Dogg shooting a video, you expected the worst. But as bad as this could have been, it doesn’t sound bad at all.
As the rest of country music seems to be following Jon Pardi’s lead, Jon Pardi himself seems to be staying static, if not heading in the other direction ever so slightly.
This time around, Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives offer a take on ’60’s instrumental surf and Ennio Morricone Western soundtrack inspired sounds. The result is often breathtaking to behold.
What the Turnpike Troubadours have proven over time is that good songs endure, and better songs grow even better over time. There’s no mistaking it. The Turnpike Troubadours are now legends.
If you’re looking for relief or reparations from the ills of life, you can reach for alcohol or other intoxicants to inoculate you from life‘s fickle and sometimes debilitating moods, or you can reach for the music of The Wilder Blue.
Sturgill Simpson (or Johnny Blue Skies) capped off a cold, but action packed weekend in Texas at the Two Step Inn Festival just north of Austin. It was a truncated, but inspired and untethered festival set.
Good music never goes out of style. People’s tastes do. Then when they wisen up and the music of the day turns so cacophonous they can’t stomach it anymore, they come back to the stuff that’s always been good.
Acting as if proximity to you or anyone else is irrelevant, and money is no object, what are some of the best experiences you can have listening to music in America?
Matt Daniel is one of those artists clearly touched (or cursed) by the need to perform country music to unburden his soul, but blessed with immense talent to write and express it.
“Arcadia” might not be the best album to introduce your friends to the power of bluegrass, but it might be the ideal specimen to introduce them to the beauty of it.
Ready to explore her country noir impulses in full force, she intermixes country songs with more indie rock treatments in an album that is eclectic and explorative, and always forthright and engaging in the writing.
The song deserves credit for the emotional-laden arrangement and the attempt to go deeper than 12 oz. But ultimately “Cold Beer Can” is a formulaic beer track for radio.
They call themselves a rock and roll band, but they’re bursting with country blues, Southern textures, and even some straight up country songs that will fit right in with your sensibilities.