Instead of exploiting a moment when Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn still have tread left on the tires to give it another shot with original songs, we get a second installment in their Reboot series.
Taken as a whole, F-1 Trillion is much more of a contemporary version of pop country than it is anything else, with committee-written songs, little heart, substance, or soul. But this album is supposed to be fun, and Post Malone succeeds.
During the Toby Keith tribute, Tyler Hubbard was scheduled to sing Toby Keith’s most simple and silly song, “Red Solo Cup.” If you had to hand off a song to a former member of Florida Georgia Line, it would be this one.
Post Malone’s “country” album “F-1 Trillion” isn’t even out for another month, and he’s already dominating the narrative at a time when country music was finally dominating much of the narrative in popular music all on its own.
Country music doesn’t need Post Malone to be cool like it did back in 2020. Post Malone, Shaboozy, Jelly Roll, and Beyoncé, it’s these artists who need country to be considered cool as we head into the summer of 2024.
You don’t really need a conventional album review to help navigate you through or understand Ernest’s 26-song treatise, Nashville, Tennessee. What you need is a road map, a sherpa, someone to point your nose in the right direction.
Every year as the nominations for country music awards come and go, it’s hard to not fall into a perfunctory attitude about them due to the cyclical and predictable nature of the nominees.
Boy didn’t the idea of Post Malone making a big country album or releasing country songs seem like a sexy idea over the last few years. Back in 2020 when he was running around in T-shirts from Tyler Childers.
Cody doubles down on his country roots, strengthens his commitment to quality songs, and even refines his sound with surprising sparsity and depth to the point where you’re nearly stunned at some of the results.
Lainey Wilson is the first woman in twelve years to win Entertainer of the Year. She’s only the 2nd woman to win it since 2000 (Taylor Swift won it twice). How in the world could Lainey Wilson pull off such a thing?
Every single year, the Country Music Association is going to find someone from outside of the country music genre to perform on the CMA Awards. That’s just the way things are. This year it’s Post Malone.
Lainey Wilson will be going out on an extensive tour in 2024, and she won’t be opening for the boys. The boys will be opening for her. It also won’t be in large clubs and theaters, it will be in amphitheaters and arenas.
Yes, there was actually a country music awards show on Thursday night (9-28). But unless you are a massive Dan + Shay fan or just a glutton for punishment, you probably didn’t even notice or know about it.
This weekend, Police and Fire personnel had large swaths of downtown Austin cordoned off due to a mass casualty/hazardous exposure event, also known as the CMT Awards. The barriers and checkpoints weren’t there to keep freeloaders out, it was to keep the grotesque infection of pop country quarantined.
One of the hottest up-and-coming artists in all of country music is now signed to the roster of one of the hottest labels in all of country music. Announced Wednesday afternoon (3-29), West Virginia native Charles Wesley Godwin has signed to Big Loud Records, which is the home of Morgan Wallen.
Love him, hate him, find yourself among the population of the very few who feel indifferent about him, Morgan Wallen is the biggest thing in mainstream country, and at this point, by such multiples of scale, it truly is difficult to comprehend. We’re talking Garth-level, generational, genre-defying popularity.
Whatever we’re calling this post Bro-Country era in popular country music, the bespectacled Hardy has a heavy hand in it, both as a primary song contributor to Morgan Wallen and others, as well as a performing career that continues to swell in popularity.
Over the Christmas/New Year holiday, Morgan Wallen’s “You Proof” set a rather landmark achievement by becoming the first radio single in country music history to spend 10 weeks at #1—a record that despite the song’s country lyricism as a heartbreak drinking song, can only be regarded as dubious.
For years, all we’ve had to see of what Marty Stuart had in store with the Congress of Country Music were architectural renderings. But as the Ellis Theater gets ready to open, we’re finally getting to witness just how much love and effort Marty Stuart and many others have put into bringing it to life.
There is new music from Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives. I repeat, there is new music from Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives. Along with the new song, Marty Stuart is finally announcing the opening of the first piece of his long-awaited Congress of Country Music.
A couple of weeks ago, HARDY announced a new album called ‘The Mockingbird and THE CROW’ to be released on January 20th, 2023, and released three preview songs with it. One of them is called “here lies country music,” and similar to ERNEST’s “Flower Shops,” it’s a straight ahead traditional country song.
It’s going to be hard for some distinguishing music fans to acknowledge that the paradigm in mainstream country is shifting. At this point, lashing out at any artist on corporate radio is an act of muscle memory, and often unlearning those motions is harder than learning them. This most certainly doesn’t mean there still isn’t […]
Who could have predicted that the hottest new things in country music would be pudgy songwriter dudes with mononyms. No, this isn’t HARDY. He’s the dorky-looking one with the glasses. This is ERNEST. Their rise is almost as improbable as the other hot trend…
‘Tis the season to set ’em up, and tee off on the worst “country” songs released in the last calendar year, and boy, were there some doozies in 2021. It still feels like country music in the mainstream continues to improve. But that doesn’t mean some stinkers still don’t slip in.