A unique collaboration that gets your attention, “McArthrur” matches up slightly strange bedfellows to tell an epic story across generations, while remaining starkly relevant to a contemporary audience.
Patient, purposeful, authentic, vulnerable, and expressive, Ol’ Kayce Dutton isn’t just relying on his Yellowstone cred and what your girlfriend thinks is a cute butt to get by. He put in his time, paid some dues…
If you’re a good candidate for this treatment or even if you’re not, Casper McWade is serving up the remedy. It may not come in a brown bottle or require a prescription, but it is certainly effective for the pain.
It’s pretty rare that seven albums and 17 years into a career that an artist finds their stride, but that’s the determination many are coming to with Jon Wolfe’s ‘Dos Corazones,’ and for fair reasons. Inspired, passionate, well-written, and consistently enjoyable throughout.
If Morgan Wallen was a young male suitor in pursuit of your sister or daughter, he would be one of those beaus where it is undeniable they are trouble, with not just red flags flying right out in the open, but a rap sheet to back up these presuppositions. This is Morgan Wallen’s career and music in a nutshell.
There is plenty that could render “Build Me A Daddy” much more cheesy than meaningful—the heartstring pulling story of a son losing his father, and oh, let’s make the father a soldier, so we weasel that flag-waving element in there too. But making a highly sentimental subject work is the mark of good songwriters.
Jon Pardi continues to show leadership in helping to return an element of twang and substance to country radio. After the debut single and title track from his latest record Heartache Medication went #1, making it the first mainstream country radio song in nearly eight years. Now he’s going to release “Ain’t Always The Cowboy.”
Jon Pardi continues to prove himself as one of the most staunch traditionalists in the country mainstream, and though you can be assured that his upcoming record ‘Heartache Medication’ will have a handful of songs that will pander to radio play, his latest release from the album “Ain’t Always The Cowboy” will not be one of them.
You’ll have to wait all the way until September 27th to hear Jon Pardi’s new record “Heartache Medication” in its entirety. But we now have the track list, cover art, and songwriting contributors for the new record, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff to unpack.
And though we’re a good half decade from when Toby Keith was still relevant in the country mainstream, and a healthy 15 years removed from when he was telling would-be terrorists where he rudely wanted to ensconce his manly footwear, Toby Keith still has a reserved seat at the very top of these “highest paid” lists, despite not showing a Top 5 single since 2011.
Though some may consider Tim McGraw soaring in such high thermals that it’s sacrilege for him to be singing about scraping the bottom and setting out to fulfill your dreams in country music, but that’s exactly what McGraw did on May 10th, 1989 when he boarded a Greyhound bus bound for Nashville—the day after his country music hero Keith Whitley died.
But possibly the most troubling sign that something is not right in the Toby Keith camp is the continued stories about strange closings and other curious issues surrounding the “Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill” restaurant chain. Keith founded the restaurants in 2005, and they are operated out of Phoenix by Boomtown Entertainment.
I don’t love this song, I’m still nowhere close to a Josh Thompson supporter, and I’m not exactly sure what that weird thing is behind him in the video. But even if this is the effect of a marketing move, this song is a much better direction for Josh, and the ears of real music fans will bleed a little bit less when this comes on compared to some of his previous work.
Wow. My little country music heart was sent reeling this morning when I rolled up to the track list and list of contributors for the new Waylon – The Music Inside, Vol. 2 compilation due out January 24th. The thing read like my lampoon of the unfinished Hank Williams songs, but unfortunately it is all too real folks.
Wow. I’m not exactly sure where this came from, and I don’t care who it came from. The simple fact is that it came, and country music is better off for it. Ahead of Shooter Jennings’ January release of his new album Family Man, he has released the song an accompanying video for the composition “Outlaw You”. Simply put, this is a shot right to the gut of Music Row, and specifically, this crop of “New Outlaws”.
When Justin Moore’s “Outlaws Like Me” comes out, I will listen to it with the most un-bias perspective I can muster, and try my best to judge the music beyond the marketing. But in the meantime, I am not going to look at him as the problem, I am going to look my self and ask, “What did I do wrong? How can I resolve this? What can I do to make sure this doesn’t happen in the future?”
About two months ago, Saving Country Music introduced you to a would-be pop country star named Michael Jackson Montgomery in the aftermath of drama between Billy Ray Cyrus and his daughter Miley. Shortly after releasing the demo, Michael Jackson Montgomery contacted SCM directly, offering to release more demo’s “when appropriate,” and yesterday he sent us another one called “The Letter ‘B'”.
If you want to listen to a true, creative meld of hip hop and country, go listen to some Beck or some Paul’s Boutique-era Beastie Boys. But this Colt Ford stuff is garbage, despite a few catchy lines, and as far as I’m concerned, lending your name to a Colt Ford project lands you a card carrying membership to the “Colt Ford Collaboration Blacklist”. Here’s the names I’ve amassed so far…
I thought we had moved on from the “new Outlaw” era, to pop country stars trying to be the next Taylor Swift. Well apparently not. Now Miranda Lambert’s hubby Blake Shelton wants in on the fun, releasing a song called “Kiss My Country Ass”, an unapologetic, unveiled attempt at the Music Row “Laundry List” songwriting formula, that takes it to another level by rehashing David Allan Coe’s “If That Ain’t Country” and introducing “Outlaw” Blake to the spoon-fed masses.
This is not John Denver and Olivia Newton John ruffling feathers by winning country awards. This isn’t Garth Brooks flying over stadiums on wires. This isn’t Rascal Flatts rehashing classic rock songs, or even Taylor Swift playing with a fiddle player hidden in a dark corner. This is it. This is the bottom of the slippery slope. This is country music’s ‘rock’ bottom.
A review of Jamey Johnson’s new album The Guitar Song is coming, but since every time the words Jamey and Johnson are mentioned a brew ha ensues, I hope with this to get some of the drama and positioning statements out of the way so the review can purely be about my take on the album, and not the sideshow the mention of his name creates.
Today is the 4th of July: the birthday of The United States. It is also arguably the birthday of the Outlaw movement in country music. Nailing down an exact date when the Outlaw movement started depends on who you talk to, but a popular one is when Willie Nelson’s legendary 4th of July Picnics started […]
The sheer speed at which American pop country is devolving before our very eyes can only be described as “awesome.” It is the evolutionary equivalent of if we could witness a species of apes evolve into a new race of humans in the length of a football season. As the creatively bankrupt boardrooms of Music […]
Remember back when Taylor Swift won the CMA for Entertainer of the Year? We thought it couldn’t get worse for country music. There was a lot of surmising of where country music might go next after that win. Would there be a traditionalist backlash? Would country become even more pop oriented to try to mimic […]