All we’ve been hearing from Kenny Chesney in the run up to the release of his new album The Big Revival is how badass it is going to be because he took an entire year off of touring to focus on it, at one point scrapped an entirely completed album awash in beer and tailgate songs to make it, and did some serious soul searching about the direction he wanted to take.
Trust me when I say if you go ambling through American college towns, you won’t find anything resembling a dearth of string bands with a bunch of young men and their banjos and fiddles stomping and shouting on stage. What you will find a dearth of are these bands that are actually worth listening to, at least outside of the context of a drunken college town barroom.
This isn’t just your average album release, or even your average album release from Lee Ann Womack. This one has a little more special meaning for Womack since it is her first release without a major label, and a release that helps rate of progress for both women and traditional country artists looking to revitalize their place to a wider audience.
I write these words knowing that many will roll up to this Tim McGraw dissertation looking for a bowl of blood as recompense for the emotional direst recent Tim McGraw singles such as “Truck Yeah” have waged on the mental state of many innocent country music fans. But the simple truth is Tim McGraw’s new album ‘Sundown Heaven Town’ deserves to be spared the most sinister strokes from the poison pen.
Acting as a guide through both the explanation of the roots of country music and the streets of Nashville, Justin Townes Earle and many others try best to define “country” for a foreign audience in the film. The Country Roads DVD also includes an entire Justin Townes Earle concert performed at Pace University on October 26th and 27th of 2012 called “The Spirit of Woody Guthrie.”
At this point, Florida Georgia Line has settled quite nicely into being the great American sedative of our generation. Just as producer Joey Moi did with Nickelback before them, this music affords a vacation from self-reflection or truly beneficial thought. This is the type of vacationary audio lubrication that keeps the engine of corporate America purring along just fine.
Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the Saving Country Music 2014 Americana Music Awards LIVE Blog! Emanating from the Mother Church of Country Music, The Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, The Americana Music Awards looks to recognize the finest artists in the Americana industry as part of the greater Americana Music Conference transpiring this week.
If you have a strong penchant towards wondering about the untold stories of music’s most adept sidemen like I do, then perhaps you have already pondered upon Telecaster player Jeremy Fetzer and pedal steel player Spencer Cullum Jr. from seeing them on stage with artists like Caitlin Rose, Andrew Combs, and Jonny Fritz just to name a few.
Michael Goodman smoothly takes you on a musical time warp to the roiling 50’s to both cut a rug and cry in your beer in a time when music was much better across the board and became immediately timeless. Like walking into Sun Studios circa 1956, he takes you back to a time when the music of American was uncorrupted, the sentiments were sincere, and the promise was unending.
This release might mean just a little bit more to Justin Townes Earle. The harder you work for things, the more value they tend to hold. After concluding a five-album contract with the scrappy and street-accredited independent label Bloodshot Records, Justin Townes Earle moved on to what he hoped would be greener pastures, and quickly got his nose pushed in.
So here it is; Garth’s first single since 2007’s “More Than A Memory.” But more importantly, it is the first real single since he retired in 2001—representing a new album, and a new era for one of the biggest music stars the world has ever seen. And with this new song, the world is who Garth courts as his audience.
A troubadour in every sense of the word, Otis Gibbs is an artist who can inspire even the most timid among us to shush a burly bar troll talking over one of his performances. This is music to lean in and listen to. This is music to get lost in as the lives of characters you’ve never heard of before become as intimate and familiar as family in the span of four minutes.
The occasion of Brad Paisley’s new album release finds the singer and guitar player at a crossroads in his career. The three-time CMA Male Vocalist of the Year and a man responsible for over 12 million records sold is in that precarious position of an artist trying to hold on to his mainstream prominence as the young pups all around are nipping at his heels…
If you’re looking for the country music female revolution’s representative for true neotraditional country, Kelsey Waldon might just be your perfect match. If this album was released in the 70’s, it would have birthed a slew of indelible country standards. Such inconsolable heartbreak, such sorrow-drenched insight is captured on these tracks and then embellished with tasteful production…
On August 18th, he released his latest single called “Neon Light” from his upcoming Bringing Back The Sun album. As a rather sedated, nondescript, somewhat country, but ultimately sort of boring offering, it was really hard to get worked up about it one way or the other. Sure it has a banjo and a somewhat country setting, but it’s no “Tear In My Beer.”
From the fertile Outlaw country ground that comprises the hills and hollers of Boone County, West Virginia comes a homespun, but inspired and deftly-written insight into the American experience called No Place Lower Than High. Composed and performed by the virtual unknown singer and songwriter Justin Payne, this no budget project cut in a 100-year-old coal camp house is rough-hewn…
Sunny Sweeney is an east Texas girl at her core, and no matter what Nashville does, it’s never possible to completely quiet those jangling spurs or smooth out that accent. She very much fits that mold of the Texas country artist that got big enough to be recognized by Music Row, but always felt just a little too authentic to do much more than experience that world from the outside looking in.
“The No-Hit Wonder” is old school country rock at its finest, with exquisitely-crafted, cunning lyrical runs that make you laugh, amazing insight enhanced by brilliant timing and pentameter, and musical clothing that enhance each song’s strengths and endear them to the audience, pointing them the way to the album’s enjoyment. This is the album Cory Branan needed to release.
The song “It Ain’t You” off of Ray Benson’s album A Little Piece continues this trend of offering both something unheard, but something wrought during the living era of a legendary artist, and paid forward with reverence and care by those still around who are inspired by their legacy. Originally written by Waylon Jennings with Gary Nicholson, “It Ain’t You” was never recorded.
“Quarterback” is a song by female Canadian country star Kira Isabella. The song tells the story of a young girl from the high school freshman class who is seduced by the star quarterback of the football team. After being disarmed by some sips of alcohol, the freshman girl ends up having unwanted sex with the quarterback in the back of a truck
We have waited seven damn years for the 74-year-old to finally put out another album of original music, and Long In The Tooth is well worth the wait. The album finds Billy Joe Shaver sitting tall in the saddle, shouting and spitting, brandishing his fists and taking potshots, and shining in moments of unexpected sentimentality.
Somewhere in the pursuit of bluegrass perfection, the simplicity of the subgenre got forgotten: the wood and the wire, and the beauty of universal sentiments conveyed through inviting melody. This re-attention to the beauty side of bluegrass is what is found on Bradford Lee Folk’s new album Somewhere Far Away with The Bluegrass Playboys.
Oh Jason, this is most unfortunate. Since Jason Aldean has re-entered the single life after getting caught in a douche-soaked nightclub on the Sunset Strip handling up on some American Idol semifinalist castoff, now he thinks he’s Mr. Sexy, taking cues from Jerrod Niemann and entering the EDM space to keep the child support money streaming in.
In an era when music has not only ceased to unite us, but has become one of the very implements used to divide us in the ever increasingly-entrenched culture war, there is one artist that is just weird enough to cross traditional borders of style, generation, and taste to tickle our funny bones universally. Yes, I’m talking about the curly-haired, spastic polka-playing parody artist “Weird” Al Yankovic.