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Let’s Write That!
The story of how Josh Turner wrote his breakout hit “Long Black Train” is a humdinger of a tale. You probably already know it, but just bear with me for a paragraph or so while I recount it one more time for the unacquainted (or skip ahead, no worries). OK, here we go: Turner was [...]
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Awards, Shows and Award Shows
“It is as though instead of a dog wagging its tail, the tail should wag the dog. And all Nature would stand aghast before such an improper spectacle.” – Elizabeth von Arnim, 1907 An award show offers an invaluable opportunity for the great entertainers of our day to be celebrated by their peers, and for [...]
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No Sex Please, We’re Country
On June 6, 1962, two days after signing their recording contract, the Beatles went to EMI Studios on Abbey Road in London for their first recording session. Having built a reputation for drawing crowds in nightclubs, their shot at stardom had come at last. Two months later, something happened that manager Brian Epstein felt could [...]
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The Automatic Add Club
“For the first time in my career I really feel like I have some real momentum going here,” Blake Shelton told me during an interview a couple of years back. “I’ve never had that. I’ve always been the guy that’s making a comeback every time.” What he meant was that at that time radio didn’t [...]
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The C Word
There is country radio, and then there is Country Radio. When I first began covering the business a decade ago, I was at first annoyed to see the way that radio insiders insisted on referring to their milieu as “Country Radio” in every casual mention (see here)—but I eventually became grateful for the useful distinction. [...]
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In Defense of the Critic
Kevin J. Coyne over at Country Universe caused a ripple in the space-time continuum of the country music blogoverse a couple of weeks ago with his ruthless takedown of Sugarland’s latest. “The Incredible Machine is a terrible album, an unmitigated disaster that manages to fail in ways that shouldn’t even be possible,” he wrote, concluding [...]
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Size Doesn’t Matter
On July 27, 1890, 37-year-old Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh walked into a field outside Paris, leaned his easel against a haystack and shot himself in the chest. He managed to stagger back to the nearby Ravoux Inn, where a doctor told him there was still a chance to save his life. “Then I’ll have [...]
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The Song, Not The Singer
When Michael Jackson died in June 2009, each person who knew enough about his music and his life to have an opinion on either (that is to say, pretty much everyone all over the world) was forced to decide: Did his personal behavior detract from the value of the music he made? Did the increasingly [...]
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Everything Louder Than Everything Else
As a music critic and journalist, I can get pretty jaded about listening to the new CDs that cross my desk (or, increasingly, the digital downloads or streams that are grudgingly entrusted to me by record labels through top-secret back alleys of the Interwebs). But I can’t front—I was flat-out excited when I opened up [...]
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