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Your Take: Pretty, Pretty Ponies
Although Blake’s review of Play, Carrie Underwood’s latest album, didn’t receive much attention last week (insert sarcasm here), there was an interesting question brought up in the comments section by the reviewer himself that got lost in a sea of proclamations of pop boundaries and visions of a country music apocalypse.
Blake pondered on a shift [...] -
Your Take: Polite Company
Sammy Kershaw once sang that there are three topics he’d just rather not get into: “Politics, Religion and Her.”
However, Kershaw may be in the minority, considering the recent string of country songs and news items that don’t necessarily fall into the conversation outlines for polite company.
On Halloween, Q Notes published “City bans Country performer [...] -
Your Take: Version 2.0
In Thursday’s News Roundup, Brody included a link to a Billboard feature on Taylor Swift’s new platinum edition release of her album Fearless, which hit stores on Monday.
The CD/DVD set will have a variety of new content, with six new songs and video extras including her video collaboration with T-Pain on “Thug Story” and exclusive [...] -
Your Take: Recycled Songs
In Thursday’s review of Trent Tomlinson’s new single “Angels Like Her,” we learned that although the song is set to appear on his upcoming sophomore album A Guy Like Me, it originally appeared on his debut album Country Is My Rock.
Commenter Jordan Stacey noticed this is the latest song in a string of singles [...] -
Your Take: Teen Sensations
Brody included Craig Shelburne’s CMT article “Fifteen Teens Who Found Country Music Success Before Taylor Swift” in Monday’s News Roundup. On the heels of Swift’s nearly unstoppable rise into country royalty, Shelburne took the opportunity to look back on other teen sensations in the genre:
Taylor Swift is undeniably country music’s most popular teenager today. At [...] -
Your Take: Sentiment vs. Sentimentality
Craig Bickhardt recently touched on the pitfalls of excessive emotion in songwriting on his Ninety Mile Wind blog post “Cold Eye, Warm Heart”:
The world was like a distant storm
I could feel it on the breeze
But it made so little difference here
Just a whisper in the trees
Mending fence for room and board
Was mostly all I’d done
For [...] -
Your Take: Aging Country Legends
Earlier this week, Kris Kristofferson released his latest album Closer to the Bone. Juli reviewed the album on Wednesday, giving it four out of five stars:
Like Guy Clark’s recent release Somedays the Song Writes You, Closer to the Bone occasionally drags. Kristofferson plods through “Let the Walls Come Down,” and so-so closing track “The Wonder” [...] -
Your Take: Starstruck
In Wednesday’s News Roundup, Brody included a blurb on the ACM Honors’ star-studded tribute to a collection of country legends.
Miranda Lambert was on hand to perform “(I Don’t Have) Anymore Love Songs” to honor an absent Hank Williams Jr., but it was another one of the night’s honorees–a guy by the name of Merle Haggard–that [...] -
Your Take: Regional vs. Mainstream
I reviewed Texas honky-tonker Kevin Fowler’s new single “Beer Season” this week, and the comments section brought up some interesting points on the pluses and minuses of being a regional artist.
Fowler is a mainstay in the Texas country music scene, but the only songs he’s written that have reached mainstream success have been recorded [...] -
Your Take: How Far is Too Far?
On the heels of Sugarland’s live album release Live on the Inside, ChicagoPride.com recently published an interview with Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland, discussing the band’s affinity for cover songs.
CP: How do you keep continuity, musically, between your own songs and the covers–how do you make the covers your own?
JN: Well, there’s my voice—I’m the one [...]
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- Please!: You're right about it pandering or playing a role of a sort to attract an audience, without a soul of ...
