Garth Brooks Tickets Sold Out; Little Doug Sahm’s First Single; Country Music Displacing Rock n’ Roll

• Charlie Robison – “Down Again”
• Cross Canadian Ragweed – “To Find My Love”
• The Lovell Sisters – In My Time of Dyin’
• Tara Nevins with The Believers – “Temporary Misery”

Rich Fagan has a new song.

“I used to be a sinner/ ‘Til I went too far astray,” he sings. “And it’s only by God’s grace that I’m standing here today / ‘Cause one night, high on Jose Cuervo, I killed my best friend with a knife.”

That’s not quite true. For one thing, it was Patron tequila, not Cuervo. And the death of Fagan’s best friend, Tom Oteri — which came in April 2008, after Fagan’s pocketknife slashed his wrist — was ruled a heart attack. Fagan was not charged with murder or manslaughter, and the aggravated assault charge was dropped.

Mr. Paisley is a guitar geek posing as a dry wit. His pose is terrific; it just doesn’t adequately conceal the geek. Lots of us put on a blithe and blasé front to hide our inner compulsions, and for a good reason: not because they’re embarrassing, but because they’re dull. Over two hours, Mr. Paisley’s guitar playing — fast, fluid and voluminous — lost its flavor completely. There was just so much of it (mostly on the Telecaster; Mr. Paisley’s style is a monument to that instrument’s lean, percussive sound and country-music tradition) that it stole power from the lyrics.

1999 – The Dixie Chicks’ Wide Open Spaces is certified for shipment of 8 million units. To put that number in perspective, if you stacked all the jewel cases, you’d end up with a pile over 49 miles high. And if you put Natalie Maines atop the pile, you’d barely be able to hear her shrill voice from ground level.

Your songs have a lot of humor in them. Is that really important to you?

I don’t know. It just kind of happens. … I’ll write a couple of songs and be pretty serious, and then for some reason, it’s just like the groom who can’t keep a straight face. I just have to write something stupid just to get back to some kind of reality.

Another thing about the comedy, though, is that I played for a long time by myself — went to a lot of coffee houses — and if you’re just playing a standard love song, you don’t know if anybody hears it or pays any attention or not. You play a comedy song, and if it’s really funny, you’re gonna get a reaction. So a lot of that was, I kind of spoiled myself, like I needed the reaction. So I’d write these funny songs, and I kind of went that way until one day I went to some place … and it had “Robert Earl Keen: Comedian Songwriter.” And I went, “Oh, no, no, no. I’m not a comedian. I just write a few funny songs.” But, still to this day, I still write stuff just to amuse myself.