Month In Review: February 2007

I wanted to highlight what I think is some the best of our content on The 9513 from the month of February. I’m mainly doing this for the newer readers who haven’t visited the Archives yet, and to get some feedback on what features people like and dislike.

Album, Concert, & Book Reviews
It’d be impossible for us to review everything that happens each month in the country music world, but below is a book, some albums, and a concert that at least one of us has reviewed in the past month. We do accept reviews from other writers who would like to publish something on this site as well, so send us an email if you have something you’d like to say.

• Book Review: True To The Roots
• Album Review: Daryle Singletary – Straight From The Heart
• Album Review: Lucinda Williams – West
• Album Review: Amber Digby – Here Come The Teardrops
• Album Review: Jason Michael Carroll – Waitin’ In The Country
• Concert Review: Brooks And Dunn ‘Rock My World’

Recommended
This is a relatively new category that is similar to reviews, except that it’s only stuff we like and have been listening to a little bit during the month. You’ll notice that the length of the articles generally won’t be as long as reviews either. It’s basically a category that allows us to recommend anything that we like so that you can get a sense of the stuff we enjoy and help you decide whether our recommendations are credible in your mind.

• Recommended: Joey Allcorn
• Recommended: Wylie And The West, James Hand, And Lost Immigrants

Exclusive Interviews
Everybody has some questions that they’d like to ask different artists and we’re no different. So we’ve been emailing artists and their record labels asking for email interviews with the artists. We realize beforehand that artists are extremely busy and probably get requests like ours all the time, but the labels and the artists are usually gracious and grant us the chance to ask a few questions. They let us know that they might not be able to get to our questions, but we send them anyways. We try to mix the repetitive, boring questions that you find on other sites with some of our own that may get a smile or two from the artists to try and keep it entertaining (whether we succeed in being entertaining is probably a matter of opinion). Those who were generous enough to answer our questions this month are below.

• Interview: Brigitte London Discusses Austin, Nashville, And Drinking Whiskey
• Interview: John Michael Montgomery Talks About Catfish & Frog Legs
• An Interview With Rodney Hayden

Your Take
Everybody has different opinions, so we use this category/feature to ask you what your opinion is on certain topics or issues. So far I’d say it has been one of our most successful categories.

• Your Take: Why Haven’t Greatest Hits Albums Become Obsolete?
• Your Take: Are Genre Jumpers Ruining Country Music?
• Stonewall Jackson VS. The Opry: Whose Side Are You On?
• Dale Watson Embarrassed By Country Music

MySpace Artist Of The Week
We’ve had a MySpace Artist Of The Week for a while, but it didn’t appear to be a popular feature so we’ve started phasing it out. However we’d still like to highlight different artists from MySpace, so instead of highlighting artists on a weekly basis we’ll probably spotlight artists only when we come across those who we think you guys would like.

• MySpace Artist Of The Week: Bobby Duncan
• MySpace Artist Of The Week: Jeff Tuttle

Miscellaneous Features

• Country Music Blogs And Their Golden Age Counterparts
  Established media outlets have the means to provide the most country music news, but blogs have some of the best content and you know that you’re not being fed PR speak from the labels and such. This is our tribute to some of the best country music blogs.
• Mailbag: The First Edition
  Glancing through our traffic statistics we found that a lot of people discovered The 9513 by searching for answers to specific questions. Jenna answers some of those questions in her first edition of the mailbag.
• CMT Music Award Nominees: YouTube Edition
  All of the nominees for the CMT Music Awards and a link to their video on YouTube.