News Roundup: Nicole Kidman Gives Birth To Daguhter, Sunday Rose, With Keith Urban By Her Side

I also asked a few questions about how much the listeners or fans affected their view of their songs. Basically I wanted to know, If you write a song and nobody hears it, does it exist? All four of the songwriters here gave me a most definite Yes! To them, the songs obviously have lives of their own before they make it out into the world — or as Karen Fairchild said, “They are all our babies.”

…[T]o the nearly 20,000 mostly unseen people working in Nashville’s music industry, Swift represents far more than the latest young artist to hit it big on the country music scene. She illustrates the industry’s new benchmarks of success in an era dominated by digital music, an explosion of new media platforms and a decline in album sales, in a business that has seen a third of its $14.6 billion retail market evaporate since 2000.

Driving home from the doctor in the fading heat of a long summer day I heard Don Henley’s “The End Of The Innocence” on the radio. I remembered 1989, when the record was ubiquitous. When MTV still played videos and everybody with an established career sold millions of albums. When my wife left our home behind. In the shock of that event, the only thing that soothed me was music. I drove around pushing the button, longing to hear “The End Of The Innocence”, longing to feel rooted, connected to something.