That’s old news. The new news is this:

Now through Thursday, there’s one way – and only one way – of gaining a second entry in the drawing (effectively doubling your chances), and that’s by participating in the Childhelp deal at Farce the Music. This is my way of throwing a little support behind what I think is a pretty cool project.

So, for a mere $5 donation to a worthy charity, you get an 18-song mixtape from Farce the Music and an improved chance of winning stuff from us. Once you’ve completed Trailer’s deal, simply forward your Childhelp confirmation email to cmw AT countrycalifornia.com and I’ll get your second entry noted. This only works as an entry if you’ve already joined our email list for the first one.

(Even if you don’t have any interest in our giveaway, please take a minute to check out the track listing of Trailer’s holiday mixtape and consider donating to Childhelp. It’ll make you feel good.)

Courtesy of our friends at Universal Music Group, we have some cool swag that is sure to impress the country music lover in your life. And hey, there’s no shame in self-gifting.

Items up for grabs include:

• George Strait’s Here for a Good Time CD with matching gray “Here for a Good Time” T-shirt (size L)
• Sunny Sweeney’s Concrete CD, autographed
• Eli Young Band’s Life at Best CD, autographed by all four band members
• Trace Adkins’ Proud to Be Here CD, autographed

Each of the four (4) winners will also receive a free copy of Ashton Shepherd’s Where Country Grows. Keep both items for yourself or share with a friend to spread the merriment.

To enter, simply join the Country California email list using the form below. It’s free, and it’s a good way of keeping up on our latest content without having to worry about RSS, Facebook, Twitter, and all that other technological hoodoo. On days when we post new material, it’ll show up in your inbox, right alongside the latest letter about your aunt’s goiter. On days when nothing’s new, you won’t hear from us. Simple.

We won’t sell your information to anyone else (or forward you emails about our aunt’s goiter), and you’re free to unsubscribe as soon as the giveaway is over. We’ll draw our winners from the list of new email subscribers as of next Thursday, December 15. Due to shipping costs, it’s US entrants only.

If you’re an older email subscriber who would like to be included in the drawing, just reply to the last Country California email you received (maybe this one?) with a message to that effect.

Ready to enter? Plug in a valid email address below, do the CAPTCHA, and be sure to click the verification link in the Feedburner email that appears in your inbox to make it official. You’re in.

It’s a surprisingly grassroots fan-building strategy for an act signed to a major label like Warner Bros. Nashville. After all, it wasn’t but a few years ago that Sony was devising elaborate copy-protection schemes (rootkits and all) to prevent honestly-purchased from being shared beyond its intended listener. Or, in many cases, from being heard by its rightful owner: the copy-protected CDs would crash some computers and refuse to play in some CD players.

So, for Warner to be giving away tens of thousands of CDs, in this era of extreme cost-cutting and attention to the bottom line, says a lot about their faith in the band’s music. Which, as it happens, is actually a pretty excellent assimilation of Haggard and Springsteen influences, all presented with outlaw swagger and radio-friendly polish. If people hear this stuff, they’ll probably like it. The label is betting on that hunch.

(It bears pointing out that the “Give Blood” strategy would be untenable for most young indie touring acts, who rely more heavily on merchandise sales to keep the whole enterprise afloat. But you do see many independent artists and labels giving away free song downloads, which have less overhead.)

Check out the video below and weigh in with your thoughts on giving away music as a promotional strategy. Have you discovered any favorite acts, been inspired to attend any concerts, or made any purchases based on free song downloads or CD giveaways?

One lucky commenter will win a copy of This Is My Blood for his or her own collection.

For more on The Dirt Drifters, visit their website.

According to Slant Magazine‘s Jonathan Keefe, though, Bryan’s recently-released third album, Tailgates & Tanlines, isn’t without its charms:

“Too Damn Young” is an obvious exception, trading equally in nostalgia and regret, and “You Don’t Know Jack” transcends the trappings of the typical cautionary tale. Instead, that song conveys a genuine sense of empathy for those undone by alcoholism, even if the pun in its title is far too easy. “Tailgate Blues,” on which Ashton Shepherd provides fantastic backing vocals, boasts the album’s most robust melody and cleverly subverts the connotations of tailgating.

Regular readers might recall that songwriter Erin Enderlin’s own version of “You Don’t Know Jack” made our Prime Cuts a couple months back, so Bryan’s ear for a good song isn’t completely off. If you’d like to hear Tailgates & Tanlines for yourself, simply comment with a teeth-whitening secret or quip about “Country Girl (Shake It for Me)” by next Wednesday, September 21.

One randomly-chosen commenter will receive his or her own copy of the CD, dispatched directly from Country California headquarters in a bubble wrap mailer made from Fake Jamey Johnson’s beard fibers. The total estimated retail value for the whole package is $1,500,000, give or take.*

So get commenting by next Wednesday!

_{* This figure might be inflated.}

In a recent chat with the Arizona Republic, Church seemed less interested in the chart action itself and more interested in the opportunity his burgeoning success gives him to play an active role in shaping the future of the country format:

My biggest problem with this generation of artists is that we just run songs up and down the charts so we can keep our touring going, so we can make money and have a living and all these things. We don’t make the music that’s really pushing the envelope or taking the music somewhere, expanding the music. Some people are. But I feel like when Cash and Waylon came along, they didn’t make the same music that Ernest Tubbs and Hank Williams Sr., made. They moved the flag. And I think it’s important that we do that. I think the evolution and diversity of the format is what’s going to allow it to have a fan base that doesn’t just grow old and age out.

While Church has come in for some criticism for his audacious interview manner, he has also managed to live up to a surprising amount of his own hype, with a dynamic stage show, considerable writing chops, and one of the great in-studio allies in the form of ultra-inventive producer Jay Joyce.

Don’t take our word for it, though. Find out for yourself by winning some Chief for your own collection. We have one (1) copy of the new album to give away to a random commenter. Just let us know your favorite Eric Church song by next Tuesday, August 16, and we’ll do our best to hook you up.

It includes the following:

Joe Diffie’s Homecoming: The Bluegrass Album (review at The 9513)
Hellbound Glory’s Old Highs and New Lows (review here)
The Grascals’ The Famous Lefty Flynn’s (it’s pretty darn good)
Easton Corbin’s Easton Corbin (Post-It review here)

Bluegrass, outlaw, mainstream. Not many women (just Grascals banjoist Kristen Scott Benson), but that wasn’t by design.* All good stuff.

How to enter:
Down at the bottom right of every post, there’s a link to email the article to a friend. Just share any of our posts (old or new) with anyone you know using that link by December 23 and you’ll automatically be entered to win. Doesn’t matter what you share – it can be something we post over the next couple weeks, or an old favorite you dig out of our archives. (For example, Fake News gets shared around a lot.) If you want to keep it super simple, you can even share this contest post with someone else who might like to enter.

When you fill out the form, be sure to use your real email address so we can contact you if you win.

A winner will be selected at random and announced just in time for Christmas.

* By way of apology, here are two free Christmas songs from Boca Chica… by their own description, “a honky tonk song about getting dumped on Christmas and a folk pop ode to water freezing in your toilet because you have no heat in your house.” Now we’re even.

As a songwriter, though, her sensibility is firmly country. On “Just What I’m Looking For,” sung with Elizabeth Cook and Tim Carroll somewhere in the background, she’s feeling a little dangerous, throwing herself into the arms of a man she knows will probably be nothing but bad news in the long term. Meanwhile, title track “Under the Rushes” is a classic story song about emergent womanhood, delivered with strength and clarity from an omniscient distance. The album’s most country moment, though, is “Makin’ Love,” on which a duet vocal from Chuck Mead proves a nice but ultimately unnecessary bonus: Beasley could just as easily have carried the song on the strength of her own performance.

Whether Under the Rushes has any impact with the general audience or not, it should be on the radar of the Nashville recording community, if only so they can pillage it for wildly successful cover versions as they do (or once did) with new releases from Bruce Robison and Radney Foster. At her best, Beasley is that caliber of writer. Here Nashville, I’ll do some of the work for you: resilient Texas rocker “Heart Like a Wound” belongs on Miranda Lambert’s next album, and “The Little Things” is a classic Pam Tillis torch song. Oh, and if Beasley doesn’t have a hit with the title track, some other Americana chanteuse probably could.

An indie album on which I can recommend at least half the tracks is a rarity, so you can bet that checking out Beasley’s previous album, Good Samaritan, just got added to my musical to-do list.

Download the album now from Amazon MP3

Give It Away, Give It Away
Want to check out Under the Rushes for free? Comment below by next Friday (July 23) for your chance to win one of two extra copies from our prize shelf. You have nothing to lose and only good music to gain.

7/25 Update: Winners chosen. Congrats to Joe B. and Rick! We’ll be getting in touch.

Any jerk can start a blog, but it takes a particular kind of jerk to keep one going for two years. I recently became that kind of jerk. Country California began in late April of 2008, and here we are in late April of 2010.

Over the last two years, I’ve become less precious about this blogging thing – less concerned with how I might be perceived, more willing to simply be myself and suffer the consequences. If I lose interest in a particular feature, I’ll stop doing it until interest returns. If I come up with some nutty new idea that could end up being really stupid, I’ll take the chance and see what happens. (Fake News was once just such an idea.) I don’t want this to become a grind, so I’ll ease up the pace, or even put the blog on temporary hiatus, if that’s what needs to happen… because ultimately me staying interested is the best possible thing for the site, and the only thing that will allow it to continue. These are the things I’m thinking about, two years in.

My Gift to Me

Over the next couple weeks, I’m going to free myself of some blogger guilt by banging out some album reviews that have been weighing on my mind over the past months. If the balance of content tips more toward album reviews over that period, now you know why. Rest assured that I’ll be back to my old tricks in no time.

Donating and Advertising

I appreciate anything and everything people do to support the site – reading, commenting, linking, emailing, interacting with us on social networks, whatever. Just keep doing what you’re doing and we’ll be set. But, since I haven’t mentioned it on the blog before, there is a page for those interested in sending a couple bucks as a donation or wanting to advertise on the site. You can find that here.

Fake Jamey / Succinct Album Review Challenge (Giveaway)

Update (5/4/10): The response to this challenge has been… nothing… so I’m going to call it off and put the $10 toward Nashville flood relief, okay?

To celebrate two years, let’s do a giveaway challenge. It’s a giveaway challenge because entering is slightly more involved than usual. Here are your options:

• Do a Succinct Album Review of any album, new or old. All you need is a Post It, a pen, a CD, and something to take the picture with (like a camera). Make it pithy, humorous, nonsensical, whatever.
• Make your own Fake Jamey Johnson and take a picture of him doing something.
• For you overachievers, do a Succinct Album Review featuring your own Fake Jamey Johnson (like so). This option will count as two entries in the random drawing.

Whichever option you choose, email your picture to me at cmw@countrycalifornia.com (subject line should be something about a giveaway) and you’ll be in to win.

Once the entries are in, I’ll post all the submissions and put the winner to an anonymous vote. The picture with the most votes will get a $10 Amazon gift card, redeemable for any music your heart desires. Another randomly-chosen submission (remember, the third option gets two entries here) will win a mystery CD of my choosing. Everyone else will win the satisfaction of having participated.

If this giveaway proves as unpopular as I suspect it might, the first entry could be the de facto winner! Get your pictures in by May 8 to be considered.

And Finally…

Thanks for the last two years! It would’ve sucked without you.

With apologies to the three vocalists who’ve headed up the band since his 1996 departure, Marty Raybon is still the defining voice of Shenandoah. It was his voice that made hits like “The Church on Cumberland Road” and “Two Dozen Roses” so irresistible – a rare point on which Gary LeVox and I agree.

Raybon’s latest solo album, At His Best, was just released by GrandVista/HiFive today, so you probably don’t have it yet. With so many other albums coming out, maybe it wasn’t even on your radar until now. Well, what better way to discover new music than to win it for free from the only country music blog endorsed by 1998 Big Bass World Champ Steve vonBrandt?

Entering is as easy as can be: Just comment below with (a) your favorite Shenandoah song or (b) a haiku about Gary LeVox and we’ll call it good. You have through next Monday (April 12) to enter, then Fake Jamey Johnson will pull a random name out of his beard and send the package on its merry way. He might even throw in a little something extra.

Curiosity piqued? Get posting!

The album hits stores next Tuesday (March 9), but I want it to be on its way to the winner (you?!) by then, so you only have through Sunday to enter. I’ll notify the winner Sunday at midnight. If I get the address Monday morning, the CD will go out the same day – as good as a free preorder. But that only leaves four days for entering the contest, so you’ll have to act quickly.

For your shot at the prize, head over to our Facebook page, become a fan (if you still haven’t), and comment on the Gary Allan wall post. Almost too easy! So this time I’ll also leave the comments open on this post in hopes that someone will get all confused and put their entry in the wrong place… because I’m sort of vindictive and, obviously, pretty hard-up for entertainment.

Enough from me. Head over to Country California on Facebook and get commenting.