A follow-up to the earlier post about Walmart using their CDs as mini MP3 billboards: Amazon has announced a similar cross-promotion for the holiday season. If you make a purchase of at least $25 from select areas of the site (including - naturally - the music CD section), a message will show up in your email inbox shortly thereafter indicating that a $5 credit for the Amazon MP3 store has been applied to your account. It looks like the subliminal message of the season is "get with the … [Read more...]

In the six years since I moved to this city, I've mastered the layout of the local Walmart right down to the location of the smallest and most obscure item. I'm still not very good at finding the quickest routes, though, as I've convinced myself that going anywhere in the store requires passing through the music section. And passing through the music section requires flipping through all the country CDs by hand to make sure I'm not missing any killer deals. And if they have cheap Vern Gosdin CDs … [Read more...]

There are any number of possible lenses through which to view music – genre, instrumentation, lyrical themes, political implications, and the list goes on. A new lens came to my attention recently when I made the following realization:The more cerebral music is, the closer I want to put it to my head.Sounds a little silly, but it's true. It's the difference between a headphone album and an open-air album, and it doesn't just come down to wanting to listen more closely to music I like better. … [Read more...]

Here's some follow-up on the Best Blog Posts of 2008 idea. I'm thinking that the list will be broken into three sections: Country Universe, The 9513, and Other. If another blog has a sizable number of entries, it might also get its own category. In the spirit of making this a worthy introduction to the world of independent country music blogs rather than a competition, items in each category will be listed chronologically rather than ranked. As a quality measure, there will be a cap on the … [Read more...]

Have you ever had a song rightfully accuse you of something? You're listening and it suddenly hits you like a sack of potatoes. It's not that you can 'relate' to what the singer is saying. It's that the singer is actually aiming right at you, reminding you of your own misdeeds, character flaws, unreasonable attitudes. A common version of this in the country genre is the song that points out society's lack of empathy for the poor and downtrodden, that asks us all to be a little kinder to the … [Read more...]

I was listening to Catherine Britt's excellent Dusty Smiles and Heartbreak Cures yesterday and the young Aussie's covers of Hag and Hank got me wondering about the most-covered songs in my library. Well, a bit of time rooting through my collection and I came up with the short list below, which happens to include some of my favorite songs.I Never Go Around Mirrors (9)Bradley Walker, Daryle Singletary, Dick Curless, Gene Watson, Keith Whitley, Mark Chesnutt, Merle Haggard, Trace Adkins, Willie … [Read more...]

I'm tentatively toying with the idea of doing a year-end Best Posts of 2008 feature to highlight some of the great things happening in the country music blogosphere. The list would probably focus on the indies (The 9513, Country Universe, etc.) rather than the corporate blogs (CMT and the like). There's still a lot of year left and this is still very much just an idea, but I'd like to solicit some early feedback.What do you think are the most memorable or noteworthy blog posts of 2008? When … [Read more...]