Everything is better acoustic. Although that statement is as susceptible to exception as any other generalization, it held mostly true at Tuesday night's Golf and Guitars charity concert at Haggin Oaks Golf Course in Sacramento, California. Preceded by a full day of golfing with -- or, for those on a tighter budget, watching people golf with -- celebrities in the rain, the mostly-acoustic concert started at 6pm and ran until almost 11. In that time, no fewer than fifteen Nashville acts … [Read more...]

I spent Sunday at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, CA - where, as I discovered, you can't have both a cheeseburger and a bottle of water for $10 - for what happened to be the very last day of the first annual Country Throwdown Tour. Billed as the first traveling multi-stage country music festival, the tour is sponsored by Rockstar Energy Drink and brought to you by Kevin Lyman, the same guy who does the Vans Warped Tour. The upside to the corporate tie-ins is that Lyman is able to bring … [Read more...]

I spent Tuesday afternoon at the Golf & Guitars charity event at Haggin Oaks Golf Course in Sacramento. It was a generous lineup for the cost of a $25 ticket, with three or four acoustic songs apiece by Jack Ingram, Mark Wills, Chris Young, Josh Gracin, Justin Moore, Chuck Wicks, Chely Wright, Emily West, Radney Foster, BOMSHEL, Bryan White, One Flew South, John Berry, Love and Theft, The Band Perry, and Brian Sizensky. Here are some of the highlights from the cheap seats: My uncanny … [Read more...]

This past weekend marked the ninth annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco, with about 80 roots-oriented acts appearing on six different stages over the course of three days. The festival is notable for its size (at an estimated 750,000 attendees this year, it dwarfs most other festivals), the caliber of talent it attracts, and its price tag: free to all who show up, thanks to the generosity of one man who foots the bill, billionaire investment banker and banjo-picking roots … [Read more...]