40+ Best Country Singles of 2022

From what I’ve read, 2022 is supposed to be the year that neo-traditionalism (i.e., singers trying to sound like Travis and Strait and McEntire trying to sound like Haggard and Jones and Wynette) returned to country radio while everybody showed how much they missed to the ’90s (i.e., Twain and Brooks and Brooks & Dunn.)…

Things I Said on March 13

2012: Amusing email just came in from Expedia: “Want to get out of Austin? See our last-minute fares.” (SXSW week — Excellent timing!) 2016: So judging from the New York Times Sunday magazine’s annual music issue, I guess no metal songs “tell us where music is going.” (Nor any Latin ones unless Pitbull counts or…

A Central Texas Music Road Trip

Austin has long trumpeted itself as the Live Music Capital of the World, and for years it’s been the fastest growing big city in the United States. And that’s just residents. Every spring, close to 300,000 music, film and tech enthusiasts travel to South By Southwest; increase that population by half, and you’ve got the…

Lego Movie vs. Eric Church

More overrated: The Lego Movie or new Eric Church album? (Leaning toward the one we actually got suckered into paying money for over the one I got sent for free in the mail; maybe that’s not fair.) I felt really bad for taking my daughter to the movie. It was mostly like watching a video…

Memory of the Dance

I feel there must be some cosmic significance in the fact that this lovely medieval-woodcut-looking graphic novel about Strasbourg’s dancing plague of 1518 (“Was this a mania, an illness, a case of divine judgement, food poisoning, a plant-induced hallucination, willful heresy, or a deliberate civic rebellion?”) was written by someone named GARETH BROOKES, but I…

Turn My Swag On

Got a heavy and quite lovely 14″ x 14″ x 3 1/2″ hinged wooden box in the mail from Warners Nashville today with a big “AM” woodcut on the front and vinyl and (sleeveless) CD versions of Ashley Monroe’s *Like A Rose* (my #2 album of the year) bubble-wrapped inside plus a very soft and…

Country reviews, 2006-’13

Gary Allan, Set You Free Gary Allan has long been one of country’s most velvet-voiced beautiful losers. But on Set Me Free he lets the crazy out, howling psychobilly graveyard threats in “Bones,” interrupting a recovery meeting church organ to blame mental ghosts in “It Ain’t The Whiskey,” vegetating in his hotel room while college…

Country Lady Licks, 2004

Fun Fact: The next Elizabeth McQueen and the FireBrands album was an all-pub-rock-covers record, partially inspired by this review! ELIZABETH MCQUEEN & THE FIREBRANDS The Fresh Up Club No confirmation that the two songs addressed to a former love interest no longer in the band concern Asleep at the Wheeler David Sanger, who produced the…

Country Dude Licks, 2003

Toby Keith tests the army’s latest super-secure landline technology. MERLE HAGGARD Like Never Before Merle has no doubt made more beautiful, more political, and jazzier albums, but maybe not all at once, and probably not in the past quarter-century. This one’s two pinnacles might be the best Gulf War II song and best Patriot Act…

John Cougar Mellencamp live review, 1987

Maybe the third best thing I’ve written about the Cougmeister (check my third and fourth books for the first and second best), and still not horrible I don’t think. Surprised I didn’t point out in the corporate sponsorship hypocrisy paragraph that his greatest song is free advertising for Tastee-Freez. My opinion of The Lonesome Jubilee…