04.14.09

All those bits and pieces

Posted in back catalogue, cricket hates on pop country, news - April 14th, 2009 at 3:31 pm by Cricket

There’s still a day left to enter and win a copy of Willie Nelson’s Naked Willie. Contest ends at midnight tomorrow, so finish up your taxes and go over and enter!

The new podcast is also up. It’s a good listen for a grey spring day. Even if you aren’t in Nashville where the weather isn’t cooperating with the season you should still go download it and listen.

And now that I’ve got your reminders out of the way, I need to clean up some of tabs I’ve had open in my browser for weeks. Here’s some things I’ve been meaning to share with you:

Digital Music News has an article up about the DIY movement killing off the rock stars of the future. I don’t know. It’s kind of a chicken/egg deal. I mean, the industry already really screwed itself out of a lot of it’s audience. The emergence of new media and methods for finding music have changed the way audiences listen and what they look for. So are artists doing it themselves breaking down the system, or artists doing the DIY bit because the system is already completely broken?

Newsweek.com has an article up about whether country music is dead. I’m no friend to mainstream, pop radio country. I love country music, the old stuff, the new stuff you can find digging in the cracks of floorboards in road houses and honky tonks. I love Americana, alt.country, bluegrass and new grass. I hate what everyone thinks of when you say country music these days. While I agree with the author here that radio country sucks, I must say way to gloss over what is happening in American music [I'm gonna have to agree with one of the comments: "Every decade has had journalists who didn't know squat about country music trying to define it." Bitchin' about having to search in order to find good country is about as stupid as Toby Keith. Choices outside of the Nashville sound are a good thing.--Mick]. If he thinks all country music has lost it’s grit, maybe somebody should introduce him to Dale Watson or Jon Byrd.

Sentences I never thought I’d write: Check out Todd Snider on ESPN tomorrow. Oh baseball, you really do bring the world together in strange ways, don’t you? Now if only Todd could make the Yankees fans and the Red Sox fans kiss and make up, my life would be so much easier[Speaking of Toby Keith, there's a hilarious little comment by Snider down that page about the whole Kristofferson confusion and the jingoistic jackass.--Mick ].

New Son Volt album in July. I liked The Search, but still feel somewhat trepidacious at the prospect of a new album. My expectations are hard to reign in from these boys.

I’m probably the last person to bring this up lately, but have you seen The Old, Weird America blog? It describes itself as an exploration of folk music via the Folkways Anthology. I could lose a weekend, or a month, just reading and listening to this delightful exploration.

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