Music. According to Kim.

I'll be getting to the review in a moment, but seeing as I'm posting this on Memorial Day here in the United States I'd like to talk about that for a minute. I'm a very big support of our military; there's a quote I've seen floating around the Internet that  says " if you can't get behind our military, get in front of them". That's pretty much exactly how I feel about it. We owe so much to our military, they are the reason why we get to live the lives we do. They are the reason we're free and they deserve our utmost respect and appreciation. Their sacrifices are many and today we remember those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice and honor those who have died. Hopefully at some point today, you'll take a moment or more to think of all the brave men and women in uniform and be grateful. For all of the fallen, for all of the veterans and for all who are actively serving their country as we speak. And may we also take a moment or more...

There seems to be a lot of hype about this album as someone who liked Lee Brice to begin with, I was very interested to hear it for myself. I’ve finally sat down and listened to the whole thing in its entirety. And before I go into what I thought of the songs, I want to take a minute and say how much I like his voice. He has a great quality to it and so much power behind it, which is something I’ve always known about him, but it just seems so much more here. I don’t know what it is, maybe he’s getting more confident as an artist or maybe it has more to do with the songs themselves, but I’m not complaining. This guy has a big voice that has a hearty heaping of soul in it that I like a lot. I really think that I could listen to him sing just about anything and enjoy it. This means that we’re off to a great start here. Vocals and music aside, there’s just something very likeable about Lee to me in general. I almost want to say that there’s a kind of warmth or something to him that is ...

And now to conclude this series.

I'd like to start off by thanking everyone who reads my blog, especially those of you who read the first part of this. I really appreciate that. This is now going to be three parts because there's a lot I want to get out there, but I'm trying to avoid having a super, crazy long monster of a post. I mentioned in my Kip Moore album review, but I now have a Facebook page for this blog, which can be found in the post below if you're interested. Thanks to those of you who have 'liked' it already! Now to get back into the world of arthritis...

Before I get into my review, I want to take a second and introduce the launch or whatever you want to call it off my Facebook page, which can be found here:  https://www.facebook.com/CountryMusicAccordingToKim . It's still very much a work in progress, right now it's just links to all of the posts I've done so far, but I'll be adding to it. Lots of pictures and things like that. So go check it out! First albums are a tricky business. I suppose you could say that for any album an artist releases, really. I’d imagine that every album brings its own problems and difficulties as I’m sure any artist would agree with. But in my opinion, the first album is a lot like the foundation of a building. This is the one that is going to give you a glimpse what kind of artist they are going to be. Now the best artists will be constantly growing and developing their sound as their career progresses and for many that will involve venturing out into a different direction musically. Bu...

Yeah, so as you may have guessed from the title this post is not country music related. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do this post or not because of that fact, but have obviously decided to do it. As you may or may not be aware, May is Arthritis Awareness Month. This is something that is very close to my heart and so I wanted to do something in honor of it, to try and get some facts and information out to people who may not know much about it. This may be something I do every once in a while, a post about something completely unrelated to country music, but rest assured that this is still very much a country blog. I’ll be getting back to that when this is done. I’m hoping that you will all indulge me and keep reading. I’m going to go into some facts and whatnot after the break, but before that I suppose I should explain why I wanted to do this and why it’s so important to me. I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in the late fall/early winter of 2000 when I was a senior in high ...

This is a little different, but I'm going with it. Good to change things up some, right? Hopefully you already read the review of Changed  by Rascal Flatts. If not, it's the post right below this one if you want to get caught up. Picking up right where I left off...

I think I'm renaming this month as album review month because that's all I've done. Trying to get caught up before even more albums come out. I'm going to get to this newest review shortly, but first, I'm going to take a second and give my readers a heads up about a new website that's going to get launched sometime next month, This Day in Country Music which will be found at  http://www.thisdayincountrymusic.com/  once it's up. These are people who love music, who love country  music and are very excited to get this site up. In the meantime, you can go check them out on Facebook,  https://www.facebook.com/ThisDayInCountryMusic , or on their twitter @TDICountryMusic. They specialize in country music trivia, history and facts so if you love country music, they are definitely worth checking out. I've learned some pretty interesting things from them that I probably wouldn't have known otherwise. So yeah. See what you think and if you think it's cool,...

Well, here's another album by someone who I'm really not terribly familiar with or at least wasn't before I did this review. I was looking on his site and he's done all kinds of things - you may recognize him from Survivor. He seems like a pretty interesting guy actually and I'm not going to get more into it, but if you're interested in learning more about him check out his website  http://chaserice.com/  and see for yourself. The strange thing about him is that I honestly can't remember where I first heard of him. I've never watched Survivor  so it definitely wasn't there; I want to say I saw someone talking about him on Facebook and then decided to look him up. This review is going to be a pretty long once as there's a total of 17 songs on this, if you count the hidden track, which I did. So it'll be pretty long after the cut just so you know. Lot of songs and I had a lot to say. My general opinion? I really enjoyed this album and I feel ...

So, I've started work on my next album review which is for Chase Rice's Dirt Road Communion, but decided to take a little break from that to start off a new ongoing series I'll be doing. With all the time I've spent doing album reviews lately, I've been thinking a lot about great albums in general and how there's so much music out there that deserves to get heard. I have my reviews to talk about new albums, but thought it'd be interesting to write about older albums every now and then that I feel are worth having. Hence the title, albums worth owning. I already know of a few I'm going to write about at some point in the future, but the choice as to which one to do first was obvious. If you've been reading my blogs for a while and saw the post I did in February about why you should check out the Dirt Drifters, you might remember that I mentioned that my dad is a songwriter. Well, he's a songwriter who has a CD out and available for purchase entitl...

I have to say that out of everything I've reviewed so far, I was the least familiar with Casey James. I didn't watch Idol the year he was on and I'm kind of grateful I didn't because it gives me the chance to look at him like I would any other artist. I got his CD on iTunes around the time it came out, but never got around to listening to it for who knows what reason. I end up doing that a lot. Exceptions being new releases by my favorite artists. But yeah, this CD came in late March if I remember correctly, but pretty much completely new to me before I listened to it for this review, minus "Let's Don't Call It a Night". So what did I think? I think I have an interesting problem as a reviewer in that I've genuinely liked the majority of the things I've reviewed so far. Which is probably a good thing. This is the first debut CD that I've reviewed and that fact makes me happy that I liked it. Why? Because I take it as a sign that the genr...

So, in my last review I was wondering why Craig Morgan wasn't more popular and I'm going to start off this review by asking why Amy Dalley isn't more popular. Though in her case, it might be because she's pretty much under the radar. It may be a case of people not really knowing who she is. I remember seeing her video for "Men Don't Change" back when it first came out and really liked both the song and video. After that was a video for "I Would Cry", but she was on Curb Records at the time and they never put out a full album. She finally left them in 2008, as the good ole internet tells me, and her last two albums - this one and the one before, It's Time - were released on independent labels. And really, in listening to this, I'm going to say that I think Curb made a mistake. Because her music is good and deserves to be released and heard and I encourage any and everyone reading this to go look her up and check her out. Maybe this was...

Okay, so after finishing my last blog, I decided to start listening to the first album on my albums to review list. And in doing so, I have a question that I'd like to ask all of my readers. I'm very curious about this, so if you have any insights, please share them with me. My question is why is Craig Morgan not more popular? I mean, he's not what I'd call unpopular and he's had his success certainly, but I just don't understand why he hasn't had more. I don't get it. I think Craig is one of the more underrated vocalists in country right now. He has a unique tone to his voice and more range than you might expect at first listen. I've gotten to see him at the Opry a handful of times and am always struck by how good of a singer he is. So if you like listening to good singers sing, that's one reason to buy this album. Maybe the voice isn't as important as the songs themselves. That's fine; in fact, as I've said before, in country mu...