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Odds, Ends and an Announcement

I can't believe it's September already. I know I've been MIA for a while now and that's been because things have been a little hectic lately. I spent most of the last month helping to pack up the house I grew up in and didn't have time for writing. This post is going to be a pretty short one. I figured I'd take some time to run through some of the things that will be coming up on this blog.

First: reviews. I've been such a horrible reviewer this year. I knew it'd been a while, but I was stunned to come on and see that I haven't reviewed anything since January. There's been so many great songs and albums released so far this year and I hate that I've let so much time go by without talking about most of them. So I intend on getting some long overdue reviews up, mainly of singles but also some albums. 

Second: cover series. My covers wish list series is one I enjoy writing and so I'm planning on getting more of those out. Especially since I keep thinking of more songs I'd like to see country acts cover.

Third: CMA related stuff. The nominees for this year's CMA Awards will be announced by Sheryl Crow and Florida Georgia Line next Tuesday. I'm really interested in seeing just who gets nominated this year. Once again, I'll be sharing my thoughts and making some predictions. This year's CMA Awards will be airing on ABC on November 6th. 

Fourth: non-country music related things. There won't be too many of these kinds of posts, but I think I might start writing about other things every once in a while. Starting off with a review of a book that's coming out on October 1st called Let Hope In by Pete Wilson. If you follow me on either twitter or instagram, you may have seen me talking about this. In an interesting turn of events, I was chosen to be on the launch team for this book. I'm pretty excited about it. As part of that, it seemed only fair for me to talk about it here on my blog and other social media sites. So you can expect to see more about that this coming month.

Fifth: the introduction of a brand new series tentatively to be called I'm With the Band, after the song of the same name by Little Big Town. I'm really looking forward to this series. Why? Because I will be giving YOU, my dear readers, the chance to be featured as guest bloggers. See, we all have our favorites. We all have that one artist that we love above all the others. Some of us have multiple artists we love over most others. Maybe it's that we feel like their songs speak directly to us. Maybe it's that we can see this act (or acts) as many times as possible and never get tired of the show. Perhaps we've met them and it was such an incredible experience that we feel somehow connected to them on a personal level. It might be that their live show is something you could see 5, 10, 20, 50 + times and never get tired of it. Maybe the shows get better every single time. It could be that we've been there from the beginning of their career and have spent years supporting them in whatever way possible. You get the idea. I don't know about y'all, but I personally love hearing why people love the artists that they do. I've heard some pretty cool stories over the years and I know there's a ton more out there. Stories that I think deserve to be told. 

Now, I do plan on writing some posts for this series myself, but I'd love to have you all become a big part of it. There's not too many rules here. The main one is that you can write about whomever you wish, just so long as they are a country artist. It can be someone current. It can be one of our great legends. It can be one of the big superstars, someone just starting out or anyone in between. It can be a singer or a musician. Have more than one favorite? You can submit as many posts as you wish. I just ask that you only write about one artist per submission. How long should the posts be? I'm going to say no less than one paragraph and no more than a page. The way it would work is you submit the post and when I post it on here, I'll probably do a bit of an introduction and then your post would be featured after the cut. You can use your real name if you want, but you don't have to if you're not comfortable doing so. Just let me know how you want to be credited and that's how you will be. I don't see this being a problem with a series like this, but keep in mind that I do not allow profanity on this page. Again, I don't see this being an issue, but wanted to get that out there.

Interested? Email me at countrymusicATK@hotmail.com and put I'm With the Band submission as the subject so I know what it is. This will be on ongoing thing; no deadline to worry about. 

And that'll do it for this update. Thanks for reading! 

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