Music. According to Kim.

Wanted to stop this off by saying that if you have any thoughts about anything I write about, I'd love to hear them. Whether you agree or disagree, I welcome opinions of all kinds. All I ask is that everyone remain respectful. I had a comment come in last night on one of my reviews that I ended up deleting due to the use of profanity. That's something that I'm not going to tolerate. There's no need for it. I don't like deleting comments, but I will remove any that include profanity. Right now I allow anonymous comments and I'd like to keep it that way. Hopefully that comment will prove to be a fluke; it's the first one I've gotten that I felt I had to remove. I really don't think this will be a big problem, but I wanted to get this out there. So now that that's taken care of, here's the rest of my ACM thoughts, picks and predictions. Kicking it off with...

Well, the Academy of Country Music Awards - the ACMs - are less than a week away. So it seemed like time for me to get myself into gear and get my picks all posted. I'm going to try to get all my picks up in two posts and then I'll be doing a couple of follow up posts sometime after the show. Remember the show is this Sunday, April 7th, on CBS at 8PM Eastern and will be hosted by Blake Shelton and Luke Bryan. I'm going to miss seeing Reba hosting, but I'm looking forward to seeing what Blake and Luke come up with. I can only imagine. I have to say that I thought some of the nominations this year were downright wacky. Some great examples of industry politics coming into play for some of them. I don't blame the artists for this; I just think it's messed up. So for anyone who was disappointed that one of their favorite artists didn't get nominated for anything, please keep this in mind. There were some major snubs this year. Not to mention some ridiculous i...

Last post! I enjoyed the ACMs this year, but to be totally honest, I'm going to be happy to be done with them. I said I was going to write about every performance and that I have - took a little longer than I wanted it to, but  that's all right. I'm going to get to the remaining five performances shortly, but just a heads up for what's coming. In two words: album reviews. I have a bunch in my list to do and am hoping to get at least four done this week, if not more. I'll be starting off with Craig Morgan's This Ole Boy , Amy Dalley's Coming Out of the Pain , Casey James  by Casey James and Chase Rice's Dirt Road Communion . That's more than likely going to be the order I do them in. Also on the lineup: Changed  by Rascal Flatts, Hard 2 Love  by Lee Brice, Up All Night  by Kip Moore and Josh Abbott Band's Small Town Family Dreams . I might do one where I review a handful of EP's since there's been some new ones put out lately as well. Al...

11 performances left. Talking about six performances this time and then will do the remaining five in the next one. Jumping right in.

So. I had this all written and scheduled to post and when it posted, the only thing that posted was the title. Everything else: gone. I started a second post and had to save it to come back later and when I came back, everything was gone. I have no idea what's going on with blogger lately. If you follow me via email you may have gotten an alert about a review for "There She Goes" by the Dirt Drifters that I did a month or more ago - I can't explain it. Hopefully things get back to normal around this. Now I'm doing this one again and hoping that the third time will be the charm. Jumping in.

All right, so I'm finally getting to the performances from the 2012 ACMs. I've made up a list of everyone who performed and am pretty sure I have everyone. If you're reading this and think of anyone I missed, please let me know. By my count, there were twenty four performances which I consider to be a lot. Especially when you consider that there were only eight awards given out during the broadcast. Eight awards compared to twenty four performances. That's ridiculous. It is an awards show. But I've ranted about that already. Moving on. These aren't going to be in any kind of order. I wasn't able to record the awards and have been relying on good ole youtube to watch everything again. So it's going to be in whatever order I think of them in and has nothing to do with what I may have thought of them. I'm going to be breaking these up into multiple posts because there's so many. I'm not going to be posting any of the videos for space purposes...

It's been a couple of weeks since the awards, but I still wanted to talk about all the performances on the show. This'll probably end up being multiple posts just because there were so many performances. Overall, I thought the show was pretty strong. Some great moments mixed with some not so great moments to things that flat out didn't work for me. Which is pretty much the case with every awards show. But first I want to share some general thoughts and observations. I'm guessing that at one point award shows were first and foremost about the awards themselves, but in the time I've been watching them it feels like the focus has shifted from being about them to being about the performances. This is true for just about every awards show these days. I understand it to an extent; a lot of times they'll be a ton of categories and there just wouldn't be enough time to air them all. I get why some awards would be done off air. Leaving some off the show is one th...

So the ACMs have come and gone and I said I'd do a post about what I thought of the show and here's the first part of that. The first of two parts since I decided to do two posts about it, one focusing on how I did with my predictions and another about what I thought of all the performances. I've gotten so behind in my posting lately and am hoping to get a lot of new stuff out there over the next week and beyond. There's forever song reviews to be done and I have some album reviews to do as well, as long as that trivia contest I first brought up several posts ago. That's all coming and hopefully in a timely fashion. But for now: The 2012 Academy of Country Music Awards winners. http://www.acmcountry.com/winners.html So how'd I do? Well, let's take a look.

Nine categories down and three more to go! This time I'm going to take a look at New Artist of the Year, Video of the Year and Vocal Event of the Year to wrap up my ACM thoughts and predictions. But first I want to address my comments about Entertainer where I didn't really take into account the fact that it's fan-voted, even after posting the link where everyone will be able to vote come Noon on March 19th, right before talking about it. I was looking at it more like the non fan-voted categories. But I'm sticking with my prediction of Jason Aldean winning for all of the reasons I mentioned and the fact that I believe that his fans are as hungry for him to win as he is. I probably didn't need to clarify that point, but wanted to. So that's that. Now it's time for me to focus on the final three categories. Here we go.

Up until this point, it's been about the artists themselves and now the focus shifts more to the songs and the people who write them. In country music it's all about the lyrics. Period. So let's take a look at the nominees for Single, Song and Songwriter of the Year:

All right, so I've talked about Entertainer and Male and Female Vocalist of the year and now it's time to focus on the Duos, the Groups, the Albums and Singles & Songs of the Year. Lots of ground to cover this time, so I'm going to jump right in:

With the Academy of Country Music Awards coming up on April 1st, I thought I'd take a moment or several to share my thoughts about the nominees and who I believe should win versus who I believe will. I'm thinking that I'll do a blog afterwards about what I thought of the show and all the winners and performers and all that. It'll be interesting to see how close I get in terms of the winners. I have a feeling that it'll be a good show this year and I'm so happy that Blake Shelton will be back to co-host with Reba McEntire. Reba's proven that she's more than capable of hosting the show herself, but I love Blake and I love watching them interact. Watching them is practically a show in and of itself, so it should be fun. I'll have to track down a list of who all is performing, though I won't be commenting on that until after the show. Now my focus is on the nominees. This is the first part of what'll end up being a four part series - it seemed li...