Music. According to Kim.

I was just skimming over the list of all the performers for the show this year and it looks like this is the year of the collaborations. There's always a few, but it seems like there's more than usual this time. Zac Brown Band will be joined by Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, Hunter Hayes will be performing his new single with Jason Mraz, Keith Urban and Miranda Lambert are singing their new duet and Taylor Swift will be performing with Vince Gill and Alison Krauss among others. And then Alan Jackson and George Strait will be teaming up to honor George Jones. There'll also be a special tribute to Kenny Rogers that will include Rascal Flatts, Jennifer Nettles and Darius Rucker. I don't know; just seems like more than usual this year. Should be interesting. In any event, in Part 1 of my predictions I talked about Entertainer, Male Vocalist, Female Vocalist, New Artist, Group and Duo. Now it's time to shift focus a bit. Starting off with…

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. We've arrived at the last category in this series. If you recall from my introductory post, I decided against making a pick for Musician of the Year. Mainly because I'm not familiar enough with a couple of the musicians nominated and knew I wouldn't be able to come up with much to say about them. And that didn't seem fair. It's easier to write about artists you don't know too well than it is to write about musicians. Why that is, I'm not sure. Most people seem to be calling this for Mac McAnally (guitarist) and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that he's won it for the past four years. Not a bad track record, I'd say! My love of the steel guitar makes me hope that Paul Franklin might take this one. But honestly, all five of the men nominated would deserve it. I don't have to know all of their playing well to know that they all deserve it  because I know how strong the talent pool is in Nashville. These five gentlemen being chose...