Music. According to Kim.

I've been wanting to write about the Grand Ole Opry ever since I started this blog and for some reason it's just never happened. So I'm very happy to be getting this post out there as part of my CMA Fest recap. Just a heads up: this is pretty picture heavy. In case I haven't mentioned it before, clicking on a picture should enlarge it. Every picture I post is one I took, unless I say otherwise. All of these in here are mine. CMA Fest really got me in touch with the zoom on my camera, I'll say that. I'm going to talk more about this particular Opry show after the break, but first I wanted to talk a bit about the Opry in general. Starting with some basic facts that I'm sure some, if not many, of you will already know. The Grand Ole Opry is a radio show broadcast on WSM 650AM. They've recently created an app and you can listen to the shows on that as well. The Opry started in 1925 and is the longest running radio show in the United States. I've been t...

I've been to CMA Fest a few times by now and it's usually hard for me to pick a favorite night because they tend to be pretty evenly matched. Not so this year. In my opinion, the first night was the strongest night by far. Before the show we headed to the BMI stage that was set up outside of LP Field. They had performances there each night of the festival, but we only made it to the first one. And that's where this starts.

So day 4 was JakeCarrieStormGate 2013. Day 3 was the Lenny Kravitz fiasco. Day 2? Well, there was  some sort of technical difficulty and a huge failure to communicate just what was going on. A situation that they chose to handle by not handling it. The artist involved? Little Big Town. But like the other couple of days, I'll get to that later. Let's start with the beginning of the night show at LP Field.

All right, so we covered day 4 and what I dubbed as JakeCarrieStormGate 2013. Now we move backwards to Saturday, day 3, which gives us yet another controversy. This time involving the surprise guest. A guest which has me wondering just what on Earth the CMA was thinking. Actually, scratch that, I can guess what they were thinking: having this artist showing up on the TV special airing August 12th will make for good TV. Or rather, what they believe will be good TV. I may be way off base here, but lately it feels like there's people out there who seem determined to prove that country music is cool. And do so by trying to cater to fans of other genres. It's the only explanation that makes sense. The problem? Well, first it implies that country music isn't cool already and that's nonsense. Country may in fact be at the height of its coolness. Look at how just about every singing competition has a country judge now. People say that having Keith Urban on Idol or Blake Shelt...

Hello everyone. Long time, no post. I'm not going to waste time with excuses that don't mean much anyway. The important thing is that I'm getting back into writing and what better place to start than with this year's CMA Fest? I hadn't been for a few years and this is the first year I've attended as a Nashville resident. I was pretty surprised by how different living here seemed to make things. I'm not even sure I can describe it, but it was an interesting experience. I really didn't get to do as much as I'd originally hoped, but I figured that I'd talk about the things I did and the shows I went to. I'll be breaking it up by day and event and also talk about a few others things. Like what could be improved upon and believe me, there's a lot. Now I'm sure some of you looked at the post title and maybe got a little confused. No, you did not miss any posts. I've decided to do something a little strange and work my way backwards. S...

Welcome to the third installment of this series! If you missed them, you can check out parts 1 and 2  here  and  here , respectively. Again, this is an ongoing thing I'm doing and I'm enjoying it so far. It's fun trying to think of songs that never, or rarely, get covered and then deciding which current artist could do it best. Each installment will feature 10 songs and then if anyone would like to suggest any, let me know and I'll add it in as a bonus song in a future installment. It can be any song, from any artist in any genre from any time period. Before I get started, I want to first to tell everyone about a movement going on in country music right now. Some of you may have heard about this already. I'm taking about the "Sixty for Sixty" movement. What is it, you ask? Well, George Strait will be turning 61 on May 18th. So far in his career he has had a total of 59 #1s. Now we're not talking about the same song being released on multiple charts o...

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...