Music. According to Kim.

Finally! This post is about four years in the making! We are fast approaching the end of October and Halloween and every year I've wanted to do a post highlighting some of my favorite creepy, dark country songs. And it's never happened. Until now. As I said in my video spotlight on Two Story Road's wonderful a cappella version of their song "Arson", I've always found dark songs to be the most interesting of songs, particularly from a songwriting perspective. Especially in times like this when there's so many party songs out there. I like listening to dark country songs to balance that out sometimes. In fact, I actually have a playlist made up of 59 of these kinds of songs. I know there's a lot more to be found out there. Maybe it's weird, but I genuinely enjoy listening to these kinds of songs. Not all the time. It definitely requires a certain type of mood. I feel like I always listen to them more this time of year because what better time of ...

Welcome to the first actual installment of my music therapy series. In case you missed it, I wrote an introduction to this series a couple of days ago that you can find here . The quick introduction is that I use music to help me cope with living with rheumatoid arthritis - with life in general, to be honest - and wanted to share some of the songs that help. Music has been proven to help with pain and depression, among other things. The power of music knows no bounds. This series will be ongoing, with the second installment coming later this week. For these first two installments, I've decided to take you all on an emotional progression of sorts. We're going to start in the dark and work our way towards the light.  Before we get into it, I did want to mention an article I read a while back that suggested that listening to sad music all the time can make you more depressed. It's a valid point and one that I agree with. So why include sad songs? Because sometimes that...

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...

Welcome to the second installment of my covers series. Check out the first part if you haven't already. Since picking songs using shuffle worked so well for me the last time, that's exactly how I'm going to do it every time. As far as I know none of these songs have ever been done by any of these artists. I forgot to mention it last time, but wanted to urge everyone to check out any songs that they don't know. You should be able to preview all of them on Amazon or iTunes. Or even YouTube. Once again, if any of the artists featured in this installment happen to come across this than they can take it as a challenge. I imagine that some of the choices might throw a few of them for a loop if they did see it. Especially one of them. Remember: I'm trying to think out of the box and not always go with what seems obvious. Some choices are more creative than others. If you came to this post via a direct link and missed part 1, you can find it  here . So that said, let...