Who should win this year’s CMA Awards

This year’s CMA Awards are due to be announced on November 11th. There are bound to be a few surprises, with unexpected winners or losers. We’ll share our best attempts at prediction with you next week, but first we thought we would let you all know not who we expect to win, but [...]

Mountain country magic: A tribute to Patty Loveless

When we announced Patty Loveless as our Spotlight Artist, all of us here at My Kind of Country were very excited about the opportunity to write about one of our favorites.  In past months, we’ve brought in Guest Contributors to help out with the reviews.  But this month, all the reviews were snatched up [...]

Another shot for Blaine Larsen

One of my favorite singers to come along in the past few years is Washington native Blaine Larsen.  In 2004, he released his first album on the small Giantslayer Records, under the wing of the label’s owners Tim Johnson and Rory Lee Feek, now of Joey + Rory fame.  The next year, the 19 year-old [...]

Recommendation: Songs about saying goodbye

Today an album that I’ve been anticipating for a while came out, namely Far by Regina Spektor- a very unique artist indeed. Listening to the album’s lead-off single, “Laughing With” (See the music video here), a line hit me kind of hard:
No one laughs at God on the day they realize
that the last sight they’ll [...]

De-stress songs

These next two weeks will be very stressful, for me that is because of one thing: AP tests. Half of my classes are AP classes, so I have a lot of big tests coming up. So what did I decide to do? I made a playlist of some albums that I consider very relaxing, namely:
Home, [...]

ACM Predictions

Tomorrow night’s Academy of Country Music awards are on everybody’s minds and lips. Reba will be hosting for the 11th time as the Academy hands out the awards on their 44th annual show.  Here then, is our contribution to the ACM Awards media frenzy.  These are the predictions of the My Kind of Country writing [...]

Are record labels stupid, or is it just radio?

Lately I’ve noticed that the worst songs seem to be picked for release as singles from a number of artists.  Alongside that, labels seem to be increasingly confused about how best to promote albums, with songs being announced as the next single from a given artist, and then hurriedly replaced by something else.  It all [...]

Country’s greatest duos

 
Few things satisfy a country music fan more than when two of one’s favorite solo performers announce plans to go into the studio and record together.  Country music has a long and rich history of producing collaborations with such great chemistry that they threatened to overshadow the solo work of the same artists. Perhaps that’s [...]

Album Review: Joey Martin – ‘Strong Enough To Cry’

Joey + Rory were my favorite duo on last year’s Can You Duet, but I felt a little guilty about hoping they would win, because I couldn’t help feeling Joey was really a solo singer, with Rory just there to support her. I would have been perfectly happy if she had built on the exposure [...]

Emotional truth: sentiment and sentimentality in country music

Emotional truth is at the heart of almost all truly great country songs.  There is a very fine line in country music between the true tearjerkers, for which the genre is justly known, and the cloying sentimentality which outsiders sometimes ascribe to the music. Not, I have to admit, always completely unfairly – if the strings [...]

Can lightning strike twice? Can You Duet season 2

I have to confess to a slightly shameful addiction here: reality music shows. I watch them even when I know they’re terrible. CMT’s Can You Duet, last spring, was a breath of fresh air – a reality music competition I could take seriously, because most of the acts were talented. It was a pleasure to watch, and [...]

Chris’s End of 2008 List: Top 10 Album Cuts

These are my favorite album cuts from albums released in 2008. I decided to do it for all genres, but there are only 3 songs that aren’t country, so I hope you guys like it! (I also shortened my comments to just a few sentences.)

10. “Strawberry Swing” – Coldplay
- The great looping guitar in the [...]

Chris’s End of 2008 List: Top 30 Singles

This is my 2008 top-30 singles post! First, about my singles list, I attempted to avoid songs that could still impact the charts more, songs like Miranda Lambert’s “More Like Her” or Little Big Town’s “Good Lord Willing”. I made some exceptions as you’ll soon see, but I tried to keep it to songs that [...]

Chris’s End of 2008 List: Top 8 Albums

This is my post for my top albums of 2008! I was looking at the new albums I had bought this year, and I only bought around 12 new country albums, most of which I thought were undeserving of being on my year-end list. So, I narrowed it down to 8 worthy candidates. I’m warning [...]