If you’re overlooking the world of bluegrass and what Billy Strings is accomplishing, a malevolent blind spot has infiltrated your point of view. After all, bluegrass is the vessel for the oldest forms of country, and Billy Strings is adhering to it, while somehow pushing it forward like never before in its nearly 80 years of existence.
If you’re eyes are solely affixed to Texas and Kentucky, and the Outlaw and underground scenes for who may rise up among the ranks of musicians and help save country music, you’re gaze is overshooting one of the most impressive classes of young bluegrass musicians the subgenre has birthed in history. Right at the top is Billy Strings.
Without anyone left to please but himself, Pat Green is free to exorcise his demons, get some stuff off his chest, make the album he wants to, and hopefully reconnect with those grassroots in Texas country that once helped carry him to the top, and he once turned his back on. To some his name will continue to be mud, but that doesn’t mean his musical output will be.
Texas country artist Pat Green recently released a new single called “While I Was Away” ahead of the release of his new record Home on August 14th, and when asked what he thought about the new artists and the new style of country music prevailing in the mainstream today, he not only took the high road, he had some high praise for one of country music’s most notorious repeat offenders.
“Home” is certainly not a critical cut from Blue Smoke, but one that for the life of me I can’t find one reason to think it couldn’t live quite nicely on today’s country radio. The video is silly, but it’s also sincerely Dolly. There is a lot here that is very hard not to love. It may not be a country version of “Kokomo” that champions some historic chart re-entry, but Sony should pony up the promo funds…
No, Dolly Parton did not have to mortgage the farm to pay for the production of her new album Blue Smoke released last week, but she is letting loose of a little hacienda in West Hollywood, California she’s owned since 2007 for anyone who can scratch together a cool $1.39 million and really likes the color pink. Dollywood West is located at 9060 Harlan Ave. in the coveted Norma Triangle neighborhood.
This weekend, former guitarist for the Drive By Truckers and current solo artist Jason Isbell accused Dierks Bentley of ripping off his song “In A Razor Town”. This is only going to become more and more common, and much harder to sort out as every single pattern and possibility of notes and chords gets occupied by the unnecessary amount of songs, albums, and artists out there.
About this time last year, every website and periodical that regularly does these type of things put out their “Best of the Decade” lists. Problem is, they were all wrong. All of them. And not just for country music. For ALL of music, and for movies, TV shows, whatever. Why? No, not because I’m a raging culture snob, because officially the decade does not end until tonight.