Wild Horses Fest Books Zach Bryan, CAAMP, Sierra Ferrell
In the last year we’ve witnessed Zach Bryan go from having to earn respect at country festivals in opening slots, to headlining some of the biggest festivals around.
In the last year we’ve witnessed Zach Bryan go from having to earn respect at country festivals in opening slots, to headlining some of the biggest festivals around.
Everybody calm down. It’s just the ACM Awards. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate that the good guys won.
Zach Bryan has become one of the most popular artists in country. But mention his name, and a vocal minority pop up to complain.
What Two Step Inn got right was that you can mix today’s independent country with country legends from the 80s and 90s, and even some of the cool up-and-comers in the mainstream, and have an event that breaks down barriers and cross-pollinates fans bases because it’s all great country music.
The 2023 Tyler Childers experience comes with an enhanced visual component compared to previous tours. Adorning the stage is a wooded backdrop, a couple of moss-covered boulders to give the facade some depth of field, and a taxadermied possum and big horned sheep (who’s begging to be named).
Zach Bryan’s popularity just continues to grow exponentially. Hell, he probably could have headlined Coachella in California this weekend. Yet even though the population of Zach Bryan fans continues to swell, the passion of those fans has not waned or been diluted whatsoever.
Platforms like Twitter and Tik-Tok have been instrumental to the rise of artists outside of the musical industrial complex by connection them directly with fans, and circumventing the need for major labels or mass media to help performers find a sustainable audience in many instances.
One of the hottest up-and-coming artists in all of country music is now signed to the roster of one of the hottest labels in all of country music. Announced Wednesday afternoon (3-29), West Virginia native Charles Wesley Godwin has signed to Big Loud Records, which is the home of Morgan Wallen.
With every single piece of recorded music now right at your fingertips, spending time reading professional reviews may seem silly. But the problem is that you have every single piece of recorded music right at your fingertips, which means we’ve gone from not enough options, to way too many.
Now Central Oregon will have their own country and roots festival, and it may have one of the best lineups of any independent country event all year. Called the FairWell Festival, they have just announced their inaugural lineup for their July 21-23 festival at the Deschutes County Fairgrounds in Redmond.
You would think that if you had more cooks in the kitchen, they would come up with something more creative. But that’s not the case when it comes to country music songwriting, and a new study corroborates what our ears have been telling us for years. As the amount of songwriters per track has increased…
For the last dozen years or so, one of the most contentious battles within the realm of commercial country music has centered around the incursion of hip-hop influences into the genre, and specifically the use of verses that are rapped as opposed to sung, and electronic beats replacing organic drums.
There are bigger festivals, and maybe in someone’s opinion, better festivals. But few festivals in the roots space are as prestigious as the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in beautiful Telluride, Colorado. Celebrating its 50th year in 2023 of hosting bluegrass and bluegrass-adjacent music in the beautiful mountains…
Will this be the next trend to overtake mainstream country? Of course not. That’s part of what is hilarious about this. As disturbing as Katie Noel’s take on “country” is, it’s also horrifically outdated. This stuff peaked in 2011 with Jason Aldean and “Dirt Road Anthem.” Heard from Colt Ford lately?
Make no mistake about it. Whether you’re a happy camper with a pair of tickets to an upcoming Zach Bryan concert securely in hand or not, his effort to completely eliminate scalpers and bots from the ticket buying process was a success, … unless you didn’t get tickets/
Before all the pomp, pop, and circumstance of the televised portions of the 2023 Grammy Awards, the Grammy Premier Ceremony transpired Sunday (2-5) afternoon in Los Angeles. This is where many of the country awards are given out, as well as awards for bluegrass, folk, Americana.
There’s talk, and then there’s action. Zach Bryan has made a lot of noise about how he’s tired of seeing his hard-working fans get filched by the ticketing monopoly that is TicketBastard, and promised a few weeks ago that he would actively work to buck the system.
For years I’ve been thinking that a cool way to present the legends of country music would be to illustrate the genre’s top artists through a deck of cards. Where to place what artist, what suit would be suited best for certain performers all seems like it would create great discussion points.
Similar to the Song of the Year category in 2023, the top finalists for Saving Country Music’s Album of the Year were so close, it only seems fitting to count them down from #4 to #1 just to take another opportunity to reinforce the best stuff once again. But there is a #1, and it’s one for the ages.
It is a new day in country music, and in live music in general. Tired of the Ticketmaster monopoly? You can continue to shake your little balled up fist in their general direction, or you can get busy building your own networks and infrastructure to circumvent them, and eventually (and hopefully), undermine them.
The Saving Country Music Artist of the Year is not about who sold the most tickets or left the biggest footprint, or who shattered the expectations and possibilities of independent artists that are not played on mainstream country radio. It’s about the artist who most embodied the spirit of of the idea…
On December 18th after Zach Bryan had three of his songs featured on Season 5, Episode 7 of the Paramount series Yellowstone, singer and songwriter Rich O’Toole took to social media to say that Zach’s song “Motorcycle Drive By” had borrowed/stolen the guitar/melody part from his song “Take My Heart” released in 2014.
Let’s highlight some of the bands on the brink, that probably should be headlining festivals and big events themselves, and very well may be in the coming years. These are the artists and bands you better get out to see before like many of your favorite headliners, they end up only playing arenas.
Zach Bryan and the Paramount TV show Yellowstone rekindled their affinity for each other and in a big way on Sunday night, December 18th. The 7th episode of Season 5 included not one, not two, but three Zach Bryan songs via the official soundtrack, and not through a superimposed backing track.