Funny stuff

It’s IBMA Awards voting season, and some changes in the process have already been announced for 2019 by the IBMA board of directors. Most are minor procedural changes that may not be terribly interesting to most members (they weren’t even

I read an interesting tale of the music business recently, in which an Edmonton music student and songwriter, Connor Shaw, claimed that a song he wrote was the basis for a current number one song by country artist Jason Aldean,

I do my best to keep up with the latest trends in bluegrass music. I like to go beyond the Bluegrass Today headlines about bluegrass artists’ weddings and medical procedures (sometimes taking place on the same day) to try to

The Memorial Day weekend is sort of a milestone in the year. It’s the unofficial start of summer. The fashion people also tell us it’s now okay to wear white shoes (lime green leisure suit optional).  Canada celebrates a long weekend

I wanted to begin this week by answering some concerns raised in the comments section and elsewhere about some of the contents of my columns, whether it be alleged pinball sexism, or alleged lack of respect for traditional bluegrass lyrics.

Some time ago, I proposed a video game for songwriters that would allow them to experience simulated hardships to enable them to write soulful songs without having to actually experience the heartbreak and tragedy that usually feeds that kind of

There are some who believe, mistakenly I think, that bluegrass music hasn’t received its due recognition in the mass marketplace because the song lyrics no longer speak to the condition of the average listener in 2018. Others believe its mass

Several weeks ago I wrote a column about bluegrass financing (save all your oxymoron jokes for another time!), and we got into an interesting discussion in the comments section below, which I’d like to pick up on, expand upon, then

Last week we were discussing the psychology of the studio experience, and we’ve come now to the critically important matter of the engineer. When we last left the studio, our engineer was mixing an album with 6 different self-producers surrounding him,

The Night Drivers and I are in the studio this week in North Carolina, recording new material for Mountain Home, so I figured this would be a good time to offer up an “encore presentation” (rerun) of a column I