Opinion / Humor

Last week we reran a column of mine about aggressive song-pitching, and I got this email: Hi Chris, I’m a songwriter who just moved to Nashville, and so far I can’t complain. I’ve gotten a song recorded by the bluegrass band Melon

I’m deep in recording studio land in North Carolina this week,. That’s a good thing, but it has left me little time for blogging, jogging, or even seeing daylight. For that reason, I offer up this column from last April

I had promised to bring up the thorny issue of the “CD trade” this week, but I’m sorry to say that I’ve chickened out, so I’m going to fall back on yet another article on band names. Just kidding; I’ll go

Last week in this space I discussed various counterintuitive business ideas, both good and bad, from giving music away, to touring exclusively in northern climates in the winter. The subject generated both interesting comments and some spirited emails and social media

The word “counterintuitive” has definitely earned its place among the most overused words and phrases of the last 10 years, like “frankly” (the favorite of politicians, and that may cover the last 20 years), “twerk,” “going forward,” “at the end

This week, while iced in in Nashville, TN, I was going to discuss the concept of the band name subtitle, and I still am, but I realized that I had teased you a little bit last week with the reprinting

I’m in the recording studio all this week at Crossroads Studios in North Carolina. If I actually wrote a new column, it would go something like this. “Well, do we like that, or should we try another pass?” “Am I the only

Early on in the life of this column, I wrote a series on naming your bluegrass band, offering various ideas depending on what kind of band you were seeking to name, and even suggesting some band-naming formulas. This week, my

An issue much on the minds of performing artists and songwriters these days is the rapid growth of streaming audio services like Pandora or Spotify, which offer targeted music streams designed to follow the tastes of individual listeners, but which

I was reminded recently by Ned Luberecki that I had once written a bluegrass haiku that went as follows: late in the evening Uncle Pen played the fiddle why did he do that? This led me to think that we were overdue for a