Music Country

“I wouldn’t have been able to make this record unless I got clean, unless I found what sobriety meant to me. Not what it meant for someone else.” Ruston Kelly is sitting at a corner table at a popular neighborhood pub in East Nashville. He has a natural ease about …

Famed street artist and graphic designer Shepard Fairey has unveiled a 15-story mural featuring the stoic image of Johnny Cash. Painted on the side of the Residence Inn by Marriott in downtown Sacramento, it is Fairey’s largest on display in the state of California. The image, interpreted from photographer Jim …

In August 1972, 22-year-old Houston-born songwriter Rodney Crowell first arrived in Nashville, a passenger in fellow songwriter Donivan Cowart’s 1965 baby blue Chevy Impala. Much as it is today, the city was experiencing a major growth spurt. Urban renewal, an interstate highway system and the changing face of the Music …

Carrie Underwood‘s breathtaking vocal prowess is on full display in a new video filmed at the Grand Ole Opry, where she gave a stunning performance of her emotional single “Cry Pretty” back in May. https://youtu.be/QnLMsPHojfo Underwood begins the performance in restrained fashion, easing into a storyline about the uselessness of …

Texas country mainstay Wade Bowen tips a proverbial hat to the great Guy Clark in his new single, “Death, Dyin’, and Deviled Eggs.” Channeling the songwriting legend’s knack for detailed, literary storytelling, Bowen’s track turns a funeral scene into something alive with everyday magic, a phenomenon captured in a new …

Lilly Hiatt got a little assistance from friends Margo Price and Brandy Zdan on a fiery cover of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” captured by a fan at Hiatt’s Nashville show last Thursday. Appropriately, Hiatt’s own “Records” leads off the 10-minute performance at the Basement East. A searing rocker …

“Paul Franklin is one of the absolute masters of the pedal steel,” Chris Shiflett says during the opening of Walking the Floor‘s newest episode. “When I asked him to name some of the artists he’s played with over the years, he said it would be easier to name the artists …

Picture Austin, Texas, in the Seventies and its most enduring image may not be so obvious: an armadillo. Those hard-shelled, four-legged desert critters were the unofficial mascot of Outlaw country, and immortalized in song by one of the era’s unsung heroes, Gary P. Nunn, who penned the 1973 cult classic …

Podcaster meets podcaster in the latest episode of Chris Shiflett’s Walking the Floor, which features a wide-ranging interview with Cocaine and Rhinestones host Tyler Mahan Coe. Along with Shiflett’s announcement that he’s been working on a new solo album in Nashville with producer Dave Cobb, he heaps praise on Coe’s …

It’s a bit of a tradition to bring along a surprise guest when playing Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, and Tyler Childers, opening the first of two sold-shows for Margo Price Saturday evening, delivered with Purgatory co-producer and friend Sturgill Simpson. Adding a fiery solo to “Whitehouse Road,” Childers’ song about the …