Nashville
Ellie Porter
With US number one singles and Grammys coming out of his ears, a record-breaking streak at the top for debut album This One’s For You and collaborations with country big-timers aplenty, Luke Combs is riding high. The North Carolina-born toast of Nashville (he was also inducted into the Grand Ole Opry this summer) keeps things going with second album What You See Is What You Get, a rambling, occasionally brilliant collection of drinking songs, lovelorn ballads and earnest tributes to the working man.The first five songs will already be familiar to fans – they made up The Prequel, a massive- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was the fabled Nashville songwriter Harlan Howard who commented that country music is “three chords and the truth”. Rose-Lynn, the protagonist of Wild Rose, just happens to have the surname Harlan, and she has the “three chords” motto tattooed on her forearm. Singing country music is the only thing that has meaning for Rose-Lynn, a bossy, brassy 24-year-old Glaswegian single mother fixated on her dream of moving to Nashville and making a career in music. Only snag is, she has managed to blank out the whole motherhood aspect of the equation, and if she’s given it any thought at all Read more ...
joe.muggs
Oh this is annoying. One really doesn't want to be mean about the People's Princess. Kylie is one of the great pop stars of our time: charming, witty, a survivor, with several dozen proper classic songs under her belt, she has never stopped sparking with star quality. And the way she talks about her creative process, it's clear she still cares, so it's very easy to believe that she still has an album in her that can stand with her best and cement her status as one of the best to do it.This isn't it, though. This is a country album, recorded in Nashville. Not that that's anything bad in itself Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If there's one thing I've learned from Nashville the TV show it's that the best musical collaborations can birth the most beautiful love stories.Johnnyswim is the real life version of boy (Abner Ramirez) meets girl (Amanda Sudano) in Nashville Tennessee, who got together to collaborate back in 2005. They made beautiful music together, and ended up in love.Their heady mix of American folk-pop, with soul and blues influences, comes together to make a sound that Callie Khouri would be proud of. They sing of summertime romances, being each other's lighthouse, getting it right on the first try, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The unsinkable Dolly Parton turned 70 in 2016 and the new year marks the 50th anniversary of her debut album, Hello, I’m Dolly. Pure & Simple is her 43rd studio album, its genesis a brace of stripped-down concerts given at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium which were reprised at Dollywood. Such a back-to-basics approach is much favoured by country musicians – Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris and Loretta Lynn have trodden a similar path. Everything is relative, however: the backing quartet multiplied in the studio yet still Dolly describes it as “almost like a garage band”.As ever, Parton’s Read more ...
joe.muggs
A legacy can be a hell of a thing. When someone has a recorded archive of stone cold classics, it must be very tough indeed to present their new works, knowing they'll be compared to their best. This goes double with a voice as distinctive as Chrissie Hynde's: even the smallest inflexions of her singing are so recognisable that they instantly trigger sense memories of all the times that her songs have struck an emotional chord in the listener.Make no mistake, Alone is a very good album. From the second the title track kicks in, feeling like a strangely rowdy Velvet Underground deciding it's Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If Kris Kristofferson had just been the writer of “Help Me Make It Through the Night”, “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”, his legacy would have been assured. Each song is a classic, and each is wonderful. Elvis Presley and Gladys Knight & the Pips ensured that “Help Me Make It Through the Night” would live forever. Kristofferson’s ex-girlfriend Janis Joplin did the same with “Me and Bobby McGee” – the writer did not initially know she had recorded it. In 1969, Ray Stevens was first to tackle “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”. Johnny Cash was next. All three songs featured Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Life and art have generally had a troubled relationship. In the case of former hobo and punk-blues singer Seasick Steve, however, it all seemed so simple. When he sang "Dog House Boogie" on his extraordinary Hootenanny debut nearly a decade ago, it was his grit and authenticity, even more than his musical skills – though the two go hand-in-hand – that the audience fell in love with. Read any fan forum and it’s clear that Steve is loved because most audiences believe he’s experienced exactly what he sings.The official biography, documented repeatedly in the hundreds of press interviews Steve Read more ...
graeme.thomson
I interviewed Merle Haggard once and he’s a slippery old snake: dry, reserved and fiercely intelligent, with an ornery pride and an oft-used gift for riling people. I’m not sure we got to know him all that much better after Gandulf Hennig’s superb documentary Learning to Live with Myself, but it was a hell of a ride none the less. A man with hidden depths buried inside his hidden depths, Haggard said towards the end of the film that he had struggled his whole life to achieve his aim of being “self-contained, totally”. He wasn't about to go all therapy-speak on our asses now.Filmed over three Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jack White (the former John Anthony Gillis) was born in Detroit and now lives in Nashville, a geographical progression you can hear in his music. He loves rude, dirty rock'n'roll but also has a fine instinct for country music, both of which tendencies are splurged all over this consistently inspired album (his second solo venture and the follow-up to 2012's Blunderbuss). You won't hear any country music played sweeter than "Entitlement" (not that the lyric's particularly sweet, mind), yet White can also create a rockin' wall of chaos like "Three Women", which sounds like Jerry Lee Lewis and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There's a "foreword" which accompanies the new Taylor Swift album – because it's not enough for the one-time Nashville starlet gone full New York pop star merely to create physical objects for the digital age: she also has to give them forewords – which says that these songs that were "once about my life" are "now about yours". It's for this reason that those articles that list the romantic encounters claimed to have inspired every song Swift has written since 2010's "Dear John" onwards do her an incredible disservice: the gossip column inches are irrelevant. That Swift can use vivid Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Perhaps capitalizing on the much-lauded success of the current television series of the same name starring Hayden Panettiere, Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) is now out on DVD. Both film and TV show merge music and drama in the same way and both detail the social and political issues constantly swirling around country music’s hometown. But that’s where the similarities end.Those currently gripped by Nashville fever will be intrigued by the style, stars, songwriting process and provincial nature of the inhabitants of music city in the Seventies – before the notion of celebrity imploded in on Read more ...