Photo Credit: Beth Garrabrant Taylor Swift wrote her third album entirely on her own. This was partly a result of Swift getting her “best ideas at 3 am in Arkansas,” as she would tell Songwriter Universe, but it also served as a rebuttal to critics and other commentators who had previously doubted teenage Swift’s creative… Read more
Photo Credit: Louie Banks In 2017, Shania Twain ended a fifteen-year gap between albums with Now – re-introducing herself to the public with a newly mature sound that attempted to show she’d evolved without losing her signature charm. That album’s best songs did just that (“Home Now” and “Life’s About to Get Good”), but the… Read more
Photo Credit: Beth Garrabrant (All Photos) Taylor Swift’s re-recordings have, so far, been largely successful – beyond achieving their central aim of giving Swift back control of the masters of her first six albums, they’ve earned her another No.1 with “All Too Well,” as well as jumpstarting an overdue critical re-evaluation of her earliest works…. Read more
Photo Credit: Sonya Jasinski It’s fair to say that Michelle Branch has spent nearly two decades living in the shadow of her first two albums – 2001’s The Spirit Room and 2003’s Hotel Paper. How could she not after taking a fourteen-year break from solo output between her second and third LP? If Branch’s fourth,… Read more
Photo Credit: Press British-Australian pop singer and actress Olivia Newton-John died on August 8 at age seventy-three, after a long and recurring battle with breast cancer. Though less in the public eye for the past few decades, the singer made a huge impact during the ’70s and early ’80s: she became one of the few… Read more
Photo Credit: Randee St Nicholas In the nearly two decades since winning American Idol, Carrie Underwood has established herself as the rare country star that everyone can root for. She’s consistently found a tactful balance between pop and country that leaves fans of both genres largely satisfied and has steadfastly avoided wading into politics –… Read more
Photo Credit: Adrienne Raquel Texan songstress Kacey Musgraves has been categorized mainly as a country artist since her 2013 debut album Same Trailer Different Park (her last one, Golden Hour, even won a Grammy for Best Country Album in 2018). However, Musgrave’s fifth (this is counting her 2016 Christmas album) studio album Star-Crossed finds her exploring a variety of different musical styles,… Read more
Photo Credit: Beth Garrabrant Given half the chance, most of us would probably like to completely erase the memory of 2020; a year of illness, upheaval, and isolation. For Taylor Swift, however, the year could hardly have gone better (at least from an artistic perspective). Her indie-folk lockdown albums Folklore and Evermore earned her the critical acclaim that had… Read more
Every now and then you might wonder what the ten biggest-selling albums of all time might be. As it turns out, it’s not an exact science: while we’re pretty sure a couple of people did buy Michael Jackson’s Thriller, different outlets have different ways of measuring overall album sales, say nothing of the fact that with the… Read more
Kenny Chesney’s ‘Guitars, Tiki Bars and a Whole Lotta Love’ Tour with Keith Urban & Dierks Bentley at the Wachovia Spectrum Center Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Dierks Bentley Keith Urban Kenny Chesney Photography by: Steve Trager