By Chris Gray
It's time to rank the best of what went around and came around again.
BILLY JOEL
The Stranger
(Columbia/Legacy)
As punk and disco exploded, the Piano Man's deeply unhip 1978 breakthrough proved that top-shelf Broadway/Brill Building songwriting could still sell - and, occasionally, rock. "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" and "Anthony's Song (Movin' Out)" remain priceless snapshots of Annie Hall-era NYC, the title track bares real teeth, and the Kenny Chesney fave "Only the Go
By Michael McCall Photo by Michael Alan GoldbergTwo
young blondes with toothy smiles and hard-core work ethics, Taylor
Swift and Carrie Underwood, helped country expand its fan base in these
years of shrinking music sales. Meanwhile, Kenny Chesney, Rascal
Flatts, Alan Jackson, Toby Keith, Tim McGraw, Brad Paisley and George
Strait kept filling arenas and at least maintaining their popularity on
the road, if not with record sales. But as has often been the case, the
best country music has little
Watch out, another twisters a-comin! Damn, how I wish we were in that there V.I.P tent!I've spent the last year telling everyone who'll listen that Country Thunder is the premier music festival in Arizona. Whether you like country music or not, you should recognize that compared with any other festival in the state Country Thunder's acts are bigger, the crowd crazier, the part wilder. So it was that I made every effort to make the pilgrimage out to Canyon Moon Ranch in Florence Thursday afternoo
The annual Country Thunder festival at the dusty Canyon Moon Ranch just outside of Florence is country music's version of a cattle drive, where over four days some of the bigger names in country music are herded on stage to bleat their biggest hits, then lassoed off to make way for the next artist. Country fans get a lot of bang for their buck, beer flows like the Colorado River, and despite their reputation as a boozin' and brawlin' fanbase, country fans are all about the "let's get drunk and h
Brad Perry and the Acoustic FingerprintsBrad Perry and the Acoustic Fingerprints(Self-released)Grade: C-I'm sure our weekly locals-only music review column, You Asked For It, has unwittingly kicked people when they were down before but, honestly, that's never the intent. That's why it's so hard to write about this week's selection, offered up by Brad Perry who was recently laid off from Channel 3.Perry is, by all accounts, a super-nice guy, but his debut EP sounds a lot like what you'd expect a
Jessica TestaToby Keith on stage at Cricket Wireless Pavilion in Phoenix.It's a shame Toby Keith will always be The Angry American. In mainstream consciousness, the Oklahoma-born country singer is a Bush-loving neocon who's always ready to put his boot in Osama bin Laden's ass, thereby making his best effort to preserve The American Way.Though it's certainly arguable that society needed a self-appointed Director of Jingoistic Activities to rally around eight years ago -- and that Toby, thou
