Opinion / Humor

Greetings from Scotland! I’ve been on a short music tour/family vacation here and in Ireland, and I’m now getting set to fly to Chicago in the morning. I was the only driver among us willing and able to drive a

A while back, I wrote a two-part series on bluegrass dream analysis. Since that time, for whatever reason, I’ve had almost no bluegrass-related dreams. Perhaps I had gotten them out of my system. In the last year, most of my

As someone who landed his first full time bluegrass employment thanks to a classified ad, I continue to take an interest in this kind of advertising. Not to be voyeuristic, but the personals section has always been pretty interesting, too;

While in Nashville this week, i was listening to a songwriter being interviewed on the radio, and he confessed that he relies heavily on his smartphone for recording and storing song ideas. He said he didn’t know what he’d do

It’s IBMA Awards voting season, and some changes in the process have already been announced for 2019 by the IBMA board of directors. Most are minor procedural changes that may not be terribly interesting to most members (they weren’t even

I read an interesting tale of the music business recently, in which an Edmonton music student and songwriter, Connor Shaw, claimed that a song he wrote was the basis for a current number one song by country artist Jason Aldean,

I do my best to keep up with the latest trends in bluegrass music. I like to go beyond the Bluegrass Today headlines about bluegrass artists’ weddings and medical procedures (sometimes taking place on the same day) to try to

The Memorial Day weekend is sort of a milestone in the year. It’s the unofficial start of summer. The fashion people also tell us it’s now okay to wear white shoes (lime green leisure suit optional).  Canada celebrates a long weekend

I wanted to begin this week by answering some concerns raised in the comments section and elsewhere about some of the contents of my columns, whether it be alleged pinball sexism, or alleged lack of respect for traditional bluegrass lyrics.

Some time ago, I proposed a video game for songwriters that would allow them to experience simulated hardships to enable them to write soulful songs without having to actually experience the heartbreak and tragedy that usually feeds that kind of