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MARTIN: Willie Nelson and ZZ Top tix on sale this week; a chat with Aaron Watson | Community Alert

Posted on December 15, 2022

Whitewater Amphitheater had a fantastic season this year, and the venue is hard at work planning for an exciting one in 2023.

They are off to a great start, with their first announcement of a co-headlining show with Willie Nelson and ZZ Top on April 14 and 15.

Both acts will perform full sets and receive equal billing. Tickets go on sale Friday, Dec. 16, at 10 a.m. at WhiteWaterRocks.com.

According to the venue’s Facebook announcement, your tickets will not be emailed to you until 72 hours prior to the event.

Though pairing an iconic country artist with a classic rock band might seem strange at first glance, it does make perfect sense.

After all, both Willie Nelson and ZZ Top are true Texas icons. and what better place to join forces than right in the heart of the Lone Star State.

Whenever I think of Texas country or Texas rock and roll, Nelson and ZZ Top are the first two names that come to mind.

I would be willing to bet that most Texas music fans will be super excited seeing these legendary acts on the same stage on the same night.

Who knows, maybe they will even team up on a few songs. Willie actually recorded a version of ZZ Top’s song “I Love My Automobile” for a tribute album many years ago.

I bet ZZ Top could do a blistering version of “Whiskey River,” too. I once saw them play a rock version of Johnny Cash’s hit “Folsom Prison Blues,” so anything is possible.

Obviously this show will sell out instantly, so be ready to jump online at 10 a.m. Friday morning.

While we are talking about ZZ Top, they just announced another co-headlining tour this summer featuring Lynyrd Skynyrd.

They are calling it the Sharp Dressed Simple Man Tour, and they will make two stops in Texas. The first will be at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth on July 29 and another on July 30 at the Cynthia Woods Pavilion in the Woodlands. Tickets for this tour can be purchased at Ticketmaster.com.

Aaron Watson to play Gruene Hall shows

Texas country artist Aaron Watson returns to Gruene Hall this weekend for two shows.

His Saturday night show with Kemberly Kelly as the opening act is sold out.

On Sunday night, his special guest will be Hayden Baker, and at press time, there were still tickets available at GrueneHall.com.

I had the chance to speak with Aaron a few weeks ago to discuss the upcoming shows and to talk about his year. Just as he was ready to release his latest album, “Unwanted Man,” he had a rare vocal cord flare up that put him on complete vocal rest for months.

He had just survived being off the road during the pandemic, so this setback was tough.

“I owe it all to the Texas music scene,” Aaron explained. “It’s given me the chance to do what I love for a living. I just love Gruene Hall, we’ve been playing there for forever now. Over the past 20 years I’m not sure how many shows I’ve played there, but it’s a bunch. I like doing the back-to-back nights, it’s so much fun. The band and I get to relax a bit, kind of our own staycation.”

Aaron and his wife have three children, and if you follow him on social media, you can tell he is a great dad.

“I love being a dad,” Aaron said. “I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve remained an independent artist. It gives me more freedom to do what I want to do. I can make decisions based on my family and what’s best for them.

“It has been a fun job to have with my kids. They enjoy getting to go to work with dad. That means the world to me. I tell people that we are a small-town business and our business is country music. When you come out to Gruene Hall and buy a ticket and buy merchandise, you are helping me pay for my band and helping me keep the lights on at home.”

When I asked Aaron how he survived the pandemic and then vocal issues, he admitted it was tough times.

“It was definitely a double whammy,” he said. “But life is full of double whammys. If you live long enough you are going to face challenges. I am still seeing a throat specialist in Birmingham, Alabama. It’s hard to feel sorry for yourself when you walk through the office and see all the cancer patients fighting for their lives.

“You have to put things in perspective. I think sometimes we live our life like we are going to be young and healthy forever, and that’s just not the case. One of my vocal cords got inflamed from over working and over singing.

“It is bound to happen when you play as many shows as we do. Every now and then you have to stop and put on new tires.”

One positive outcome of having so much down time is the fact that he has three finished albums that he still hasn’t released.

Aaron assured me that he has big plans for next year, and as a huge fan, I can hardly wait to see what he has in store for us.

A Very Bibulous Christmas at Devil’s Backbone

The Devil’s Backbone Tavern is one of the most historic venues in the Texas Hill Country.

What was once a stagecoach stop for the early settlers has become a regular stop for some of the best artists in the music business.

Owned and operated by musicians Robyn and John Ludwick, they continue to book the best that Texas music has to offer.

This Friday, they will have a talented group of artists joining forces for a show called “A Very Bibulous Christmas.”

It will be hosted by Mike Harmeier and will feature special guests Matt Hillyer, Django Walker, Jonathan Terrell and Cody Braun. Get your tickets now at DevilsBackBoneTavern.com.

Comal Country Music Show scheduled for Dec. 20

Last month, I dropped the ball and failed to mention the anniversary of the Comal Country Music Show.

Hopefully their die-hard fans went and enjoyed some great country music. Next Tuesday, Dec. 20, they will host their December show at the Columbus Club Hall on Landa Street.

The doors open at 6 p.m. and the music begins at 7:30 p.m., with the low price of just $7 at the door.

As always, all profits are donated to the Meals on Wheels program at the Comal County Senior Center. The guests this month are two amazing singers, Loren Woods and Yesenia McNett.

Austin City Limits announces 2023 season

Austin City Limits, the longest-running show of its kind in history, just announced their 2023 season. The new season will start with an ACL Hall of Fame induction of Sheryl Crow on Jan. 7.

The season will continue with Nathaniel Rateliff and Adia Victoria on Jan. 14, Adrian Quesada on Jan. 21, War on Drugs on Jan. 28, Pavement on Feb. 4, Maren Morris on Feb. 11, and Spoon on Feb. 18. The season will conclude on Feb. 25 with another ACL Hall of Fame induction of Joe Ely. The Austin City Limits TV show is broadcast locally on KLRN, the PBS station in San Antonio.

Random notes from the music scene

Hope Hospice and Village Venue will be hosting a Winterzeit Christmas Show on Friday, Dec. 16, at 7:30 p.m. Live music will be provided by Zack Walther and Matt Briggs. It will be a CD release party for their new Christmas album.

There is a $25 entry fee with 50% of ticket sales going to the Hope Hospice Grief Center. This family-friendly event will be held at the Silos at Freiheit, located at 2032 Central Plaza.

Gruene Hall just announced some new shows that include Dale Watson, Los Texmaniacs, Micky & the Motorcars, Roger Creager and a second show by the reformed Uncle Lucius. Tickets for all the shows go on-sale Friday at 10 a.m. at GrueneHall.com.

Rock band Blue October will play the Tech Port Arena in San Antonio on Saturday, Dec. 17.

Riley’s Tavern recently held a toy drive that collected 75 toys and $2,000. Well done guys, this will help a lot of local kids have a better Christmas.

Redbird Listening Room welcomes Bryon White on Sunday at 4 p.m. He’s the lead singer of The Damn Quails. Next Wednesday at the Redbird is the sold-out show by William Beckmann.

The rock band Kansas celebrated 50 years with the 3-CD set of hits titled “Another Fork In The Road.” According to their press release, they are releasing an American version and a European version. As Christmas gets closer, more venues will be hosting special holiday shows. A quick look at the concert calendar and you will see that the Brauntex Theatre, Devil’s Backbone Tavern, Gruene Hall, Luckenbach Dance Hall, Our Lady Bar & Grill, Rudy’s BBQ, and Villa at Gruene all have special shows this week.

Classical music came surging back in 2022 – and said thank you to the Queen

Posted on December 15, 2022

© Mark Allan/BBC
Conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, founder of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, at the Albert Hall – Mark Allan/BBC

In classical music, as in all the arts, 2022 was supposed to be a new dawn, a joyous surging back to life after the dismalness of two lockdown years. In the event, it was – but only up to a point.

Numerous events were curtailed or hampered because of illness, and the Proms lost two headline artists, Jonas Kaufmann and Freddie De Tommaso, to bouts of Covid. And the return of audiences to live events has been tentative. Only for the biggest names have venues been able to fill every seat, and most orchestras report audiences are still about 15 per cent down on pre-pandemic figures.

Brexit continues to exert a huge drag, imposing maddening bureaucratic delays and costs on anyone who wants to travel to the EU to perform – and vice versa. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was another blow, as organisations rushed to disinvite Russian soloists, give back tainted Russian money, and cancel concerts with Russian music (though there was also an upside, in the rush to programme fine Ukrainian composers we’d never heard of).

These headwinds were expected. What was not expected, and came as a nasty shock, was the sharp decline in listeners to the BBC’s classical music station, Radio 3, which lost one in six of its listeners in the third quarter of 2022. Commercial stations Classic FM and Scala Radio were also sharply down, by 6.5 per cent and 9.5 per cent respectively. There was much anxious speculation that just as listeners were losing the habit of going to concerts, they were also losing the habit of turning on the radio, as well.

Underneath the temporary choppy seas of rising costs and falling revenues run deeper, less visible currents of social and cultural change, to which musicians and organisations must adapt. Classic FM now offers playlists organised by “mood”. In a nod to younger listeners’ preference for spiritually “immersive” music, Radio 3, once the home of strenuous high-mindedness, has invited Icelandic musician Ólafur Arnalds to curate his own series, Ultimate Calm, which explores “how classical, contemporary and ambient music can soothe the soul”. The fact that some musicians still talk in terms of musical experience as a effortful “going on a journey”, whereas others now see it as a lucid, thoroughly wide-awake process of following the unfolding logic of a piece, shows that there are competing visions of what classical music is or should be.

© Provided by The Telegraph
Spine-tingling: Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s Your servant, Elizabeth was first performed at the Proms – David Shepherd

Another factor that continued to grow in 2022 was “diversity”. Organisations that promote it, such as Black Lives in Music and the black-and-ethnic-majority orchestra Chineke!, were more handsomely rewarded in the recent round of Arts Council England funding than any other sort of client, which shows which way the wind is blowing. Another growing trend is composers turning to nature for inspiration. This is as old as Renaissance-era songs in praise of hunting, but these days it takes on an environmental twist. The most striking manifestation of this was the Recycling Concerto premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival, a piece for hundreds of bits of recycled rubbish, conceived by percussionist Vivi Vassileva and composer Gregor Mayrhofer.

It was one of 41 premieres at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival, which was expanded from two weeks to three, one of many signs that the classical sector, despite the obstacles, has been determined to break out of the lockdown “stay small, stay safe” mentality. The Hallé Orchestra’s magnificent performance of Verdi’s immense Requiem, conducted by Mark Elder, and the Royal Philharmonic’s no less magnificent performance of Mahler’s even bigger Eighth Symphony, were eloquent evidence of that.

Another example of lavishness allied to superbly high standards was an occasion that, though not a “classical concert” in the conventional sense, was easily the most widely appreciated event containing classical music of the whole year – the funeral of the late Queen. The singing from the choirs of the Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey and the high quality of new pieces from Judith Weir and James MacMillan show that the art of sacred choral singing and composing – perhaps this country’s most distinctive contribution to the Western musical tradition – is alive and flourishing.

Oddly, it was another piece inspired by royalty – Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s Your servant, Elizabeth – that was, for me, the standout in this year’s gratifyingly lavish Prom season. As I said in my review: “This intermingled the words of two Queen Elizabeths in music which moved from quiet intimacy to a radiant mystery, as if the two Queens were communing across the centuries.” Like all the best “classical music”, it was fresh and surprising, yet rooted in tradition, and gave hope that an embattled art form has plenty of life in it yet.

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Phung Khanh Linh and artists abroad get creative with city pop palette

Posted on December 15, 2022

Late last year, Vietnamese pop singer Phung Khanh Linh was mourning the death of a beloved cat. Her pet’s passing came after the loss of other loved ones during a rough stretch of the pandemic. Overcome with grief, she longed for a cure to her sadness and found comfort in the nostalgic funk-pop sounds of Japanese city pop.

“I turned to those sounds around the start of this year, and listening to them made me feel really inspired during this time, especially albums from Mariya Takeuchi and Anri,” says the 28-year-old performer over video chat from Ho Chi Minh City.

Soon, Linh was binging on the glitzy melancholy of city pop, a genre that epitomizes the ease and exuberance of Japan’s bubble era. She eventually began creating her own sonic metropolis, guided by both the sounds and aesthetics associated with this corner of Japanese music.

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21 Savage Set to Perform for Season Finale of ‘Amazon Music Live’ – Billboard

Posted on December 15, 2022

Amazon Music announced Wednesday (Dec. 14) that 21 Savage will perform on the upcoming season finale of Amazon Music Live.

The superstar rapper will take the stage on Dec. 29 for the new series’ final show of the year, which will be hosted as always by 2 Chainz following Amazon’s Thursday Night Football. According to a release, the Grammy winner is expected to perform songs from Her Loss, his new collaborative album with Drake, as well as debut new and unreleased tracks.

Premiering in October on both Prime Video and Amazon Music’s Twitch channel, the inaugural season of the Thursday night concert series has also included performances by — and exclusive interviews with — Lil Baby, Megan Thee Stallion, Kane Brown, Lil Wayne and Anuel AA. Plus, Anitta is slated to take over for this Thursday’s episode (Dec. 15) ahead of 21 Savage’s finale.

Her Loss debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and spent four weeks atop the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart after its release in early November via OVO Sound and Republic Records.

Following his new album with Drake, Savage — who was named an honorable mention in Billboard‘s Greatest Pop Stars of 2022 — also collaborated with Nas on their fiery single “One Mic, One Gun.”

‘It was a gateway for people to get into electronic music’: 30 years of Warp Records’ Artificial Intelligence | Music

Posted on December 15, 2022

In the white hot rave heat of 1992, Warp Records, then based in Sheffield, released a compilation for the wind-down: Artificial Intelligence. The name would, sadly, prompt talk of “intelligent techno” and then “intelligent dance music” (IDM), implying an air of nerdy elitism. However Warp insisted the title was only ever a tongue-in-cheek alignment with sci-fi, and the balmy music was unmistakably hedonistic. Taking cues from Detroit techno, and featuring future superstars in Autechre and Aphex Twin (as the Dice Man), it perfectly captured the still-ecstatic backroom and after-party vibe of the era.

As a new reissue celebrates the compilation’s 30th anniversary – and three decades of its pleasure principle reverberating across subsequent scenes and generations – we asked famous fans from 1992 to the present about why Artificial Intelligence endures.

Róisín Murphy. Photograph: Pedro Gomes/Redferns

I was used to the idea of electronic music for listening at home as I’d hammered the KLF’s Chill Out long before I’d arrived in Sheffield – but this was different. There was nothing remotely hippy or retro about it. The image on the cover, by the brilliant Phil Wolstenholme, says it all: it just was future. Alone, but together with, and connected to, technology. I would often visit Phil at his home and he was always on that bloody computer of his, he had to be the most patient man in Sheffield – he doesn’t get enough credit for his vision.

I only discovered these compilations a couple of years ago. I’d never identified with IDM at all, it’s too culture-less of a notion. But this zone of electronica built for home listening, which pulls from real club cultures like hip-hop and house, while making space for abstract exploration – that, I care about a great deal. It can be a beautiful area, even though it’s a diffuse non-genre, so hasn’t much of a cultural core. It sounds and feels like suburbia in that sense.

The Dice Man: Polygon Window – video

Lila Tirando a Violeta

When I was a teenager a friend said Fill 3 by Speedy J on this compilation reminded them of the sort of music I was trying to make. They were right! On first listen I was inspired: it felt timeless, really carefully crafted and still impactful. I was astonished to learn that the album came out just before I was born – I’d have believed it was a new release. It’s been a huge influence on producers’ not being locked in club or ambient genres – its biggest strength was in revealing there were cracks in between.

The Blessed Madonna. Photograph: Eva Pentel/PR

Some records arrive by way of serendipity, at the cosmic moment when all the tumblers in your brain click and some music from another galaxy beams into you and upgrades your operating system. In 1992, I was looking for a world that I believed existed but had not yet set foot upon: that’s when this album arrived for me. Every part of it was affecting, but none so much as Dr Alex Paterson AKA the Orb’s contribution of Loving You performed live. All these years later, I am no less moved or filled with hope when I hear that cut. Nothing sounds more like an acid-drenched sunrise from a time before the world was ending. Its persistence is a comfort to me.

JD Twitch

Autechre: Crystel – video

I was a big fan, but it was also a gateway for a lot of people who perhaps didn’t get the “rave” thing to get into electronic music and clubbing. I have friends who got into the scene via this album. Of course, a lot of the music on Artificial Intelligence was straight up club music rather than any kind of armchair listening: Up!’s Spiritual High is a total banger while the Speedy J track was a low-tempo club anthem. It can’t be ignored that it is a very white take on Detroit techno inspiration, though. I and many friends loathed the idea of one form of techno could being more “intelligent”, too. “Stupid Techno” then became a badge of honour for us – I think we even used that term on a flyer or two.

Mor Elian

My early musical education was my older sister’s CD collection, which I stole from many times – I found this there years after its release. Similar to Aphex Twin’s first album, I find it deeply moving, still forward-thinking and relevant. Unfortunately, it is mostly impossible to play in most club environments these days – it’s more suitable for deep listening, lying on your back with a huge spliff in your hand … or maybe when you are dancing at dawn at the after-hours. It’s music that makes me feel painfully nostalgic, like a deep longing – but also incredibly motivated to get in the studio and make music.

I was at Leeds College of Art in 92 and really just started being properly music obsessed. I’d already followed music from hip-hop through Detroit techno and all points in between, but all of that had to be hunted down on import; Warp managed to draw a narrative out of the UK’s answer to all of that. The fact that it had a manifesto, that bold artwork, the incredible albums that followed by Kenny Larkin, Fuse, Black Dog – it was irresistible. It made me throw everything into getting cheap equipment and making music 24/7 and I haven’t looked back.

The amount of classical music in YouTube videos is up 90% year-over-year

Posted on December 15, 2022

Not all digital creators prefer contemporary beats in the background of their content. An increasing number of them are dusting off old tracks for their new videos. The soundtracker’s end-of-year data reveals that its classical music library has now been streamed more than 200 million times, and those pieces appeared in 90% more YouTube videos than in the previous year.

Those figures are two of the headlines from Epidemic Sound’s report, which pulled out yearly trends from among the 20 million video views that featured its music. One year after raising a $450 million funding round, the Stockholm-based company brought its library of licensed tracks to 14 million videos, which earned 1.5 billion views per day on YouTube. On TikTok, videos with Epidemic Sound audio averaged 11.5 billion monthly views in 2022.

Though electronica, pop, hip hop, and alternative are still the most-common genres chosen by Epidemic Sound users, one of the oldest forms of music on record made a huge comeback in 2022. Classical music downloads rose 64% year-over-year on the Epidemic Sound platform, and those tracks appeared in videos around the world. In 13 of the 15 content categories tracked by Epidemic Sound, classical was the fastest-growing soundtrack choice of 2022.

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Cecilia Blomdahl, who uses classical music in her videos, said that the genre is going because it is timeless enough to outlast any contemporary music trends. “The right song is vital in setting the scene,” Bloomdahl said. “Classical music provides a great range of emotions. It can be both melancholic and joyful depending on the footage, so the genre fits really well with the feeling I want to evoke in my videos.”

By releasing an end-of-year statistical breakdown, Epidemic Sound is mirroring the platforms that feature its library of tracks. The 13-year-old company has increased its profile as a production company, and it has released videos that highlight the artists who work with it. The most-used Epidemic Sound artist of 2022, Ooy, appeared in a 2019 short film from YouTuber Peter McKinnon. That collab was put together by the music licenser.

For more information, check out the infographic available on the Epidemic Sound website.

Academy of Country Music cuts ribbon on new Nashville headquarters

Posted on December 14, 2022

Two years after announcing they would be leasing office space in Wedgewood-Houston’s Nashville Warehouse Company building, the Academy of Country Music (ACM) finally hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony at their new, 9,773-square-foot, third-floor office space in the 140,000-square-foot, five-story building on 4th Avenue South.

Notable guests at the event deemed by many in attendance as “Hollwood-meets-Nashville” included ACM CEO Damon Whiteside, Nashville Mayor John Cooper, Nashville Convention and Visitors Corporation President Deana Ivey, space developers AJ Capital’s CEO and Founder Ben Weprin, ACM Board Officers, plus the reigning New Female and Male Artist ACM Award winners, Lainey Wilson and Parker McCollum.

CEO Whiteside highlighted that for the first time in the ACM’s six-decade history, the Los Angeles-born organization would have its base in Music City. He emphasized that country music’s global and streaming spread in the past two decades has, in many ways, lessened the organization’s initial goals of promoting country artists and industry initiatives solely focused on the genre’s west coast expansion.

ACM Chief Executive Officer Damon Whiteside attends a Ribbon Cutting ceremony officially opening the new Nashville headquarters at ACM Headquarters on December 14, 2022 in Nashville, Tennessee.

Bringing a taste of the ACM’s “bar room instead of boardroom” roots as a “renegade and progressive” organization is core to what he feels the organization will bring to and will emanate from its new downtown Nashville home.

Los Angeles native Whiteside’s been the ACM’s CEO since 2019 (he previously spent time at the Country Music Association as Chief Marketing Officer). Overall, he has over two decades of career experience in the music and entertainment industries. A Nashville resident since 2013, he noted, exclusive to The Tennessean, that he feels the city’s growth on the national and global scene is intrinsically linked to country music artists having a “strong, united community” that has made the city a destination hub to celebrate a superstar-making pop industry.

The ACM will use its offices to maintain its involvement in its yearly ACM Honors program at the Ryman Auditorium, which was broadcast in 2022 on Fox for the first time. Plus, ACM Lifting Lives, a program that, via health-related initiatives, financial support and music camps for talented individuals with developmental disabilities, benefits the country music community at large, is expected to get a boost from now direct local aid.

Plus, from a corporate standpoint, greater engagement with brands like Amazon (already a broadcast partner for the ACM Awards) will be possible as ACM “integrates into [Nashville’s] fabric,” notes Whiteside.

Growth insofar as forthcoming diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives via the ACM’s “LEVel Up” professional development program aim to make country music “open and equal to everybody” are high on Whiteside’s list of achievements to accomplish now that the 5,000-plus member organization is more active on the ground in Nashville.

“We’re here to move the needle as a member of the community,” Whiteside stated.

Nashville Mayor John Cooper attends a Ribbon Cutting ceremony officially opening the new Nashville headquarters at ACM Headquarters on December 14, 2022 in Nashville, Tennessee.

Mayor Cooper added in statements during a brief press conference that the ACM’s arrival in Nashville was the genesis of a “seamless transition” to the organization’s “next greatest chapter” in Wedgewood-Houston, a fast-developing area also home to entertainment promotion group Live Nation’s Nashville offices, a location of global members-only artist and creative space Soho House that Cooper referred to as “one of the great neighborhoods in America.”

Notably, for private real estate firm AJ Capital, the ACM offices expand their Nashville music industry holdings and investments to the EXIT/IN, the renovation of North Nashville’s legendary Club Baron, previously-mentioned Soho House Nashville and Live Nation having space in the same Nashville Warehouse Company building.

The group could also add a 4,500-person venue — for which they have already filed plans — in the same neighborhood.

ACM Best New Artists McCollum and Wilson are likely — among many — to benefit from the inclusion of a small live performance stage, social media content creation office and two working boardrooms in the new ACM headquarters. In a city where signed and unsigned artists struggle to do the work required to succeed or elevate their craft, having an ACM membership serves multiple purposes — including access to professional grade services.

ACM New Female Artist of the Year Lainey Wilson attends a Ribbon Cutting ceremony officially opening the new Nashville headquarters at ACM Headquarters on December 14, 2022 in Nashville, Tennessee.

Moreover, it is on the back of artists’ work that the genre has grown so significantly so quickly. The ACM’s downtown Nashville relocation is attached to the impressiveness of this development.

McCollum highlighted how he won his 2022 Best New Male Artist award in Las Vegas in front of people watching on Amazon Prime in 235 countries worldwide, then headlined the Houston Rodeo (in front of 80,000 people) and then returned to Nashville — a worldwide country and pop musical hub, in the same week.

For Wilson, eight months have elapsed since she won her ACM Nest New Female Artist Award on Amazon Prime and became a streaming television star on Paramount Network’s “Yellowstone.”

She feels that “everything really started rolling” when she achieved her ACM honor.

Moreover, as someone who has spent 95 percent of her days away from Nashville in the past 365, she highlights Nashville’s growing country music footprint hitting “every corner of town” as “cool.”

“Over the past ten years — from the hole-in-the-wall bars to Broadway — everything’s been impacted by the growth,” Wilson continues. She jokes that her story of moving to Nashville in 2011 in a camper trailer that she parked in a backyard would be implausible as the city’s economic growth continues to expand.

For Wilson, spaces like the ACM’s new headquarters will allow artists to engage more deeply in community development, fostering broader support for rising stars.

“Anywhere we go in the world, it will help to feel like we’re all on the same team.”

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Academy of Country Music cuts ribbon on new Nashville headquarters

Sergeant takes major A4 Quartet award — 4barsrest

Posted on December 14, 2022

A work inspired by the brutalist architecture of Owen Luder claims the A4 Quartet Composition prize.

A work inspired by the buildings designed by renowned British ‘brutalist’ architect Owen Luder has won the 2022 A4 Brass Quartet Composition Competition.

‘Luder’s Dreams of a Castle’ by Matthew Sergeant took the £500 first prize and will now be performed by the award-winning ensemble in performances to mark their 10th anniversary.

Controversial buildings

The RNCM graduate is Reader in Music at Bath Spa University and has already gained widespread acclaim for his compositions which have been performed internationally on concert and festival platforms by ensembles including the London Symphony Orchestra and BBC Concert Orchestra, the Divertimento Ensemble (Italy), and the Nieuw Ensemble (Netherlands).

Owen Luder was a British architect who was particularly renowned for his controversial buildings of the 1960s — the brutalist style that included the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth, Derwent Tower in Gateshead and Trinity Square in Gateshead, whose multi-storey car park featured in the film iconic British film ‘Get Carter’.

Futuristic castles

Speaking about the work he said: “Luder was particularly renowned for his buildings expressed in angular and uncompromising concrete shapes — often resembling futuristic castles.

Although not always successful or popular, Luder’s architecture was driven by utopian ideas; a personal wish to make the living and working conditions of ordinary people better. The piece presents images of both the shocking angular forms of Luder’s architecture alongside his hopes and wishes for a better world. As such, in a sense, these are Luder’s dreams of a castle.”

Owen Luder was a British architect who was particularly renowned for his controversial buildings of the 1960s4BR

Runner-up and Under 24 winner

Runner-up from a record field of entrants was Robert Ely for his one movement work ‘Four Play’ inspired by thematic ideas of a classic scherzo.

The Under 24 Award was won by Naomi Hill, a baritone and euphonium player currently studying at the University of Huddersfield.

Her work, ‘As We Dwell’ is inspired my what she called “melodic conversations”that provide “a sense of space and serenity”- as if dwelling in the “calmness of the music”.

The other finalists were Joe Galuszka (‘Ukraine2022’); Harry Weir (‘Music in Four Parts’) and Akira Shoji (‘Sonatina’).

Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars of 2022: No. 6 — Lizzo

Posted on December 14, 2022

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard is counting down our staff picks for the top 10 pop stars of 2022 all this week. At No. 6, we remember the year in Lizzo — who once again used a runaway viral smash as a springboard to total pop cultural ubiquity.

The year 2022 was not just a ‘Special’ one for Lizzo – it was the year she proved that she could navigate and command the pop landscape alongside splashy newcomers and veterans alike.

Three years removed from her seismic breakthrough with Cuz I Love You, Lizzo had entered the new decade unproven as a major force in pop music. In 2021, she unveiled “Rumors,” a Cardi B-assisted standalone single that debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and fizzled out too quickly to really maintain the excitement from her previous hit singles “Truth Hurts” and “Good as Hell.” But the brief silence that followed would eventually give way to a year that yielded Lizzo the fastest-moving and highest-charting album of her career — while she expanded her reach in different fields of entertainment and cultivated a coherent and powerful public image to complement her pop stardom.

When Lizzo reemerged in 2022, she chose television, not music, as her entry point. Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls, an unscripted reality competition series chronicling the journey to becoming one of Lizzo’s dancers, debuted on Amazon Prime — her first project under her production deal with Amazon Studios. Lizzo smartly used the launch of the show, which was met with a generally positive critical reception, to launch her proper return to the music scene. A day before Watch Out for the Big Grrrls went live, Lizzo announced the release date for “About Damn Time.”

The following week, in a move straight from the playbook of pop titans past and present, Lizzo previewed yet another venture: This time, she was entering the world of shapewear with Yitty, her collaboration with Fabletics. Through a series of smartly sequenced announcements and releases, Lizzo reemerged as a full-fledged pop star — one whose brand permeated different industries and yielded successful returns in each.

By April, Lizzo fixed her attention squarely on music. “About Damn Time,” an uplifting disco-tinged anthem of affirmation, was released on April 15, alongside the announcement of its parent album, Special. With a quiet debut at No. 50, “About Damn Time” got off to a much slower start on the Hot 100 than “Rumors.” Nonetheless, Lizzo used the familiarity and bottled momentum she accrued on TikTok in 2020 to inform her aggressive promotion of the song on the platform. Thanks largely to added exposure from a dance trend created by TikTok personality Jaeden Gomez, “About Damn Time” reached the Hot 100’s top 10 in its fourth week.

In a move that shifted Lizzo’s promotional approach from that of a mid-level pop star to one that more closely mirrored a superstar’s, she tapped into how the song connected with audiences on an emotional and political level. Obviously, “About Damn Time” made people feel good, hence the cute dances that Lizzo would often stitch and repost on her official TikTok page. But she also knew that the song would make people feel empowered: In an April 8 TikTok, Lizzo used a snippet of “About Damn Time” to celebrate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s historic appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. During her performance of the song at the 2022 BET Awards, Lizzo proclaimed, “It’s about damn time we stand in our power. Black people, my people.” This combination of marketing savvy and innate ability to make music that can mean different things to different audiences at different times resulted in “About Damn Time” becoming both Lizzo’s second Hot 100-topper in late July, and ultimately one of the defining hits of 2022.

When “About Damn Time” reached the pole position on the Hot 100, its parent album, Special, zoomed to a No. 2 finish on the Billboard 200. Although the set earned a less rapturous reception than its predecessor, Special earned the best first week of Lizzo’s career so far, with 69,000 units moved. Special debuted alongside “Lizzoverse,” a Twitch-streamed cosmic light show extravaganza that found Lizzo tapping into yet another media platform to expand the reach of her music and brand.

Although Special was blocked from the top of the Billboard 200 by Bad Bunny’s monstrous Un Verano Sin Ti, the album’s strong performance proved that Lizzo had built herself a legion of fans that were guaranteed to show up for her, regardless of whether her albums were packed with buzzy guest artists. Special also spawned one more minor hit in “2 B Loved (Am I Ready),” which Lizzo spotlighted in a characteristically impressive performance in a medley with “Time” at the MTV Video Music Awards in August. Outside of hit singles, the Special campaign showed how deftly Lizzo could maneuver controversy after, she humbly changed a lyric in “Grrrls,” one of the set’s promotional singles, that was criticized as ableist.

Although the singles campaign for Special seemed to end with “2 B Loved,” Lizzo remained a leading pop culture figure in 2022, and she only continued to amass more cultural capital. In September, Lizzo embarked on her first headlining arena tour; the tour boasted openers such as Latto and Saucy Santana, two rappers who each turned 2022 into career-defining years, and surprise guests at different stops, including Missy Elliott (“Tempo”), Cardi B (“Rumors”), and SZA (“Special”).

A week into the tour, Lizzo, a classically trained flautist, found herself at the center of a firestorm of controversy when she played James Madison’s 209-year-old crystal flute while twerking onstage. Ultimately, the controversy didn’t stick because, as the Library of Congress tweeted, Lizzo’s performance with the historic instrument was “not all that unusual.” In fact, the controversy did more to expose her detractors’ own misogynoir and fatphobia – and showed that the general public would be quick to come to Lizzo’s defense. Two weeks before she launched the Special Tour, Watch Out for the Big Grrrls took home three trophies at the Primetime Emmy Awards, lifting Lizzo halfway to EGOT status.

As 2022 drew to a close, Lizzo continued to rack up awards and nominations. She earned nods for herself and “About Damn Time” at the American Music Awards, as well as triumphs at the Soul Train Music Awards (best dance performance), MTV Video Music Awards (video for good), and the People’s Choice Awards (song of 2022). At the People’s Choice Awards, Lizzo used her acceptance speech for the People’s Champion award to uplift and amplify the marginalized voices of 17 activists including Tamika Palmer, the mother of the late Breonna Taylor. Yet again, Lizzo found a way to use her passion for activism and political empowerment to continue to transcend and reinvent what pop stardom can look like.

Closing out the year with the premiere of her Love, Lizzo documentary on HBO Max, a writing credit on SZA’s acclaimed SOS album, and five Grammy nominations including album, record, and song of the year, Lizzo ends 2022 a solidified capital-letters Pop Star — and it’s about damn time.

GLOSSER have a new song named “The Artist” – Aipate

Posted on December 14, 2022

GLOSSER are a US alt-pop duo made up by Riley Fanning and Corbin Sheehan. They have a new single out called “The Artist”.

The synth-driven dream pop track is actually lifted from the outfit’s upcoming album which drops early 2023. It follows the singles “Disco Girls” and “Movies”.

Riley says, “I think ‘The Artist’ is in stark comparison to most of our music. It’s very bare and stripped back, which is something we hadn’t tried before. It was also the very last song written for the album, so it’s almost in its own world”.

Listen to the song and follow GLOSSER on Instagram.

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