Cat Country 96.3

01/16/2012

Country's hottest stars are touring this winter, and they've got the elixir for your cabin fever.

Miranda Lambert will be glad to light you a fire, Jason Aldean's always ready to call some rowdy friends over, and the soothing sounds of Lady Antebellum promise to go down like hot cocoa on a cold night.

Meanwhile, Rascal Flatts invite fans inside to thaw out, George Strait and Martina McBride stick to the buddy system and kid-at-heart Brad Paisley reminds everyone how much fun it was to go out and build a snow fort.

Here are 10 of the top country tours heading over the river and through the woods this winter.

Jason Aldean
Aldean left his mark on 2011 with two No. 1 hits, "Don't You Wanna Stay" (featuring Kelly Clarkson) and "Dirt Road Anthem," plus the prestigious CMA album of the year (My Kinda Party). In 2012, his My Kinda Party looks to leave tattoos on every town it visits. Greenville, S.C., is the first to get inked on Jan. 20. Luke Bryan and Lauren Alaina will open the shows.

Dierks Bentley
Bentley will be asking that eternal question, "Am I the only one who wants to have fun tonight?" He's sure to be answered with a resounding "No!" when the Country & Cold Cans tour pops its first top Jan. 21 in Mt. Pleasant, Mich. Keeping his cans cold will not be a problem there or when the tour continues on to Canada for more dates. Look for a new album on Feb. 7.

Eric Church
After building a loyal fan base in small clubs and bars all across the country, this year marks the chief's first shot as an arena-level headliner. His aptly titled Blood, Sweat & Beers tour kicks off Jan. 19 in Fort Smith, Ark., featuring the charismatic bad boy along with Brantley Gilbert and a rotating cast of supporting acts -- Cadillac Black, Blackberry Smoke, Sonia Leigh, Jon Pardi and Drake White.

Billy Currington
Currington surely learned a thing or two on Kenny Chesney's Goin' Coastal tour last summer, and he aims to bring that experience to his first turn as headliner this winter. Also featuring labelmates David Nail and Kip Moore, these suave country crooners hope to find that "People Are Crazy" for their mix of easy-going charm and soul.

Lady Antebellum
Lady Antebellum say their Own the Night 2012 World Tour is the one they've been waiting for all their lives. And with Darius Rucker and Thompson Square along for the ride, fans might think so, too. Starting Jan. 27 in Tulsa, Okla., the trio will lay claim to as much of America as they can before crossing the border into Canada in March.

Miranda Lambert
She may be known for burning things down, but Lambert's On Fire tour looks to build her public profile even more. Her marriage to fellow country star Blake Shelton surely helped, and a side project with the Pistol Annies and a brand new solo album, Four the Record, kept the heat on. Chris Young and Jerrod Niemann are the firemen on the tour that began Thursday (Jan. 12) in Rockford, Ill.

Brad Paisley
Paisley's on a mission to make his tour as fun as humanly possible. First he invented a new word to describe the carnival-like concerts -- "camobunga" -- but after seeing it come to life in rehearsal, he decided on a more fitting title. "For two hours each night of the tour, they can be taken away from reality -- literally," says Paisley. With Thursday's (Jan. 12) kickoff in Grand Rapids, Mich., fans will have their lives turned upside down at the Virtual Reality World Tour 2012. The Band Perry and Scotty McCreery will be there to flip the switch each night.

Rascal Flatts
Being from the Midwest, Rascal Flatts are no strangers to the cold, so they know rule No. 1 of winter weather survival: Dress in layers. Lots of them. The same could be said for winter tour survival, and the Flatts boys will have an "Easy" time layering their hits with opening acts Sara Evans and newcomer Hunter Hayes. Their Thaw Out 2012 tour aims to melt your worries away during the tour that started Thursday (Jan. 12) in Charleston, W.Va.

Blake Shelton
Shelton had the biggest year of his career in 2011. His marriage to Miranda Lambert, the No. 1 song "Honey Bee" and side job as coach on the hit TV show The Voice all gave Shelton a platform to speak from. Now he's making sure everybody in the back gets the message with his Well Lit & Amplified tour. Justin Moore and Shelton's Voice protégé Dia Frampton join him on the dates that began Thursday (Jan. 12) in Toledo, Ohio.

George Strait
People may call him the king, but George Strait is all about teamwork. He puts on a team roping event every year in San Antonio and wrote much of his latest album, Here for a Good Time, with his son Bubba. Yet his right hand man for 2012 is actually a woman -- one who seems closer to earning the title "queen" each year, Martina McBride. They'll hold court in cities all across the country starting Jan. 27 in Lafayette, La.

Honorable Mention
You won't be able to catch two of country's favorite female stars unless you've got some serious frequent flyer miles to cash in, but we'd be out of line if we didn't mention Reba McEntire and Taylor Swift's international tours. McEntire will fly out to see whoever's in old England on Feb. 26, then it's on to Ireland, Switzerland and Germany. Meanwhile, Swift hopes to make "Sparks Fly" when she arrives down under March 3 with stops all across Australia and New Zealand. Adorable Facebook posts about kangaroos and koalas are sure to follow.

01/11/2012

Scotty McCreery's debut album, Clear as Day, has been certified platinum for shipments of 1 million units. McCreery, who won American Idol in May, released the album in October on Mercury Nashville/19 Recordings/Interscope Records.

"It means the world to me," said McCreery. "It's one of the highest honors you can get with your album, and it's a huge testament to the loyalty of country music fans and how great they have been to me this year. 2011 was absolutely an incredible, life-changing year for me. I want to say a huge thanks to the fans for this."

The album's first single, "I Love You This Big," has also been certified gold for 500,000 digital downloads. His current single is "The Trouble With Girls."

McCreery will begin his tour with Brad Paisley and The Band Perry on Thursday (Jan. 12) in Grand Rapids, Mich.

"I'm looking forward to having a great time," McCreery added. "It's going to be a fun, jam-packed set. We are including a lot of the fun songs on the album, and both of the singles are in there. It will be a good chance to see the fans and just enjoy a good show with Brad Paisley and The Band Perry."

01/04/2012

Jack Ingram Writes About Townes Van Zandt in New Book
I'll Be Here in the Morning Explores Van Zandt's Songwriting Legacy
January 3, 2012; Written by Jack Ingram
Editor's note: More than 40 musicians have contributed essays to a new book, I'll Be Here in the Morning: The Songwriting Legacy of Townes Van Zandt, by Brian T. Atkinson. The following excerpt was written by Jack Ingram.

Townes was opening for Guy Clark at Rockefeller's in Houston. By the time Townes's set was over, he was just crying. He wasn't even playing music anymore. Guy had to come out and help him off the stage. It was just really sad.

That's what gets lost in translation in the mythical folklore about Townes, and especially in how much he's grown in mythical stature -- the real harsh reality about alcoholism. The idea that someone as big as Townes Van Zandt gets reduced to being helped off the stage by an old friend takes some of the fun out of it. Having seen that, for me it's like the cold, hard light of day. It gets to the heart of the matter that drinking songs are about pain. That night I saw Townes was before I was playing music out, when I was young, like seventeen or nineteen.

Townes is a Christ-like figure in Texas. He's the one. I think that guys like Guy and others he ran with have lifted him up to that stature. They're still around to talk about him. For guys like me coming up, Guy Clark was probably better known around the scene. Townes was never a mainstream character in the whole Texas music scene, for my generation anyway. I heard more mainstream guys like Guy Clark and Jerry Jeff Walker and Willie Nelson always talking about Townes Van Zandt in these reverential tones. But, as they say, the music business is kind on the dead, but hard on the living. Couple that with these guys who are still alive and are legends in their own time talking about Townes in such reverential tones after his death. He's become the songwriter, the poet from Texas.

For me, Townes was one of those guys I'd always heard about but had never listened to very much. Somewhere along the line I heard Guy Clark or Jerry Jeff Walker mention his name in interviews and liner notes, and at some point I went out and got a record, his greatest hits maybe. I took a night, and put it on the headphones, but I listened to Townes Van Zandt for a long time before I got it, before I understood what everyone was talking about.

It wasn't until I was probably twenty-five years old, driving in a van after playing a gig that I got it. We were playing at the state fair in Oregon, and we had a thirty-three-hour drive to Minneapolis. I had the post-gig driving shift from 3:00 a.m. until daylight, and I put in Townes Van Zandt. It was the same kind of mind-altering moment as when I finally got Bob Dylan's stuff. Everybody's supposed to love Bob Dylan, so you get a Dylan record and you listen to an eight-minute song with all verses and somewhere you get lost. You just kind of pretend to get it, until you have a moment of clarity with that kind of music.

I was driving in Montana and put on one of Townes's records. I put it in and the sun was coming up and I was going eighty-five miles an hour, and a light bulb came on. It was like, "Okay, I get it. This is more than music, this is more than words and melody, this is the real stuff. This is as big a message as any writer can have." I don't know what it is. It isn't any single line that gets you. You just know that this guy has a connection with a deeper place. I don't put in Townes to listen to a song; I put it in to listen to him.

Did Townes have an effect on me as a songwriter? F**k yeah. I don't pretend to understand to know exactly where he's coming from, but I do understand that he opened himself up to writing. He opened himself up to being led by something else to write the music. And that's what I got from him -- to open up, and to write. To let things come out and say things in a poetic way. To not be afraid to use the language that I have.

I think a lot of people don't allow themselves to write in the kind of language that Townes allowed himself to write in. He didn't try to dumb down the language that he had the ability to use. That's part of what separates him. You can tell he's a poet. He's writing in this other structure, this other kind of poetry. He's melding poetry and folk music, which creates an interesting mix.

"Pancho and Lefty," that's easy to understand. I'm sure you can look at it and find the true poetry in it, but for me that's the simplest song that he has, language-wise. If the majority of his work was as simple and easy to hum along to and understand on a surface level, I bet Townes would be a lot better known. I'm a huge fan of music and I'm very open to all kinds of it, and it took me seven years of listening to him to finally feel like, at whatever I can understand music and poetry, I can say, "Oh, my god, okay. I get it." Trying to understand it, trying to be a student of the music, it took me that long to get a grasp of what he was doing. That complexity and drinking all the time is probably what kept him from being better known during his lifetime.

I'm not a spokesperson for the evils of alcohol addiction, but I think people can have fantastic periods of inspiration doing whatever they have to do to get it. You do wonder what would happen with a guy like Townes if you'd get him in the studio with a clear mind to do more recording. What if he took himself more seriously as a recording artist? I'm sure the drinking was part of the creativity on one hand, but I'm also sure that he could have gotten over that. I don't believe for a second that a mind like his, an artist like that, needs anything to get to an artistic level that Townes had. And I think that anyone who would say that is just scared.

It's quite possible Townes was scared of success. There's nothing wrong with that. Looking at it that way, it maybe wasn't the alcohol that stunted his being more famous or well known or prolific; maybe alcohol was just a symptom of what was really behind it -- being scared. I haven't had time with him on the couch, so I don't know. You can only speculate.

But guys like Townes influence the great songwriters. A guy like me is going to listen to Townes and be influenced by him. A guy like Dylan and like Townes and like Kristofferson -- they permeate the fabric of what happens years and years and years from now in the songwriting culture. So, it doesn't matter if his name is remembered and well-known 1,500 years from now. It's the fact that what he did is going to be a part of what happens later on. Townes Van Zandt has had a major influence on every songwriter that has picked up a guitar in Texas or Nashville for the last thirty years.

We all want to be remembered by name, but imagine if you could get past that and be remembered instead by deed. Maybe Townes was selfless about that, and that's why he didn't achieve the kind of success that other people look to as watermarks for that. Maybe he really, truly didn't care about that, and maybe that also goes into why he could write the way he did, why he wrote songs that people had to listen to hard to understand. He was writing on another plane. What if we could get over wanting to write a hit, and songwriters could write a song, as Townes said, for the sake of it, if they didn't give a s**t about somebody knowing their name?

I see guys today that are great songwriters, but I don't see anyone else writing like Townes. Hayes Carll comes close, and he will get closer. I do think of Hayes as a guy who understands songwriting, understands where you should try to get to write about real, honest emotions. At least in my head, I didn't feel the kind of emotion Townes and Guy and the real songwriters -- Randy Newman, Tom Waits, Kristofferson, Dylan -- write about until I was turning thirty.

It's hard for me to say blanket statements about Townes. I have mixed emotions about him, his songwriting and his legacy. I know what his legacy is for me, and I think he's influenced the American culture. Think of bands like Wilco or Son Volt or guys like [Bright Eyes'] Conor Oberst, people who are songwriters' songwriters, they'll never mention Townes's name, but you know they've been influenced by him.

I think his legacy as a songwriter will be much bigger than anything I could ever talk about. On a human approach, I think it's sad that he died at such a young age, and basically by his own doing. I think that's a real tragedy. I don't know how you get his mythical status as a songwriter separated from his mythical status of this bulls**t that alcoholism fueled his fire. I don't know how you separate those two with a broad stroke so people remember his legacy as this one thing. It's confusing for me, but he's one of the true ones. He's one that will last.

Excerpt From: I'll Be Here in the Morning: The Songwriting Legacy of Townes Van Zandt, published by Texas A&M University Press.

01/03/2012

New Year, Old Story: Lady Antebellum, Zac Brown Band Still on Top of Country Charts
Conway Twitty, Little Big Town Score Top New Album and Song
December 31, 2011; Written by Edward Morris

Lady Antebellum
Although there are still a few hours of 2011 left on the calendar, the numbers cited in this week's chart column are from Billboard's Jan. 7, 2012 charts, a circumstance that suggests the trade publication has the power to hasten the earth's turnings. And who are we to argue?

Anyway, the No. 1 album and song for the first week of 2012 are the same as for the last week of 2011 -- Lady Antebellum's Own the Night and the Zac Brown Band's "Keep Me in Mind."

But a few changes occur farther down the charts.

There is one new album to report: Icon: Conway Twitty, which arrives at No. 67, and four re-entries: Icon: Johnny Cash (back at No. 58), Icon: Hank Williams (No. 62), the various artist package Country Strong: More Music From the Motion Picture (No. 71) and Sunny Sweeney's Concrete (No. 72).

Five new songs raise their timorous heads: Little Big Town's "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (No. 49), Miranda Lambert's "Over You" (No. 53), Blake Shelton's "Drink on It" (No. 56), Justin Moore's "Run Rudolph Run" (No. 58) and Edens Edge's "O Holy Night."

(Note, please, that Lambert co-wrote "Over You" with Shelton, her royal consort. This should mitigate any sting he might feel from having entered the chart three places below his missus.)

The No. 2 through No. 5 albums are Scotty McCreery's Clear as Day, Jason Aldean's My Kinda Party, Toby Keith's Clancy's Tavern and Luke Bryan's Tailgates & Tanlines.

Trooping in behind "Keep Me in Mind" within the Top 5 songs are Aldean's "Tattoos on This Town," Rascal Flatts' "Easy" (featuring Natasha Bedingfield), David Nail's "Let It Rain" and Eric Church's "Drink in My Hand," in that order.

Let us end on this happy note: According to Nielsen SoundScan, the Top 75 country albums sold a total of 1,085,698 copies the final week of 2011, a jump of more than 300,000 copies over the week before.

Quick! Red Solo Cups for everybody!

11/21/2011

Now STEAMING LIVE AT ilovecatcountry.com!!!

11/14/2011

Miranda Lambert's Four the Record Debuts at No. 1
Eli Young Band Tops Song Chart With "Crazy Girl"
November 12, 2011; Written by Edward Morris

Miranda Lambert
Looks like Texas did take umbrage at the Oklahoma usurpers who ruled Billboard's country charts last week and decided to dispossess them.

Lone Star State native Miranda Lambert debuts at No. 1 this week with the album Four the Record, and the Eli Young Band, that gang from Denton, Texas, gallop to the top of the songs list with "Crazy Girl."

Producer Frank Liddell, a Houstonian, helped oversee both projects.

Four the Record achieved the summit on Nielsen-confirmed sales of 133,233 copies.

Last week's chart-toppers -- Toby Keith's Clancy's Tavern and Blake Shelton's "God Gave Me You" -- have slipped to No. 3 and No. 2, respectively, in their lineups.

There are three new albums besides Lambert's: Craig Morgan's This Ole Boy (an EP bowing in at No. 53) and two multi-artist holiday collections, Country Christmas (No. 63) and Christmas Today's Country, Volume One (No. 74).

Steve Earle's I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive returns to the chart at No. 70.

As to new songs, there are but three: Neal McCoy's "A-OK" (No. 56), Rodney Atkins' "He's Mine" (No. 57) and Trace Adkins' "Million Dollar View" (No. 58).

Kid Rock's "Care" re-enters at No. 60.

The remaining Top 5 albums are Scotty McCreery's Clear as Day (No. 2), Lady Antebellum's Own the Night (No. 4) and Jason Aldean's My Kinda Party (No. 5).

Songs No. 3 through No. 5, in that order, are Taylor Swift's "Sparks Fly," Brantley Gilbert's "Country Must Be Country Wide" and Miranda Lambert's "Baggage Claim."

So did the CMA Awards live up to your expectations -- and which performances did you like best?

Of course I want to know!

11/02/2011

Willie Nelson Covers Country Classics on New Album
November 2, 2011

Willie Nelson
Willie Nelson will release a new album of country covers, Remember Me, Vol. 1, on Nov. 21 on R&J Records. A second volume is expected next year. Nelson teamed with producer James Stroud for the project. The track list stretches from the mid-1940s, including Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys' "Roly Poly" and Tex Williams' "Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette"), to 1989, with Vern Gosdin's "That Just About Does It." However, most of the material originates from the 1950s, including classics from Tennessee Ernie Ford, George Jones, Webb Pierce, Ray Price, Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb and Porter Wagoner, along with Rosemary Clooney's 1954 pop hit, "This Old House." Nelson also covers Kris Kristofferson's "Sunday Morning Coming Down" (1970) and Merle Haggard's "Today I Started Loving You Again" (1970) and "Ramblin' Fever" (1977).

10/27/2011

Blake Shelton, Hunter Hayes to Play NASCAR Championship Drive
October 26, 2011

Blake Shelton
Blake Shelton and Hunter Hayes will appear at the Coca-Cola Family Racing concert in Miami Beach on Nov. 17. Shelton, reigning CMA male vocalist of the year, will headline the event. Featured guest Hayes recently released his self-titled debut album which debuted in the Top 10 on Billboard's country chart. The concert at Lummus Park is part of the free two-day outdoor fan festival leading up to the Ford Championship weekend at Homestead/Miami Speedway. The weekend will conclude with the NASCAR Sprint Cup Ford 400 on Nov. 20.

10/21/2011

http://www.cmt.com/news/country-music/1672734/lady-antebellum-reveal-2012-tour-dates.jhtml?rsspartner=rssMozilla

Visit CMT.com for all that is Country Music; Artists, Photos, Videos, Lyrics, Shows, Online Radio and More. Get the latest Country Music News and Videos on your favorite Artists. Get CMT's television schedule and watch your favorite TV shows.

09/13/2011

Thanks to YOUR feedback, Texas Country Music debuts tomorrow on Cat Country 96.3! Hear your favorite Red Dirt artists exclusively on your station for 12-in-a-row!

08/12/2011

Have you checked out our website yet? www.ilovecatcountry.com!

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08/11/2011

We've been getting some requests for Texas Country/Red Dirt Country on the station - tell us what you think!