Rascal Flatts
2012 ACM Awards: Staff Picks & Predictions
Throw on your bedazzled boots – the 47th annual Academy of Country Music Awards air live from Las Vegas this Sunday at 8 p.m. EST. The show promises to be a melting pot of performances, with oddball duets like Rascal Flatts and Steve Martin – and no, that’s not an April Fools joke. The CU staff picked and predicted the awards below. Tell us your thoughts, and check back for our live blog on Sunday night!
Entertainer of the Year
Should Win:
- Jason Aldean
- Kenny Chesney
- Brad Paisley
- Blake Shelton
- Taylor Swift – Jonathan, Dan, Tara, Leeann, Kevin, Ben, Sam
Single Review: Lionel Richie featuring Shania Twain, “Endless Love”
Lionel Richie’s new country duets project, set for a March 27 release, sounds like the kind of thing that could either go very right (Jennifer Nettles, “Hello”) or very wrong (Rascal Flatts “Dancing On the Ceiling,” anyone?). We get a taste of the new project with this re-working of Richie’s classic pop duet with Diana Ross, “Endless Love,” sung this time as a duet with Shania Twain.
2011 CMA Awards: Staff Picks and Predictions
It’s that time of year again! The time when we all dutifully tune in to the CMA Awards show, raise our eyebrows at the “What the heck are they doing here?” award presenters, and afterwards complain about how totally un-country the whole show was. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t wait.
We’re pleased to share the Country Universe staff picks for this year’s CMA Awards, as well as our predictions of who the winners will be. This year we have some highly competitive categories in which predicting the winners is quite difficult, leading to some significantly divergent picks among our writing staff. Agree? Disagree? Join in the discussion in the comment thread below, and let us know.
You can go ahead and shoot me if you want to, but I actually kind of like this one.
The 30 Day Song Challenge: Day 18
Today’s category is…
A Song You Love By an Artist You Don’t.
Here are the staff picks:
Dan Milliken: “Ticks” – Brad Paisley
He was one of the first country artists I got into, but I’ve developed a sourness for Paisley over the years. With each successive album, his songwriting voice has tended to sound a little more self-impressed and a little less self-aware. “Ticks” is a nice exception to my ears, though. For once, Paisley seems to get that he’s playing the machismo creep, so a listener can take perverse pleasure in listening to him be creepy rather than balk at the fact that they’re expected to sympathize with him. It helps that it’s one of his cooler-sounding singles, too.
ACM Live Blog 2011
Hello.
This is going to be a really important show, you guys.
WINNERS
Entertainer of the Year: Taylor Swift
Top Female Vocalist: Miranda Lambert
Top Male Vocalist: Brad Paisley
Top Still-Deciding Vocalist:
Album of the Year: Lady Antebellum, Need You Now
Song of the Year: “The House That Built Me”
Single of the Year: “The House That Built Me”
Couple of the Year:
(^ Not to be confused with) Top Vocal Duo: Sugarland
Top Vocal Group: Lady Antebellum
Top New Artist: The Band Perry
Top Till You Drop:
Vocal Event of the Year: Zac Brown Band & Alan Jackson, “As She’s Walking Away”
Music Video of the Year: Miranda Lambert, “The House That Built Me”
Crunching the Numbers: January 2011
Feel that chill in the air? It’s not just climate change, friends. The music industry is suffering through historic lows in record sales, the worst since SoundScan started tallying them in 1991.
How are country artists faring? Let’s take a look at cumulative sales for current albums. Sales are rounded to the nearest hundred.
Top Selling Current Country Albums
100 Greatest Men: #99. Rascal Flatts
In the modern era of country music, you have to move a lot of units to be considered a legitimate superstar. The first act to do so on a regular basis was Alabama, who had eight consecutive multi-platinum albums in a row in the first half of the eighties.
Since then, there have been a multitude of country artists who’ve accomplished the same feat, but despite the fact that it was a band that broke down the barrier, only one male band since Alabama has achieved similar success: Rascal Flatts.
Family connections helped this power trio get their start. Lead singer Gary LeVox and his cousin, Jay DeMarcus, each had a desire to be country musicians, but it was DeMarcus who went to Nashville first. After a stint in Christian band East Meets West, DeMarcus convinced LeVox to join him in Nashville.