Tom Roland
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Articles by Tom Roland
October 27, 2009
It´s been seven years since Joe Nichols released his first album, Man with a Memory, so fans and music executives alike might feel confident that they have a pretty good handle on this artist and what he represents.
But with the release of his sixth album Old Things New on Oct. 27, Nichols ...
January 13, 2009
Kitty Wells sat calmly, almost regally, in a back room of the library at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, quietly contemplating her life and career.
The Nashville native has done quite a bit of reflection recently, thanks to a new exhibit at the Museum. "Kitty Wells: Queen of Country M...
December 01, 2008
Backstage at CMA Music Festival in June, Randy Travis came face to face with the new reality.
Just outside his dressing room at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, he met Taylor Swift for the first time. At their impromptu encounter, with each scheduled as a guest on the Lorianne Crook-hosted "CMA Cel...
June 18, 2008
A sweeping dichotomy surfaces at the close of Alan Jackson's latest album, Good Time. "If You Want to Make Me Happy," the penultimate track, is set in a barroom awash in jukebox laments and mind-numbing alcohol. The closer, "If Jesus Walked the World Today," is a buoyant gospel piece that contempl...
February 05, 2008
Feb. 29 isn't just another Leap Day for Brooks & Dunn. On that date, the superstar duo will do something never before attempted in more than 16 years together, as they open their first-ever string of dates in Australia.
But in the Southern Hemisphere's largest commonwealth, it's something ev...
January 02, 2008
We call it "Country Music" - but that doesn't necessarily mean it's just for one country. That lesson was easy to draw from 2007's annual CMA Music Festival during June in Nashville, where visitors came from as far off as Chile, Japan and Scandinavia - a total of 21 nations on five continents.
...
October 24, 2007
Downtown Nashville buzzed during the 2007 CMA Music Festival - not just the honky tonks up and down Broadway and the restaurants and clubs along Second Avenue, but also the stores whose wares have little to do with Country Music.
A visit to Tattoo, for instance, the body-art shop in the histo...
May 03, 2007
When Ken Nelson needs cheering up, he sings a 60-year-old song to himself: "You've got to accentuate the positive / Eliminate the negative / Latch on to the affirmative / Don't mess with Mr. In-Between."
It's an appropriate choice for three reasons: One, it lifts his spirits; two, it connects...
October 14, 2006
One of the stereotypes of the entertainment business is that every actor wants to sing, and every singer wants to act. Strangely enough, Warner Bros. (WB) fought the temptation from its very beginning as a motion picture company, waiting some three decades to establish a record label for good, and...
April 26, 2006
With its strong penchant for classic songwriting technique, Nashville has been referred to as the modern equivalent of Tin Pan Alley. That makes it fitting that a legendary songwriter who got his start during New York's Tin Pan Alley era had a founding interest in one of Country Music's labels, Capi...
January 31, 2006
Through its primary subsidiaries - MCA Nashville, Mercury Nashville and the former DreamWorks Records Nashville - the Universal Music Group has a huge presence in the current makeup of Country Music. In a recent issue of Billboard, the company owned three of the top five titles on both the Country S...
January 24, 2006
The 2005 merger of two of the record industry's few major distributors united giant corporations based in Japan and Germany. In Nashville, it also brought two of the companies with the longest track records in Country Music literally under one roof. The staff at SONY's labels - Columbia, Epic and Mo...