Originally published at MoonRunners

Greg Martin has spent his entire career as a professional musician chasing down the roots. As lead guitarist and founding member of the Kentucky Headhunters, he has fully explored the links between country, blues, and rock and roll, creating a Southern-fried sound that doesn't quite fit in anywhere. Yet for a period of time in the early '90s, Martin's band was the talk of Music…

Originally published at MoonRunners

The hills of south central Ohio are an enigma. Both culturally and literally they are worlds apart from the pre-NAFTA industrial hubs like Akron and Cleveland. To the best of my knowledge, neither LeBron James or Drew…

Originally published at MoonRunners

It's easy to write songs like Jim Morrison. No disrespect intended to a charismatic frontman and a great rock band, but everybody can and has written blatant attempts at poetry, shrouded in so much imagery that only the most astute listener will know or care what the songs actually mean.

It's tougher to write something that is intelligent, yet so simple that you get…

Originally published on MoonRunners

This whole Chris Brown thing reminds me of a deleted scene from Mike Judge's Idiocracy and is exhibit A in the case against our modern day society and culture.

I'm not speaking from any moral high ground here. A short list of any of my favorite artists would reveal drug addiction, alcoholism, and even an attempted murder or two. But I was…

An uncensored version of this was originally published at MoonRunners

You ever hear a song on the radio and ask yourself, as Eddie Murphy did, "Can you believe this motherf****** shit?" You know the type of song I'm talking about. It's one of those things that sounds more like an engineer and a computer programmer jerking each other off on a bed of Auto-Tuned bubblegum than anything even remotely…

Originally published at MoonRunners

"Miracles appear in the strangest of places," as Willie said.

Today, while we were on a pointless excursion in town, my brother decided he wanted to visit one of our local pawnshops and check out some guns. I had nothing better to do, so no…

Originally published at MoonRunners

Today marks the 77th birthday of Elvis Presley, hands down the most influential recording artist of the 20th century. But what does influence really mean? Does each action have an unintended, inadvertent reaction? Is it enough to call Elvis the King of Rock 'n Roll and say he was one of the best ever or should we look beyond that and ask what his influence really was and what it…

Originally published at moonrunnerscountry.com

Well folks, 2011 is just about gone and we've seen a lot of great releases. The great news is that 2012 is gearing up to be even better. Below are some of the albums I'm looking forward to next year along with my thoughts or the artist's comments on each of them.

Alan Jackson

Nashville honky-tonk traditionalist Alan Jackson…

Back in 1982, one of the most popular country singers of his era delivered the following lines: "Blew my last twenty dollars on an Oilers football game/I only lost by half a point, nothing ever goes my way/Reaganomics and plastic people makin' good luck hard to find/All this stuff that's goin' down, really got me down this time." It's worth noting that he didn't write those particular…