Lady Antebellum

Lady Antebellum and Brandy Clark Headline a Night of Country Concerts

Better Than: This divided by two. Let it go into record that for once, on the night of May 7 in the year 2013, Manhattan had too many good country—country referring to popular country, as imported from Nashville—shows to attend, overlapping bookings that could have both been the highlight ... More >>

Blake Shelton Wants to Nail You in a Nice-Guy Sort Of Way: Rating the Top Country Hits

Every couple weeks, we take a hard listen to the music in which millions of Americans soak. Questions raised by this round of top country music singles: Did you know country stations are the only radio home for new songs (like Blake Shelton's) built on Babyface-style slow-bump R&B heartbeat rhythms ... More >>

Here's What Lady Gaga's Next Career Move Should Be

It's so obvious I can't believe she hasn't thought of this yet! She needs to do an album with the Goo Goo Dolls called Goo Goo Gaga. The title alone would sell!

Kenny Chesney Is Havin' a Party

The country star throws a summer blowout at MetLife Stadium

Zac Brown Band Stretches Country's Limits (And Its Legs) On Uncaged

Country music has never had a simple relationship with Mexico. While outlaws like Waylon Jennings once warned that there "ain't no God" on the other side of the border, Tim McGraw more recently took the opposing position, suggesting that God in fact created the country, but only as a place for trapp ... More >>

Live: LMFAO Get The Prudential Center Party Rocking

LMFAO w/Far East Movement, The Quest Crew, Sidney Samson, Eva Simons and Natalia Kills The Prudential Center Friday, June 29 Better than: You'd expect. The problem with an LMFAO concert, I realize three songs into the LMFAO concert, is that even the biggest of LMFAO fans don't want to hear more th ... More >>

Live: Lady Antebellum Cross Genres, Get Gooey At Radio City

Lady Antebellum w/Darius Rucker, Thompson Square Radio City Music Hall Thursday, March 3 Better than: Most things that can actually be described as antebellum. Two years ago, "Need You Now" pushed Lady Antebellum, a soulful country trio with a chart-topping record and single, out of Nashville and ... More >>

OWN THE NIGHT

Lady Antebellum get mushy 
at Radio City Music Hall

Live-Blogging The 2012 Grammys: Tributes, Tribulations, Skrillex, And The Return Of Adele

via Cats Who Look Like SkrillexWill this cat win Best New Artist?​Welcome to Sound of the City's liveblog of the 54th Annual Grammys, coming to you live from a couch in Astoria. There are quite a few questions lurking around tonight's ceremony. Will Adele sweep the three major categories in wh ... More >>

Oddsmaking: Will Mumford & Sons Upset "Rolling In The Deep" In The Grammys' Record Of The Year Race?

Every year, when I get involved in Grammy debates with my cooler friends, I tell them the problem with the awards isn't that they reward mass-appeal schlock. If the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences is doing its job right, it should be rewarding popular, undeniable, and somewhat unhip ... More >>

The Grammys' 53 Record Of The Year Winners, In Order

53. Phil Collins, "Another Day in Paradise" [1991] 52. The 5th Dimension, "Up, Up and Away" [1968] 51. Olivia Newton-John, "I Honestly Love You" [1975] 50. Celine Dion, "My Heart Will Go On" [1999] 49. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, "A Taste of Honey" [1966] 48. Bobby McFerrin, "Don't ... More >>

Q&A: Jason Aldean On His "Really Good Build," Making New Fans, And New York's Country Radio Drought

Jason Aldean uses the royal "we" so often that you're half-tempted to ask for whom else he's speaking. Yet Nashville's newest king comes by the grammatical flourish honestly: Barring a last-minute surge by Lady Antebellum or the kids in the Band Perry, Aldean's My Kinda Party is almost certain to en ... More >>

Live-Blogging The 2011 American Music Awards: We Could Have Had It All (But Then Adele Had To Go Have A Vocal Cord Hemorrhage)

Welcome to Sound of the City's liveblog of the 2011 American Music Awards, the annual salute to the most popular popular music that exists in the American wild this year. While Lady Gaga and Adele and Beyoncé are absent, this year's show apparently has one performance that will cost $500,000 to pul ... More >>

The Seven Worst Songs Of All Time

​Whenever these tunes get played, I hide under a rock for four minutes--actually, five, just for safety's sake. They are easily the seven worst songs in history. (7) Mr. Roboto by Styx. I would have ranked this a little higher, but its sheer kitschy audacity, pulled off in a sort of nouvea ... More >>

The American Music Awards Nominations: Hey, Did You Know Adele Sold A Lot Of Albums This Year?

Have you bought your copy yet? (Give it time.) ​You can have your Grammys and your Mercury Prizes and your Polaris Prizes and whatever other musical prizes honor things like "talent" and "artistry"—the most honest awards show in pop music, though, is undoubtedly the American Music Awards ... More >>

The Many Faces Of "Marvins Room": Ugh, To Be Young And In Love

It should never be surprising that the sort of R&B that burns up the charts and draws chatter at youth hubs like Twitter is the kind that adolescents identify with. And that's what "Marvins Room," in all its various incarnations, is. The original "Marvins Room," released by Drake in early June, is ... More >>

The Voice Battles Over Reality-Show Staples

The Voice is now a month or so in. It's a massive hit. It's the show NBC's putting on after the Super Bowl. It's out of American Idol's shadow. And it's a week away from becoming a live show and really launching into its season. It has arrived. So someone should really say something about Christina ... More >>

Will An Army Of Beyoncés Save "Run The World (Girls)" From Chart Oblivion?

​Last night's Billboard Music Awards handed out popularity-contest trophies to the likes of Eminem, Justin Bieber, and Katy Perry, all of whom were rewarded for the copious amounts of radio play and sales they racked up in recent months. But the evening's real winner was probably Beyoncé, who ... More >>

American Idol: Jacob Lusk, You Were Too Good For This Show

Michael Becker/FOXFarewell, Jacob. ​It always happens. My end-to-end favorite contestant has never, ever won American Idol. They usually do pretty well, but they always flame out within a few weeks of the finish line because of some combination of nerves, bad choices, mass bad taste, and the f ... More >>

"American Idol": Say Goodbye To Paul McDonald

Michael Becker/FOX​So Paul McDonald went home this week. Not that shocking! The only real surprise is that it finally reverses the gross and troubling trend of only female contestants getting bounced. (The one time a male contestant was voted off after top 12 week happened when the judges save ... More >>

Justin Bieber Is Your New Chart Overlord

​Good news: The music industry is starting to sell more records in 2011. Bad news: They're Now compilations and Justin Bieber remix records. The latter takes Billboard's top spot from the former this week, with Never Say Never: The Remixes selling a brisk 161,000 copies, and why not, since Nev ... More >>

The Fame Cookie: 2011 Grammy Awards Live Blog

It's the return of the most talked-about Grammy Awards live blog--a collection of quips, blips, and arguably insightful observations that dares to match the actual Grammy telecast in terms of pure spectacle and Justin Bieber mentions. Please join our hosts Tom Breihan and Ryan Dombal below, and keep ... More >>

The Great 2011 Grammy Postmortem: Even If Arcade Fire Made It, "We" Probably Didn't (Right?)

This picture is from Arcade Fire's Tumblr, where it's captioned "Win jumping up and down, thanking the world." Because why wouldn't it be?​Radiohead may have already surpassed last night's Grammys as the au currant news of an indie-rock world that is all of a sudden drowning in good tidings, b ... More >>

Pazz & Jop Voter Comments: Rick Ross Lies, the Rolling Stones Plunder, and Taylor Swift Triumphs

Arcade Fire Sell Nearly Half A Million Records in 2010, Will Perform at the Grammys

​"The whole chart thing is kind of like sports," said an unimpressed Merge label chief Laura Ballance, back when Arcade Fire hit #1 on the Billboard charts. That may well be true. But if selling records is like sports, Arcade Fire are weirdly good at it, considering they're a bunch of spindly ... More >>

Top 25 Headlines Not As Weird As "Dave Sitek Joins Jane's Addiction"

Good luck learning all the chord changes in "Jane Says," dude​So TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek has joined Jane's Addiction, in some unspecified bassist/songwriter/possibly-non-touring-member capacity, which is super bizarre when you first hear about it, but is, upon reflection, not the stranges ... More >>

Five Takeaways From The 2010 Grammy Nominations

Behold, the future of music.​The Grammy Awards are a bit of a punchline in music nerd circles, a place where, say, MGMT battles Hall & Oates for a trophy that will inevitably be won, and then dropped on the ground, by the more telegenic and industry-saving Taylor Swift. The Grammy voters hate ... More >>

What This Year's Bizarre Chart Results (Arcade Fire! #1!) Say About the State of Music in 2010

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!​If the band Spoon can be trusted, then Billboard is about to announce (and here we are!) that the Arcade Fire and their label, Merge, have the #1 record in the country. (They've already done it in the UK.) The Suburbs sold 156,000 copies its first week out, ... More >>

American Idol Season 9: Live-Blogging the Top 6 Results

Frank Micelotta / FOXShakira goes country, kind of​"Picture this:" says Ryan Seacrest. "Rascal Flatts and Shakira." I'm picturing it, I'm getting up, I'm turning off my TV. Sigh. If only that were an option. Instead, I can't actually look away from the trainwreck that is another results show ... More >>

Now Passing For Nostalgia on the Billboard Charts: Circa-2007 Rock-Radio Staples

​The No. 4 album on this week's Billboard albums chart, which is topped once again by soft-underbelly country act Lady Antebellum's Need You Now (93,000 sales, down 11% from previous week), is The Edge, a compilation of songs that you might hear on your local "active rock" station or at your l ... More >>

Explaining the Success of Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, Which Has Sold More Copies Than 50 Cent's Before I Self-Destruct and That Joanna Newsom Record Combined

​A small shift at the top of the charts this week -- snoozy country act Lady Antebellum retakes the top spot, with Need You Now selling 126,000 copies to the smoky Sade album Soldier Of Love's 79,000 -- is followed by a slew of debuts from artists of varying notoriety. Polarizing American Idol ... More >>

American Idol Season 9, Top 8 Guys: Michael Lynche Redeems His Own Bad Parenting; Tim Urban Hits the Suburbs

Kidnap that fool--Tim Urban. Photo by Frank Micelotta/ FOX. ​Such a weird night on Idol. There's still plenty of dogshit left on the men's side of the competition, and maybe even worse, there are plenty of people who haven't yet decided if they're going to be dogshit or not. And the night got ... More >>

On Sade and the Virtues of Scarcity

Sade, hiding. Photo courtesy ThinkTank Marketing.​This week's album charts were topped by Sade's Soldier Of Love, the smoky soul singer's sixth full-length and first since 2000's Lovers Rock. Soldier accomplished the rarer-than-ever feat of going gold in its first week of release, selling 502, ... More >>

So Was Lil Wayne's Rebirth a Modest Success Or a Total Commercial Failure? Maura Johnston Reads the Charts

"Billboard's 'Tastemakers' chart is the one we should all paying attention to, don't you think?"​This week's Billboard 200 is headed once again by Lady Antebellum, the milquetoast country trio whose second album Need You Now moved 481,000 copies in its debut week, and 209,000 copies in the sal ... More >>

The Grammys Work: Lady Antebellum's Need You Now Is #1; Lady Gaga Is Back at #3

​All bands should be so lucky as to play the Grammys the week their record hits shelves. For instance: charmingly trite, light country trio Lady Antebellum, who just sold 481,000 fucking copies of their sophomore record, Need You Now. Those are Susan Boyle numbers. Extra bonus scorched earth p ... More >>

COUNTRY GOT SOUL

Courtesy of Lady Antebellum

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