ShowbizJunkies

By Sarah Skates © 2013 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc. Keifer and Shawna Thompson explore new avenues and share stories of their personal and professional voyage on Just Feels Good, the second album they’ve released as Thompson Square.   “We wanted to really open up our lives to everybody on [...]

By Bob Doerschuk Used by Permission © 2013 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc. Apparently, it’s not enough for Missouri-born Angie Johnson to have served as an intelligence analyst in the United States Air Force; she also sang and toured with The Air Force Band. Then, following an initial attempt to [...]

By LORIE HOLLABAUGH © 2013 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc. The LoCash Cowboys have been down on their luck more than a few times during their 10-year career. But the high-energy, fun-spirited duo is still betting that the odds are in its favor as it prepares to release its first [...]

By Bob Doerschuk © 2013 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.   Tate Stevens’ triumph on Season 2 of The X Factor confirms that Country Music is stronger than ever. More important, it heralds the arrival of a performer whose music is in step with what America wants to hear.   [...]

By Bob Doerschuk Used by Permission © 2013 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.   What made Carrie Zaruba so tough, so able to express her feelings in song? Maybe it comes from always being the last kid when your class had to line up in alphabetical order? Whatever it was, [...]

By DEBORAH EVANS PRICE © 2013 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.   For more than two decades, Tim McGraw has been one of the Country format’s most consistent hitmakers. Yet with his latest album, Two Lanes of Freedom, the veteran artist feels as though he’s just getting started.   “After [...]

The Academy of Country Music provides this behind the scenes video of Entertainer of the Year award winner/48th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards co-host Luke Bryan. Bryan joined the media backstage for a 10 minute press conference in which he talked about nabbing the title of Entertainer of the Year, being blessed by Country [...]

By Bob Doerschuk © 2013 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.   One strength of Country Music is its ability to mirror real life. Rarer is the artist whose stories come to us not washed in neon but raised from a deeper, dreamier place.   Kacey Musgraves is one such anomaly. [...]

By Erin Duvall © 2013 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.   Though Ashley Monroe is hardly a newcomer to Country Music, many fans will hear her for the first time on her own with Like a Rose – her first solo effort since she achieved visibility as a member of [...]

By Holly Gleason © 2013 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc. Take one quavering tremolo guitar chord, a rattlesnake shaker, some Farfisa carny keyboards and a few picante horn punctuations, and you’re on the brink of “Back in Your Arms Again,” written by Raul Martinez, Gary Nicholson and Seth Walker, the [...]