billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 21, 2015 (VIDEO)

Well, this was another struggle to get online. Damn, this took too long...

Okay, next up, schedule as usual, stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 21, 2015

Sometimes on Billboard BREAKDOWN, we can get some pretty rough weeks... but sometimes you the weeks where it all just clicks in some of the best ways possible. The good songs win, the bad songs lose, the new songs kick ass, and even the returning tracks aren't bad. I don't think it's quite possible to ever have a perfect week - simply based on the law of averages I reckon it's impossible to a Hot 100 that's all great music - but you can have great weeks. And folks, we came pretty close here - yeah, we got some rough songs, but we also got a bonafide classic, and I couldn't be happier about that.

the top 50 best songs of 2014 (part ii: 25-1) (VIDEO)

And there's part two. One last list to come, stay tuned!

the top 50 best songs of 2014

And now onto the third list, and by far one of the hardest to make. This year I discussed 210 albums and from there I had just under 700 songs that I considered eligible for this list. From there, the task of narrowing it down and ranking them was excruciatingly difficult, because I want to make sure this list was of the best of the best, and even with that I had to make some painful cuts. And once again, keep in mind these are not the hits. We have singles and deep cuts here, from artists who are defiantly mainstream to those lodged deep in the underground. And one more thing: for a song to land on this list, it has to have been released from an album I reviewed this year. If it was just a single, it doesn't cut it - but on a contrary note, if the single dropped last year or even the year before and the album was only released now... well, it qualifies in my books.

But enough wasting time, let's get this started with...

video review: 'eric paslay' by eric paslay

Man, this was a great surprise. Really dug this album, I must say.

Next up... not sure yet, we'll see. Either way, stay tuned!

album review: 'eric paslay' by eric paslay

I've got the sinking feeling that bro-country isn't going away.

No, despite Kacey Musgraves winning the Grammy for Best Country Album for Same Trailer, Different Park - a well-deserved win, I might add - it doesn't mean the country music paradigm is going to change overnight, and some of the bigger bro-country acts aren't just going to evaporate. Like in the aftermath of the club boom of 2009-11, the b-listers are the ones that fall away in, leaving the heavyweights behind. 

But that's not to say that bro-country is going to stay in the same form, and if you take a look at the hits from Luke Bryan, Florida Georgia Line, and Blake Shelton, they've opted to move away from the summer time party anthem to mid-tempo relationship songs, with mixed results. For Blake Shelton it's an easy shift, he's been making this material for over a decade, but Florida Georgia Line's 'Stay' is clumsy, overwrought, and really hard to take seriously, and it's becoming apparent that band might not have a lot of staying power.

But maybe I'm even wrong about that, because there are still acts looking to hop on the good-time bro-country bandwagon, which takes us to Eric Paslay, another country singer with a criminally underwritten Wikipedia page. He struck a hit with his song 'Friday Night', which is clearly trying to jump on the trend, but he doesn't strike the image of the typical bro-country act. For one, he's older, 31 at the time of this review, and for another, he has major writing credits on all of his songs. He doesn't quite look the part of a bro-country singer, and if that wasn't convincing, his collaborating work with Amy Grant of all people might be indicative that we're dealing with someone different. And while I thought 'Friday Night' was played-out and not that interesting, I had a feeling there was more to this guy, so I checked out his debut, self-titled album: how was it?