Word: rocks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...country hits, a number so high that it loses meaning. Luckily, there's a track on the old Texan's new album that illuminates his commercial genius. Why Can't I Leave Her Alone starts out as your basic country stalking song, but with the melody of a rock power ballad. Strait's vocals swing from flash-free, honky-tonk lows to top-of-his-range, quavering highs. Then the song gets funny--"I've wrote her letters signed I was a fool/ She wrote me back saying go find a stool/ And driiiiiiiiink one"--and Strait laughs and cries...
...with a range that extends from earnest ballads to really earnest ballads. This four-disc set of 43 original tracks, all of which Gill wrote or co-wrote, is downright Garthian in its ambition--and it changes everything. Each disc covers different musical terrain--bluegrass, jazz, Southern rock, country--has well-cast guests (Bonnie Raitt shines) and reveals Gill as an astonishingly dexterous guitar player and singer. A few songs miss, but more than enough hit to make this collection, priced with characteristic humility at $29.95, one of the best of the year...
...House's West Wing, where restrictions on visitors ensure that no one is just a tourist, his appearance in the hallway can elicit a bubble of giggly Beatlemania; I heard a visiting VIP yelp, "Omigod, I just saw Tony Snow!" His fame--invariably, his colleagues describe him as a "rock star"--has unavoidably changed the very nature of the job. He is more than a mouthpiece; he's a one-man echo chamber, able to riff on the themes of the Bush presidency with a wide smile and a word-a-day-calendar vocabulary. His flamboyant style has drawn...
...bona fides have made him as familiar to the Republican base as Bush is, Snow is also, for the moment, probably better liked. In the end, if a candidate would rather be seen with the press secretary than with the President, then you've got bigger problems than a rock-star spokesman can solve. Check time.com for more examples of "Tony being Tony...
...wondrous grace, how much can be done in a simple short story. Yet the 74-year-old Canadian does it by breaking every rule ever taught in a writing seminar, setting up a master class along the sidelines. Her latest--her 11th--collection of stories, The View from Castle Rock (Knopf; 349 pages), marks a departure from her usual examinations of women in rural Canada leaving home to remake their possibilities by drawing instead on family documents, historical records (from 19th century Scotland) and what feels like memoir to piece together, in 12 parts, a fictionalized chronicle...