Blog Posts by Chris Willman

If you were a betting country music fan, you'd probably already be in Las Vegas to get some roulette spinning in, in advance of Sunday night's Academy of Country Music Awards. But if you prefer your wagers to be purely symbolic, there's no reason not to be an armchair gambler and lay odds on who'll win the top prizes at the ACMs.

In what are usually the three most-watched categories—entertainer, male vocalist, and female vocalist of the year—we're placing our bets on a three-peat by Taylor Swift, Blake Shelton, and Miranda Lambert, respectively. But everything else is up for grabs. See if our prognostications meet with your approval:

ENTERTAINER OF THE YEAR

• Jason Aldean

• Kenny Chesney

• Brad Paisley

• Blake Shelton

• Taylor Swift

Taylor SwiftWILL WIN: Swift. This award goes to the person who's considered the best ambassador to the outside world for country music and/or the biggest touring act. Without a doubt, both criteria fit T-Swift to a tee. And if she won it last year, how much easier

You know Chris Young as the king of balladic sensitivity. But that's not the Chris Young you're going to see in the opening half-hour of the ACM Awards Sunday night.

"We're actually doing 'Save Water, Drink Beer,' which is what I open my shows with," Young tells Yahoo! Music. "I think it'll be cool, because at least on TV, while I think I've gotten to play a lot of different things... one thing they haven't really seen yet, unless they've been to one of my shows, is kind of just a fun uptempo party song. And that's definitely what this is. There's not a whole lot of confusion about a song with the title 'Save Water, Drink Beer'!"

He has a message for viewers about timeliness. "We're actually performing fairly close to the beginning, which is awesome. But at the same time, I have to tell everybody, 'Hey guys, make sure you are home! Don't pull in the driveway 15 minutes and miss part of the breginning'. Because it's not just [about] me—in the beginning of the show, the first little

Remember when the "best vocal group" category at the various country music awards shows was kind of a joke... because there virtually were no groups in country? But suddenly that's a particularly competitive category. Rascal Flatts pretty much had the category to themselves for the seven consecutive years they won, before they were supplanted two years ago by Lady Antebellum. Now the nominations are rounded out by two acts that have quickly become among the biggest in country: the Band Perry and the Zac Brown Band.

Which pretty much leaves first-time nominees the Eli Young Band as the underdogs in the category. Or are they? Because they did just happen to have the biggest country song of 2011, in the form of "Crazy Girl," and that's an honor that not even a behemoth like Lady A can claim. It certainly makes the Eli Young Band contenders in the Single and Song of the Year categories, where they're also modestly storming the gates for the first time.

"The whole thing with the group

Legendary banjo picker Earl Scruggs, one of the pioneering figures of bluegrass music, has died of natural causes in a Nashville hospital at 88.

Thanks in large part to his ongoing activity on the concert circuit as an octogenarian, Scruggs had hardly been forgotten in the years and months leading up to his death. Just two months ago, writing in the New Yorker, Steve Martin said, "A grand part of American music owes a debt to Earl Scruggs. Few players have changed the way we hear an instrument the way Earl has, putting him in a category with Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Chet Atkins, and Jimi Hendrix."

"The Essential Earl Scruggs"Scruggs reached his highest level of fame in the 1960s when he and partner Lester Flatt recording the theme song for The Beverly Hillbillies, which became a beloved weekly staple in living rooms that wouldn't think of ever putting on a bluegrass record, as well as a No. 1 smash on the not usually so rootsy Billboard country chart.

But his stardom continued to give him a healthy touring

The going meme is that, on his new album, Lionel Richie "goes country." But that's a little bit misleading. It's really more a case of 13 top country stars "going Lionel Richie."

Tuskegee, as anyone who reads any news outlet or watches any TV surely knows by now, is Richie's duets project as well as his Nashville entrée. And while there are some nods to Music Row accoutrements like steel guitar and fiddle, just as often it's a case of superstars like Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, Shania Twain, Blake Shelton, and Willie Nelson settling effortlessly into the original style and pace of Richie's songs and having them still turn out like—surprise!—contemporary country.

In this Yahoo! Music video interview, Richie talks about the surprising and instantaneous acceptance he felt when he got to Music City USA to start work on Tuskegee.

"What I love most about Nashville is they come from songwriters first," Richie says. "Nashville kind of had its arms open for me before I even knew that I was

"MDNA"Does MDNA have the RGHT STFF? The critics have weighed in on Madonna's new album, and the consensus view is that this is Her Madge-esty's most enjoyable effort since 2000's Music -- or even "her best album since Ray of Light in 1998," as one notoriously tough critic, the Chicago Tribune's Greg Kot, happily declared.

Which is not to say that Madonna, unlike music itself, is necessarily one to make the people come together. There is also plenty of snark to go around in the reviews, and while some critics question whether her full immersion in youthful dance music is appropriate for a superstar of 53, others take her to task for not being nearly as edgy or provocative as she used to be. In other words, she is either acting too immature or too mature, depending on which bone you prefer to pick.

Disagreement also hinges on whether MDNA is an autobiographically revealing work that could be described as "our lady's divorce album," as Rolling Stone's Joe Levy did, or whether it's really more

For some folks, 65 is retirement age. For Elton John, who reaches that mark on Sunday, it's the age at which you book a summer tour of Europe in addition to your lucrative Las Vegas residency… release a T Bone Burnett-produced comeback CD… prepare a sequel to your last hit animated musical, Gnomeo & Juliet… watch the grosses come in for your touring stage musical, Billy Elliot… dress up as a monarch and shill for Pepsi in inescapable TV spots…

And, oh yeah, the age at which you stop and smell the nappies.

"I love the smell of nappies and diapers," John said at a press event last year, helpfully using both the British and American terms for the fragrant delights. Perhaps he'd taken leave of his olfactory senses, but most likely the long-recovered alcoholic has found his true late-in-life fix getting high on fatherhood.

Elton John, David Furnish, and Zacahary at a 2012 Oscars partyAs Elton turns 65, his son, Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John, has yet to pass the year-and-a-half-old mark. The baby was born on Christmas day of 2010, via a fertilized

[Photo: Araya Diaz/WireImage]The Golden Gate Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge are sizable enough arches. But connecting the Brooklyn music scene with classic Bay Area rock? That'd require a much bigger bridge altogether. Fortunately, we have just the collaborative musical architects to do it: on one side, Bob Weir, of Grateful Dead fame; on the other, indie-rock band the National. An epic enough span for you?

Saturday night, the unlikely partners will meet up for an epic, historic, to be witnessed by a crowd of about 50 people at Weir's TRI Studios and a huge remote audience across the web. The concert dubbed (you guessed it) "The Bridge Session" will be broadcast live on Yahoo! Music starting at 9 p.m. ET/6 PT.

Prepare to settle in for a while. "We're doing a pretty lengthy show," Weir tells Yahoo! Even if there were no specific plan for intermission, he says, "there would need to be a set break."