Opening a show is one of the toughest jobs in live music. You’re walking onto a stage where most of the audience bought tickets to see someone else. The room is still filling up, conversations are happening at the bar, and people are settling in for the evening. You have
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Fans see the lights. They hear the songs. They cheer when the artist walks on stage. What they rarely see are the hundreds of decisions, and dozens of people, that make those ninety minutes possible. Somewhere behind the curtain is someone making sure the buses arrived, the crew has hotel
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Archers Gate, Saturday, June 27, 2026 , Annie’s Music Center, Cincinnati, Ohio Sometimes the concert experience begins long before the first note is played. Leaving the house Saturday evening, I immediately questioned my wardrobe choice. An 80-degree evening paired with Midwest humidity isn’t exactly hoodie weather. Thankfully, the air conditioning in
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Some guitar players spend their careers trying to be noticed. Paul Sidoti has spent his making sure the audience notices someone else. That may sound like an odd way to describe a musician who’s shared stages with Taylor Swift for nearly two decades, toured the world, played late-night television, worked
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The Dreamboats , June 18, 2026 , Summer Arts Festival Veterans Park Amphitheater, Springfield, Ohio. Sometimes the best concert nights start with a little uncertainty. I left home around 5:00 PM on a rainy Thursday afternoon headed for Springfield, Ohio. As I watched the rain hit the windshield, I couldn’t help but wonder
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There’s an unwritten rule in live music: if your audience spends more time watching the show through their phone than actually reacting to it, you’ve probably lost them. The Dreamboats seem to have missed that memo. Or maybe they burned it. When I sat down with drummer Johnny G. Wiz,
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The music business has a strange habit of making years of preparation look like a few minutes of opportunity. A three-minute audition. One song in a Nashville recording studio. A National Anthem before a packed football stadium. A festival slot somebody managed to squeeze you into after the lineup was
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By the time Friday night rolled around, CMA Fest had already done its best to remind me that I’m not twenty-five anymore. After spending Thursday bouncing between artist meetings, live performances, industry events, and enough late-night conversations to fill a season of a reality show, day two arrived with little
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The first official day of CMA Fest always feels a little like the first day of school. Everyone is excited, everyone is running on too little sleep, and Nashville suddenly becomes the center of the music universe for a few days. For me, CMA Fest 2026 started with a phone
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At 11 years old, Stephanie Rabus underwent open-heart surgery. Thirty-three years later, she found herself dealing with her heart again. And somewhere between those two moments, she built a life around singing. There are coincidences. Then there are circles so perfectly drawn that you have to wonder whether somebody knew
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