Merle Haggard: Down Every Road

In 1996, Capitol Records released a box set of country singer Merle Haggard’s music. After this review ran in Rolling Stone, a writer for a conservative newspaper, The Washington Times, took me to task for putting a liberal spin to the songs of a conservative artist. But as I wrote in this review — and I stand by it — seeing Haggard simply as a “conservative” doesn’t do him or his full body of work justice.

Ed Sheeran: The X Factor

What Ed Sheeran’s huge success showed was the endurance of the acoustic guitar in popular music—not just in the singer-songwriter or country-bluegrass realms, but also in the pure, unadulterated, teen-loving pop world. In this 2014 multimedia package, I talked to him and others about his music and guitars, and he performed an unplugged version of his hit “Thinking Out Loud.”