Music reviews are some of the most time consuming projects that a writer can undertake.  It requires hours of listening to an album on repeat in order to formulate an opinion.  And that’s before the real writing of the review begins.  Then it takes another few hours to put your thoughts about the music into writing.  Then editing.  Then rearranging.  Then re-reading.  Then re-reading again.  Then re-writing.  Editing.  Re-reading yet again.  And editing.  And re-reading.  It goes on and on until several hours later your OCD is satisfied and you have a piece you’re willing to share with the public.

Unfortunately here at Hometown Country Music we simply haven’t had the time to write reviews these days due to the number of albums we get submitted to us on a weekly basis.  If we review one, we feel obligated to try to review all the others.  After kicking around some ideas, we’ve decided to launch a new feature to give new music a score.  We’re going to ease into it by rating some recent singles to fine-tune or scoring system, then eventually will attempt to use our scoring method to rate full albums.

We have selected 10 categories for which we will score each song on, with a rating of 1-10.  We will then average the score to give the song an overall score of 1-10.  We hope that this new feature will help fans decide which new music to invest in.  We also want to remind folks that we tend to view music through a lens that shines a light on more traditional sounding music that seemed to have disappeared over the past few years.  This doesn’t mean a lower scored song isn’t good, it just means it isn’t good for what country music should be.  Any recent “catchy” Sam Hunt song that may be your jam but probably belongs on a pop station rather than a country station has a potential for a lower score.  A song with a high score likely has some steel guitar and/or fiddle to it and likely tells a great story with the lyrics, the way country music was supposed to be!

We hope you enjoy our new feature…keep your eyes open for new scores soon!

Scoring Scale:

• 9.0-10 = Great country song/album
• 8.0-8.9 = Very good country song/album
• 7.0-7.9 = Good country song/album
• 6.0-6.9 = Decent country song/album
• 5.0-5.9 = Average country song/album
• 4.0-4.9 = Below average country song/album
• 0-3.9 = Not a good country song/album