I Am From L.A.! ... Jamey Johnson's L.A.

Jimmy Carter in in Manchester, NH.

Here's out of the super-heated South for the New England Country Music Festival in Foxboro, where the Patriots play. Stadium-sized crowd for Paisley, Rucker, Aldean, Evans and others.

Just heard the new Jamey Johnson song about lower Alabama ... and the new Joanna Smith single. The future is bright! Big battle now on the air with pop/country and more traditional. Not sure who will win. Harder and harder to serve both masters.

Economy is or should be scaring everyone. The flights I take are full and high-priced. The rental car and hotel prices are HIGH! Deals are few. What's that about?

Then you see NASCAR Bristol is not sold out this time. That is unusual. People keep canceling tour dates. Something is going on. You know some people are hurting.

The Fall always picks up the pace for Country Music. The award season for CMA and the year seems to always be backloaded with releases.

The Summer has been awful in a weather sense, but Country music has not melted. Sales of physical product stinks, but downloads promising.

The news has been spirited. LeAnn Rimes has kept the tabloids going and now KC has made some pre-album release gossip.

Carrie's wedding ... the fantastic summer of Blake & Miranda ... Tim McGraw's solid concerts with Lady A ... Brad in Europe. Things have been rolling along.

Things are wrapping up for Brooks & Dunn, Oprah, Dr. Laura, Larry King. It's a changing of the guard. It happens and right now happening a good bit. Natural order of things.

Football season is about to light up. Baseball season about to heat up. The Fall is great.

Will we see radio finally get a break and the government force the cell phone people to put a radio chip in each cell phone? I hope so.

The Fall will be a hot time for politics. Will radio just ignore the real world and just keep chugging along? Sometimes you can, but with the economy choking, how do you ignore a huge life issue like politics? Morning shows can't be "Face the Nation," but the best ones can boil the junk down to something chewable. More LIVE and local shows.

I just continue to see a few well run radio stations and too many bad ones.

The world is complicated ... always has been. It's been more dangerous, too. (The Cuban Missile crisis)

Radio is at such a fork in the road. The computer-aged crowd is pushing out the irrelevant people. People are dying, trying to drive and tweet. The cell phone could be also a radio.

Time to tune up and relate to your audience. It is not standing still. Better find out what they need and like and give it to them.

Generate some excitement and motivate. Stations like WQYK do the total radio thing so well in a complicated market structure. Listen online!

Others do it, too, but the point is to make the music exciting and get the listeners excited. ENERGY! Generate talk.

Have fun. Make things happen.

Keep it moving. Cookie-cutter is so boring and listeners are not going to take it. You better wake up or just turn it off and save the power. The change is here ... not coming ... it's here!