by Julian Spivey
Have you ever realized how strange the Best New Artist category at the Grammy Awards is? As in, it shouldn’t even be a category.
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Best New Artist has been awarded every year in which there has been a Grammy Awards, all the way back since 1959. Some all-time legends in the recording industry have been named Best New Artist by the Grammys, like Bob Newhart (1961), The Beatles (1965), Crosby, Stills & Nash (1970), Mariah Carey (1991) and Adele (2009).

But the Best New Artist category has perhaps been most known over the years for awarding artists that didn’t exactly go on to have Hall of Fame careers. Notable examples being: The Swingle Singers (who?, 1964), Starland Vocal Band (1977), A Taste of Honey (1979 – beat out both Elvis Costello and The Cars), Rickie Lee Jones (1980 – beat out Dire Straits) and more.

The most controversial choice in the past decade was probably jazz musician Esperanza Spalding (the only jazz musician to ever win the award) in 2011 over Drake, Mumford & Sons, Florence and the Machine and Justin Bieber. But, that’s pretty much only to pop music fans and not fair to Spalding, who’s nominated for multiple Grammys again this year and has won two Grammys since being named Best New Artist. There was also Macklemore & Ryan Lewis over Kendrick Lamar, Ed Sheeran and Kacey Musgraves (all major Grammys winners and nominees since) in 2014 – but then again Macklemore had a huge breakout effort.

Some have even attributed winning Best New Artist to be a curse. Starland Vocal Band rode their hit “Afternoon Delight” to a Best New Artist win in 1977, but never had success again. Group member Taffy Danoff said in an interview for VH1’s 2002 special “100 Greatest One Hit Wonders”: “We got two of the five Grammys – one was for Best New Artist. So that was basically the kiss of death and I feel sorry for everyone who’s gotten it since.” Aww, don’t feel too bad Taffy … 1995 winner Sheryl Crow and 2000 winner Christina Aguilera have done pretty good for themselves.

Best New Artist at the Grammys is also notable for being the only category in the history of the awards to rescind a victory when in 1990 it was revealed that winner Milli Vanilli were a façade and did not contribute their own vocals to their debut album.

Four Best New Artist winners really had huge years and won Album of the Year in the same year: Bob Newhart (1961), Christopher Cross (1981), Lauryn Hill (1999) and Norah Jones (2003). However, what’s truly fascinating is two artists who were nominated, but lost Best New Artist went on to actually win Album of the Year the same year – Vaughan Meader in 1963 for The First Family, an album in which he impersonated and parodied President John F. Kennedy and his family (maybe the strangest Album of the Year win ever). Meader lost Best New Artist to Robert Goulet. Alanis Morrisette won Album of the Year in 1996 for Jagged Little Pill but was beaten out by Hootie & the Blowfish for Best New Artist.

Three artists this year are nominated for both Best New Artist and Album of the Year – Lizzo, Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X. Might one win Best New Artist and the other Album of the Year?

Then there’s the strange rules for being nominated for Best New Artist. Best New Artist nominees don’t necessarily have to have released their debut album during the eligibility period. Any artist who releases the first recording which establishes the public identity of that artist is eligible. This is how an artist like Lizzo this year can be nominated for the award despite having released two previous albums in 2013 and 2015.

But none of these are really reasons why I think Best New Artist is strange and shouldn’t even be a Grammy category.

The reason why Best New Artist makes no sense at the Grammys to me is because it’s an artist award and not a recording award. Think about it … the rest of the Grammys (with the exception of Producer of the Year) go to recordings – albums and tracks (and music videos and documentaries). So, how does an award that goes to the artist make sense, especially as one of the so-called four big Grammy categories? There is no Entertainer of the Year, Male Vocalist of the Year, etc. at the Grammys, as you might have at the CMA Awards and the like, so why Best New Artist?

This has bugged me ever since it first occurred to me a few years ago.

What do you think?

by Julian Spivey
CNN premiered its documentary “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice,” on New Year’s Day, revisiting the legendary singer’s career in a roughly by the numbers aspect going from start-to-finish and focusing mostly on her career and less on her personal life and decade-long battle with Parkinson’s disease.
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The documentary is directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, who won an Academy Award together for their 1989 documentary “Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt.”

The 95-minute documentary is a must-watch for any fan of Ronstadt’s as it traces her success from her breaking into the Los Angeles music scene in 1967 throughout the end of her singing career when she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2009. The story is told through interviews featuring old bandmates, fellow musicians and friends and family like former manager Peter Asher, former love interest and collaborator J.D. Souther, former bandmate Don Henley and frequent collaborators like Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton.

What ‘The Sound of My Voice’ does exceptionally well is it is a great linear biography of her entire music career and shows how unique Ronstadt was with her ability to jump genres and have hit songs in pop, rock, country and soul – at one point having songs on basically every Billboard chart you could think of. In this manner Ronstadt was a chameleon who could do it all and do it all well and that’s something you just don’t see today and didn’t really see a whole lot of back then either. You know she’s really doing it all when she’s starring in Broadway productions of “The Pirates of Penzance” and showcasing her Mexican heritage with traditional Mariachi music.

What ‘The Sound of My Voice’ left me wanting more of was looks into the personal side and life of Ronstadt. It briefly went into her upbringing, relationships with Souther and California Gov. Jerry Brown, and her battle with Parkinson’s, but didn’t go in-depth enough probably for fear of running too long. But, without these deeper looks it felt like just a supersized version of an old VH1 “Behind the Music” biography.

Because Ronstadt had such a terrific voice and can’t use it anymore because of her disease I truly believe the filmmakers missed out on a big chance to show the true tragedy of her experience. If it had been less by the numbers and more like another music documentary that premiered on CNN in “Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me” I would’ve found it more interesting.

Still, because Ronstadt is such an important and great musical figure, I would recommend it, especially if you’re unaware of her terrific output.

Bruce Springsteen’s documentary “Western Stars,” which was co-directed by him and Thom Zimny, is a more traditional concert film than music documentary as it sees Springsteen perform his entire 2019 album Western Stars from beginning to end while giving some of the back stories and themes included in the songs and album before each performance.  

Because of this “Western Stars” makes for a great companion piece to the album, and thus something all Springsteen fans should watch and will admire and enjoy, but it’s not really the kind of thing one needed to run out to the closest theater showing it when it came out last year (I rented it from Amazon Video).

This isn’t so much “Springsteen on Broadway,” his terrific one-man show he did for more than a year on Broadway that was taped and can be seen on Netflix, but Springsteen seeming to hope it’s somewhat like “Springsteen on Broadway.” “Western Stars” doesn’t feature the kind of storytelling that Springsteen’s one-man show did but is more just nice insight into his writing process of his latest album. Honestly, the film probably should’ve just been released in a deluxe version of the album. It’s what it feels like, more so than a major work of documentary art.