Stapleton, ‘Girl Crush’ bring country music back to Grammys

This year’s Grammy nominations have just been released and several expected names, like Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift, and The Weeknd, have scored big.

Song of the Year: Lamar’s “Alright” is up against Swift’s “Blank Space”, Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush”, Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again”, and Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud”.

Record of the year: D’Angelo makes it here, in the singles category, where he will do battle with Mark Ronson & Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk”, Ed Sheeran’s snoozer “Thinking Out Loud”, and you guessed it, Swift (“Blank Space”) and the Weeknd (“I Can’t Feel My Face”).

Others running in the race of Album of the Year are Alabama Shakes and Chris Stapleton, while Courtney Barnett, James Bay, Sam Hunt, Tori Kelly and Meghan Trainor are taking their run for the Best New Artist.

Kiss Land debuted at number two on Billboard’s top 200 chart, while the follow up, 2015’s Beauty Behind the Madness, debuted at number one, spending three consecutive weeks in the top spot. Rap, R&B, pop and country dominate the field of nominees announced Monday.

The awards cover recordings released between October 1, 2014, and September 30, 2015, which means that Adele’s recent multimillion-selling album, “25”, isn’t eligible.

His seven nominations tie him with Taylor Swift’s tally. But, T-Swift is rumored to be feeling a certain type of way about Lamar receiving more Grammy nominations than she did.

The soundtrack to the hit musical-comedy movie “Pitch Perfect 2”, which features Muskogee native Ester Dean, is nominated for best compilation soundtrack for visual media. For country fans, this year’s country Grammy nominees are perhaps confirmation that this genre is soon due for some serious change.

The Grammy Awards, chosen by members of the Recording Academy, will be handed out at a ceremony in Los Angeles on February 15. Their four nominations include best alternative music album as well as best rock performance and song for “Don’t Wanna Fight”. His album “Montevallo” is nominated in the best country album category for the upcoming Grammys and he has also done well at other awards shows this year.

THE nominations for the 2016 Grammy Awards were announced overnight, but many were left confused by one noticeable absence – Adele. It brings several questions to mind, questions we’d love to ask the collective entity that is the Academy: Wouldn’t we all be better served by an awards show that gives equal footing to both commercial behemoths and the recordings that not enough people heard? Cole and Kendrick Lamar share equal billing with Fetty Wap and Paul McCartney, yet somehow Future Hendrix, the lord of Atlanta, the strip club kingpin and arguably the streets’ favorite emcee and quite a deserving potential Grammy victor, is nowhere to be found. Indo-British director Asif Kapadia features in the nominees list of Best Music Film category for Amy, his documentary on late singer Amy Winehouse.

The absence of Madonna and her latest album “Rebel Heart” among this year’s nominees is likely to be viewed by some as a snub of the veteran singer.