In 2013, Burns joined the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management as a Faculty Co-Director.

(meta data) TITLE: Lawton R. Burns - Health Care Management

James Joo-Jin Kim Professor, Professor of Health Care ManagementProfessor of Management

Primary Email: burnsl@wharton.upenn.eduOffice Phone: (215) 898-3711

203 Colonial Penn Center3641 Locust WalkPhiladelphia, PA 19104

Research Interests: formal organizations, health care management, hospital-physician relationships, integrated health care, physician networks, physician practice management firms, strategic change, supply chain management

PhD, University of Chicago, 1981; MBA, University of Chicago, 1984; MA, University of Chicago, 1976; BA, Haverford College, 1973

Analysis of the pharmaceutical outsourcing market, IMB, 2003-04; Antitrust implications of PHOs, Federal Trade Commission, 2004; Development of integrated delivery systems, Illinois Hospital Association, 1994-97

## Career and Recent Professional Awards; Teaching Awards

2003: Board of Institute of Medicine, Health Services Research Section; 2001: Arthur Anderson Distinguished Visitor, University of Cambridge (UK); 1999:Teacher of the Year, Administrative Medicine Program, School of Medicine, University of Wisconsin; 1992-93: Edwin Crosby Memorial Fellowship, Hospital Research and Educational Trust; 1990-91: Udall Fellowship, Udall Center for Public Policy; 1997: Invited Lecture Series, Catholic University of Rome, Luiss, and National Agency for Health Care Services (Rome)

Wharton: 1994-present (Chairperson, Health Care Systems Department, 2008-present; named James Joo-Jin Kim Professor, 1999; Director, Wharton Center for Health Management and Economics, 1999-present).

Previous appointments: University of Arizona; University of Chicago.

Visiting appointment: University of Wisconsin

Editorial Board, Health Services Research, 1994-present

Lawton Robert Burns, Ph.D., MBA, is the Chair of the Health Care Management Department, the James Joo-Jin Kim Professor, a Professor of Health Care Management, and a Professor of Management in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

He is also Director of the Wharton Center for Health Management & Economics, and Co-Director of the Roy & Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management.

He received his doctorate in Sociology and his MBA in Health Administration from the University of Chicago.

Dr. Burns taught previously in the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago and the College of Business Administration at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Burns has analyzed physician-hospital integration over the past 25 years.

In recognition of this research, Dr. Burns was named the Edwin L. Crosby Memorial Fellow by the Hospital Research and Educational Trust in 1992.

Dr. Burns has also published several papers on hospital systems and physician group practices.

The last 13 years he spent studying the healthcare supply chain.

He completed a book on supply chain management in the healthcare industry, The Health Care Value Chain (Jossey-Bass, 2002), and a recent analysis of alliances between imaging equipment makers and hospital systems.

These studies focus on the strategic alliances and partnerships developing between pharmaceutical firms/distributors, disposable manufacturers, medical device manufacturers, group purchasing organizations, and organized delivery systems.

He has also edited The Business of Healthcare Innovation (Cambridge University Press, 2012) which analyzes the healthcare technology sectors globally: pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, medical devices, and information technology.

Most recently, he has served as lead editor of the 6th Edition of the major text, Healthcare Management: Organization Design & Behavior (Delmar, 2011).

His latest book, India's Healthcare Industry, was just published in 2014 (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Dr. Burns teaches courses on healthcare strategy, strategic change, strategic implementation, organization and management, managed care, and integrated delivery networks.

From 1998-2002, he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, where he taught corporate strategy to physicians.

Dr. Burns also received an Investigator Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study the reasons for failure in organizational change efforts by healthcare providers.

He is a past member of the Grant Review Study Section for the Agency for Health Care Policy & Research, and a past board member of the Health Services Section of the Institute of Medicine.

He is also a Life Fellow of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge.

Assessment of GPOs: The National Survey of Materials Management & Purchasing Executives Offical Rules

Jeff C. Goldsmith, Lawton R. Burns, Aditi Sen, Trevor Goldsmith Integrated Delivery Networks: In Search of Benefits and Market Effects.

Guy David, Rich Lindrooth, Lorens Helmchen, Lawton R. Burns (2014), Do Hospitals Cross Subsidize?, Journal of Health Economics.

Aditi Sen, Lawton R. Burns, Michael Dandorph, Suzanne Sawyer (Draft), Physician Referral and the Potential for ACOs in Philadelphia.

Abstract: Implementation of the Affordable Care Act has far-reaching implications for the U.S. health care delivery system.

In particular, achieving the type of integrated patient care that health care reform calls for (e.g., through "accountable care organizations" or ACOs) will require major organizational changes to the health delivery system.

Despite increased focus on ACOs, little is known about how these changes will be carried out, particularly in complex urban settings where there are numerous providers and payers and long-standing networks already in place.

We provide the first market-wide analysis of the potential for ACO development in this type of market.

We focus on primary care physician referrals to specialists, which will play a key role in coordination of care through ACOs and will likely have to be adapted to meet quality and cost objectives.

We find that physicians base referrals largely on experience and personal ties and that it would take sizable incentives (10-15% of reimbursement) for physicians to change practices.

Across the market, we find that though there is uncertainty about ACO implementation, stakeholders anticipate changes in provider relationships, reimbursement, and data capacity.

Lawton R. Burns, India's Healthcare Industry: Innovation in Delivery, Financing, and Manufacturing (2014)

This book analyzes the historical development and current state of India's healthcare industry.

It describes three sets of institutions that deliver healthcare services, finance these services, and manufacture products used in these services.

These institutions provide healthcare (hospitals, physicians, pharmacies, and diagnostic laboratories), pay for healthcare (individuals who pay out-of-pocket, insurance companies, community insurance schemes, government ministries) and produce the technology used in healthcare delivery (pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and medical devices).

The volume also discusses innovative efforts to raise capital for the development of these sectors.

Finally, it includes three interesting case studies of innovative models of healthcare delivery (L. V. Prasad, Aravind, and Vaatsalya), as well as analyses of other innovative organizations like Narayana Hrudaylaya and the hospital chains.

The contributors to the volume include Wharton faculty members, graduates of Wharton's healthcare MBA program, and executives and consultants from India.

Aditi Sen, Jessica Pickett, Lawton R. Burns, "The Health Insurance Sector in India: History and Opportunities".

In India's Healthcare Industry: Innovation in Delivery, Financing, and Manufacturing, edited by Lawton R. Burns, (2014), pp. 361-400

Abstract: To request a copy of this article, contact Professor Burns at burnsl@wharton.upenn.edu.

Lawton R. Burns, "The Medical Device Sector in India".

In India's Healthcare Industry: Innovation in Delivery, Financing, and Manufacturing, edited by Lawton R. Burns, (2014)

Lawton R. Burns and Ajay Bakshi, "The Medical Profession in India".

Lawton R. Burns, "India's Healthcare Industry: A System Perspective".

Lawton R. Burns, "India's Healthcare Industry: An Overview of the Value Chain".

Lawton R. Burns, Mandar Vayda, Bhuvan Srinivasan, "India's Hospital Sector: The Journey from Public to Private Healthcare Delivery".

This introductory course takes a policy and politics angle to health care's three persistent issues - access, cost and quality.

The roles of patients, physicians, hospitals, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies will be established.

The interaction between the government and these different groups will also be covered.

Current national health care policy initiatives and the interests of class members will steer the specific topics covered in the course.

The course aims to provide skills for critical and analytical thought about the U.S. health care system and the people in it.

This course presents an overview of the business of health and how a variety of health care organizations have gained, sustained, and lost competitive advantage amidst intense competition, widespread regulation, high interdependence, and massive technological, economic, social and political changes.

Specifically, we evaluate the challenges facing health care organizations using competitive analysis, identify their past responses, and explore the current strategies they are using to manage these challenges (and emerging ones) more effectively.

Students will develop generalized skills in competitive analysis and the ability to apply those skills in the specialized analysis of opportunities in producer (e.g. biopharmaceutical, medical product, information technology), purchaser (e.g. insurance), and provider (e.g. hospitals, nursing homes, physician) organizations and industry sectors.

The course is organized around a number of readings, cases, presentations, and a required project.

This course focuses on leadership and management issues in health care organizations while providing students with a practice setting to examine and develop their own management skills.

Each team acts as a consultant to a local healthcare organization which has submitted a project proposal to the course.

The teams define the issue and negotiate a contract with the client organization.

By the end of the semester, teams present assessments and recommendations for action to their clients and share their experience with the class in a series of workshops and cross-team consultations.

This course provides an overview of the evolution, structure and current issues in the health care system.

It examines the unique features of health care as a product, and the changing relationships between patients, physicians, hospitals, insurers, employers, communities, and government.

The course examines three broad segments of the health care industry: payors, providers and suppliers.

Within the payor segment, the course examines the sources and destinations of spending, managed care (HMOs, PPOs),employer based health insurance, technology assessment, payor strategy, and efforts to pay for the elderly, the poor & the medically indigent.

Within the provider segment, the course examines the impact of cost containment and competition on hospitals and integrated delivery systems, long term care and disease management, and the important role of epidemiology in assessing population health needs and risks.

Within the supplier segment, the course will examine developments in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, medical devices, genomics and IT industries.

NOTE: This is a required course for Wharton Graduate Health Care Management majors; it counts as an elective course for all other Wharton Graduate students.

It is also open to Law School and Nursing School students with a joint Wharton Program.

This course, co-taught with Brad Fluegel, former Senior Vice President and Chief Healthcare Marketing Development officer at Walgreen Co, will focus on two interrelated topics: managed care and market structure.

The section on managed care will cover strategic planning and marketing of managed care services, operational issues in developing a managed care network, actuarial issues, and the management of physician behavior.

The section on health care market structure will analyze strategies of vertical integration and horizontal integration (M+As), and their attempt to alter the balance of power in local healthcare markets.

The section will also analyze the operational issues in managing cost and quality in an integrated system, integration along the supply chain, and the performance of these systems, and the bargaining and negotiation between hospitals, physicians, and health plans.

Arranged with members of the Faculty of the Health Care Systems Department.

For further information contact the Department office, Room 204, Colonial Penn Center, 3641 Locust Walk, 898-6861.

This course is intended to provide entering doctoral students with information on the variety of health economics models, methods, topics, and publication outlets valued and used by faculty in the HCMG doctoral program and outside of it.

The course has two main parts: the first, to acquaint students with theoretical modeling tools used frequently by health economists.

This part of the course involves a number of lectures coupled with students' presentations from the health economics, management and operations research community at Penn on a research method or strategy they have found helpful and they think is important for all doctoral students to know.

This advanced PhD seminar will explore topics in the industrial organization of health care and structural econometric approaches in health economics.

The focus in this course is the development of advanced econometric tools.

The (tentative) topics covered include health insurance and hospital demand estimation, the analysis of hospital competition, insurer competition, quality competition, technology adoption, models of entry and exit and dynamic oligopoly games.

The readings will focus on recent advances in economics.

Students are required to present recent research from the field and write an empirical research paper that broadly based on the topics covered in the course.

With the permission of the instructor, the seminar is open to doctoral students from departments other than Health Care Management.

During the last decade it has become clear that in the global economy, firms must constantly adapt to changing technological, competitive, demographic and other environmental conditions in order to survive and prosper.

The importance of acquiring the knowledge and tools for changing organizations successfully cannot be overemphasized (particularly for students headed for consulting and general management careers, although not limited to them).

This course focuses on specific concepts, theories and tools that can guide executives entrusted with the task of leading organizational change to successful execution.

Among other topics, the course will focus on various change strategies such as leading change, managing cultural change, and mergersor acquisitions, corporate transformation, managing growth, building the customer centric organization, business process outsourcing both from client and provider perspectives, and managing radical organizational change.

The perspective of the course is integrative and the focus is on successful execution.

This course is focuses on strategy in practice, with the objective to explore important strategic topics and tools relevant to managers.

We will discuss four broad areas: 1) strategy and business model development for single and multi-business companies, 2) strategic failure and change, 3) analytics and data science in strategic decision making, and 4) corporate ownership and strategy.

Inside China's Health Care Reform Effort, LDI News - 02/24/2017 Description

Inside China's Health Care Reform Effort

Wharton Professor's Book Takes a Deep Dive in a Very Complicated Market

Keeping the Lights On: Why Are U.S. Hospitals Closing?, Knowledge @ Wharton - 07/11/2019Will 'Modicare' Be a Game Changer for India?, Knowledge @ Wharton - 10/08/2018Unlocking Serendipity Is the Key to Life Science Breakthroughs, Knowledge @ Wharton -

Iron Triangle and China's Health Care Dilemma, Knowledge @ Wharton -

03/16/2017Hospital Consolidation: Can It Work This Time?,

Knowledge @ Wharton - 05/11/2015Innovation and the Three "P's": A 360-degree View of Indian Health Care, Knowledge @ Wharton -

Care in China: Is There a Doctor in the House?,

Knowledge @ Wharton - 06/26/2013'Ticking Time Bombs': China's Health Care System Faces Issues of Access, Quality and Cost,

Are In — and Why You May Be Seeing More of Them

Knowledge @ Wharton - 02/13/2013'Multi-tasking Writ Large': Is American Health Care Reform a Prescription for Trouble?, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/19/2012'Multi-tasking Writ Large': Is Health Care Reform a Prescription for Trouble?, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/05/2012China's Health Care System and Reform: Reinforcing the 'Iron Triangle', Knowledge @ Wharton - 09/11/2012Prescription for Global Pharma Firms: Search for More Opportunity in China, Knowledge @ Wharton - 08/01/2012Research Roundup: Cross Subsidization at Hospitals, Building Better Teams and the Alcohol Bias, Knowledge @ Wharton - 07/18/2012Medical

Devices, Ethics and Money, Knowledge @ Wharton -

06/25/2012Mystery Diagnosis: An Era of Uncertainty for the Health Care Sector, Knowledge @ Wharton - 09/14/2011Compassion vs. Cost: Improving the Prognosis for India's Health Care Sector, Knowledge @ Wharton - 02/11/2010The Road to China: Fresh Insights into the World's Fastest-growing Economy, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/09/2009Information Technology: Not a Cure for the High Cost of Health Care, Knowledge @ Wharton - 06/10/2009Podcast: Lawton Burns on the Critical, and Costly, Role of Companies that Make Healthcare-related Products, Knowledge @ Wharton - 05/17/2006The Business of Healthcare Innovation: How New Products Come to Market, Knowledge @ Wharton - 05/03/2006Why Bush and Kerry are Wrong on Health Care, Knowledge @ Wharton - 10/19/2004Employers Step up Enlistment of Employees in Battle against Health Care Costs, Knowledge @ Wharton - 07/28/2004Can Aventis Fight Off Its Hostile Suitor?, Knowledge @ Wharton - 02/25/2004From Skin Creams to Life Insurance to Medical Care, Biosciences Are the New Frontier of Business Opportunity, Knowledge @ Wharton - 02/27/2002Prescription Drug Coverage for Seniors Faces Uncertain Future, Knowledge @ Wharton - 10/10/2001The

Patient Died: A Post-mortem on America's Largest Nonprofit Health Care Failure, Knowledge @ Wharton - 01/20/2000Can Opposites Attract?, Knowledge @ Wharton - 08/04/1999

Keeping the Lights On: Why Are U.S. Hospitals Closing?

Many U.S. medical facilities are closing and consolidating as their expenses far outpace revenues.

Experts say it's a symptom of the disease plaguing the American health care system.

Knowledge @ Wharton - 2019/07/11All News

Burns received a BA in sociology and anthropology in 1971 from Haverford College. Following this, he received his MA in Sociology in 1976, his PhD in Sociology in 1981 and his MBA in Health Administration in 1984, all three from the University of Chicago.
 Burns started his academic career at the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago, and moved to the College of Business Administration of the University of Arizona. From 1998 to 2002, he was a Visiting scholar in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Since 1994, he has been the chairman of the Health Care Systems Department of Wharton, and since 2008 the James Joo-Jin Kim Professor of Health Care Management. Since 1999 he is also director of the Wharton Center for Health Management and Economics.
 In 1999, he received an Investigator Award in Health Research Policy from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.


Joe Sacco is a trained journalist who extensively documents his subjects and spends years crafting his stories.

(meta data) TITLE: Comics Journalism: A Guest Post by Brad Mackay |

(meta data) PUBLISHER: https://www.facebook.com/WordPresscom

# Comics Journalism: A Guest Post by Brad Mackay

April 7, 2016 adastracomix Leave a comment

Brad Mackay is a writer and cultural commentator who has covered a wide range of of subjects, including comics and cartoonists.

He wrote and co-edited (with Seth) The Collected Doug Wright: Canada's Master Cartoonist.

This article first appeared in THIS Magazine in January 2008.

We are re-printing it here on Ad Astra Comix with permission of the author, coinciding with the re-release of the anthology "EXTRACTION!", to provide our readers with an overview of comics journalism.

In January 2007 when David Widgington started thinking about a new project for his small-but-scrappy imprint Cumulus Press, he quickly settled on a subject: the alleged wrongdoings of Canadian mining companies at home and abroad.

The choice was a natural one for the Montreal-based publisher, which frequently tackles social justice issues.

Founded in 1998, Cumulus earned a reputation for eclecticism, printing everything from short fiction, memoirs and travel books to multimedia DVDs, music criticism and poetry—including that of Governor General's Award-winning poet George Elliott Clarke.

So when it came time to decide on the format for Cumulus' latest project, Widgington—not unexpectedly—choose to forge new ground for himself: comics journalism

An idea that would have been dismissed by most publishers just a few years ago: a comics-based exposé of the mining industry is the kind of project that seems perfectly tailored for the young, politically-engaged readers that Cumulus called its own.

Inundated by media and hungry for new approaches to storytelling, this younger demographic has been instrumental in rise of the graphic novel (and the comic medium in general) from supporting act to headliner over the past decade.

It's a trend that Widgington was clearly aware of when he began to assemble the project in 2006.

Inspired by The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell's 1937 non-fiction book about the brutal living and working conditions in three mining towns in Northern England, Widgington was eager to bring a similar investigative approach to bare on the mining practices of Canadian companies such as Goldcorp and Alcan.

This was exacerbated by his frustration over what he says is the largely credulous coverage that the mining industry gets in the mainstream media, most of which is dedicated to business mergers and new mineral discoveries.

"Bre-X got a lot of press, but that was because of financial issues," Widgington explains from his home.

"They didn't talk about the potential impact on the communities where the supposed gold deposits were located."

Already familiar with a number of non-mainstream journalists devoted to covering the social and environmental effects of mining, the choice to use comics was an equally easy choice.

"How do we make people, who maybe don't read the financial section of the newspapers, aware of Canada's role in the mining industry around the world?" Widgington says of his decision.

"It seemed like the perfect opportunity; to get some comics and some journalism together, and see what happened."

The result, originally released in December 2007, is EXTRACTION! Comic Reportage: an investigative graphic novel that reveals the dark side of the Canadian mining industry both internationally, in India, Guatemala, and at home in northern Quebec and Alberta's controversial oil sands.

EXTRACTION: Comix Reportage – First edition cover, Cumulus Press, Montreal, 2007

Divided into four chapters, each one dedicated to a precious (and profitable) resource, the book offers a gritty, ground-level look at the force that is brought to bear in the hunt for new sources of oil, gold, uranium and bauxite (or aluminium ore).

The first chapter, which pairs Vancouver writer Dawn Paley with award-winning Montreal cartoonist Joe Ollmann, explores the questionable practices of B.C-based Goldcorp Inc. who are in the process on establishing a controversial gold mine in Sipakapa, Guatemala.

Ollmann deploys his trademark world-weary characters (every blemish, mole or baggy eye has a home here) to full effect as he brings Paley's first-person script about an organized movement by locals to quash the mining project to life in lush black, white and gray tones.

Unlike most graphic novels, the book itself is the result of a team of writers, artists and editors who pushed the project into existence.

Edited by Widgington, writer/activist Frédéric Dubois and veteran cartoonist Marc Tessier, each chapter is written by journalists and writers handpicked for their intimate knowledge of the mining sector, such as Paley, Victoria-based Tamara Herman (who is active in groups opposing Alcan's mining efforts in India), Montreal broadcaster Sophie Toupin and environmental consultant and academic Petr Cizek.

In addition to Joe Ollmann (This Will All End in Tears), the artists tapped for the project included Phil Angers (Mac Tin Tac), animator Ruth Tait and aspiring cartoonist Stanley Wany.

Accustomed to working with tight timelines (not to mention tight budgets), Widgington says the unique process of EXTRACTION! was a challenge over the 10 months it took to see it to press.

Both exciting and frustrating "often at the same time" he quips, the transition from the original scripts into the comics form was daunting.

"We scripted all of the articles before we handed them to the comic artists and we had all sorts of questions, like 'Can we use mise a scene here? Or set up a scenario that actually didn't happen, to get the information across?'

It was like, where does the journalism end and the comics begin?"

It's these kinds of questions that make the genre of comics journalism so exciting to read, and often such a challenge to create.

No one knows this more than Joe Sacco, the American cartoonist who is credited with coining the term "comics journalism".

Born in Malta and raised in Australia and the U. S., Sacco has hewed out a unique position for himself as the pre-eminent cartoonist/reporter of his age thanks to the success of books like Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde and The Fixer (published by Montreal's Drawn and Quarterly Books).

"The Gaza Strip" from Joe Sacco's PALESTINE – 1992.

According to Sacco, his books can take up to seven years to complete thanks to a time-consuming approach that includes months of research, dozens of interviews and countless reference photographs—and that's not including the months needed to actually write and draw.

It's a method he originally formed in the early 1990s when he began working on Palestine, his genre-defining debut that was recently re-released in a Special Edition featuring fascinating background notes and sketches that provide a peek into his unique process.

"It would be a lot easier for me to be a print journalist," says Sacco from his home in Portland.

"When you're writing, you can say 'We were escorted by an armoured car'.

[But] if you draw it, well then what kind of armoured car was it?

And if I don't find an exact reference, you think 'Is this how accurate it's going to get?'"

For example, when he begins drawing a person he often changes their name to protect their identity, a tactic common to traditional journalism, but then he has the additional challenge of drawing them in such a way that it not only true to the story, but also protects them from possible harm.

"There are no damn rules to it," Sacco says, of his chosen medium.

You have to think 'How important is that detail?

Is it really going to change the essence of the story?'

At some point you're more like a film director that's looking back at [Queen] Elizabeth I."

"There are many troubling notions about what I do, to myself," he adds.

"So I try to be as rigorous as I can be with all the details."

It's this seemingly obsessive attention to detail that helps make the 288 pages of Palestine hold up some 15 years after it was first published (then, as a poor-selling comic book series.)

The book, which chronicles a two-month visit Sacco took to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in late 1991, is packed with stories about the people he met along the way who've been uprooted and displaced by the Israeli government.

But it's also packed with thrilling visual experiments, both successful and unsuccessful, that serve as testament to his efforts to forge a new journalistic path.

A graduate of the journalism program at the University of Portland, Sacco's disillusionment with traditional journalism—along with his unease about his undertaking—are as much a part of Palestine's narrative charm as are the stories he recounts.

(In one scene, Sacco shows himself thinking "I will alert the world to your suffering!

This unease, which all but disappears in his later work, was on his mind so much during the making of the book that Sacco felt a need to give his unique new vocation a proper name.

In 2001, during interviews for the collected Palestine he began calling it "comics journalism" in an effort to help explain what exactly it was that he did for a living.

Seven years after the fact, Sacco no longer has the need to explain himself, and has come to appreciate the inherent benefits of the form.

"The great thing about comics is that it's so loose and so little had been done with it, that I didn't feel like there were any footsteps that I had to follow," he says.

"Comics then, and maybe even now, were like un-trampled grass and you could walk across it in any direction you wanted.

It's one of those mediums that's so open to interpretation."

And Sacco is by no means the only cartoonist to take advantage of this creative freedom.

Though he's credited with giving comics journalism its name, many other cartoonists have worked in a similar vein including Eric Drooker and Peter Kuper (founders of the socialist comics magazine World War 3 Illustrated), British cartoonist and anti-capitalist Sue Coe (an alumni of the ground-breaking "commix" anthology RAW), Canadian Guy Delisle (with Pyongyang, Shenzhen and his forthcoming book about Burma), and even the likes of Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar, Kim Deitch, Bill Griffith and Leonard Rifas, the rabble-rousing leftist cartoonist who created Corporate Crime Comics during the 1970s.

But to many comics historians, including Jeet Heer and cartoonist Art Spiegelman, the roots of today's comics journalists can be traced back much further — nearly 150 years further — to the American Civil War.

When the war began in 1861 newspaper and magazine editors were hungry for images to run alongside their coverage of the divisive confrontation.

Unfortunately, nascent photographic technology wasn't advanced enough to allow photographers to capture battles, says Heer.

Abolitionist cartoon satirizing slave holders racist justifications for enslavement of blacks.

A white couple passing a group of slave laborers says, 'Poor things, they can't take care of themselves.'

Illustrations of the Antislavery Almanac for 1840.

"During all of the 19th century wars, like the Crimean War and the Civil War, the main defining images weren't photographs of the battlefield, but from illustrators who were sent out there," he says from Regina.

"There are photographs of The Civil War, but they're always after the battles because the cameras [at the time] required exposures of five to 10 minutes."

This reality paved the way for the success of popular printmakers like Currier and Ives, who made a fortune by selling prints of headline-grabbing Civil War battles.

This practice continued in later years, as newspapers made a practice of sending their best illustrators (including George Luks, who penned the seminal comic strip The Yellow Strip for a stretch) to the front line to serve as what came best be called war artists.

Though these illustrations bore none of the sequential narrative that we have come to identify as 'comics', their success helped pave the way for what came be called the first wave of comics journalism.

The first incidence of the power of cartooning being harnessed for journalistic purposes actually came about a few years after the Civil War, in the politically corrupt world of New York City.

While working for Harper's Weekly, German-American cartoonist Thomas Nast began penning a series of cartoons that lampooned William "Boss" Tweed—a notorious New York politician who was the head of the city's Democratic Party organization, then known then as Tammany Hall.

Among the first political cartoonists, Nast's comedic and incisive cartoons (which blended art with text) brought the damning investigative reports the magazine had been running on Tweed to life in a format that was accessible to a wider audience.

The forefather to the comic strip which would emerge at the turn of the century, Nast's serious-minded cartooning was as influential to other artists as Michael Moore would be to aspiring filmmakers more than a century later.

Nast's media melee eventually had reverberations north of the border as well.

In 1873, John W. Bengough, one of Canada's first professional cartoonists, founded Grip a satirical weekly magazine that targeted politicians and the societal norms of the day.

Bengough's cartoons ridiculed Prime Minister John A. MacDonald and tackled topics like the Pacific Railway scandal.

A few decades later, The New Masses, the seminal American communist magazine, pushed the concept of comics reportage further by sending its artists to cover labour strikes and protests.

Though still restricted to one panel, these artists (which included the likes of Art Young and Crocket Johnson, who would go on to draw the comic strip Barnaby and illustrate the popular children's book Harold and the Purple Crayon) furthered the burgeoning tradition of cartoon reporting.

It wasn't until the 1950s that the first true examples of comics journalism began to appear, thanks to none other than Harvey Kurtzman, the founding editor of Mad magazine.

Kurtzman's role in comics reporting came about after he left Mad in 1955, following a dispute over money with his publisher William Gaines.

In the years after, Kurtzman became something of a celebrity cartoonist, reluctantly rubbing shoulders with the liked of Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner.

As a result, in the late 1950s and early 60s Kurtzman was commissioned to write and draw a number of high-profile assignments for Esquire, Pageant and TV Guide, that saw him hanging out with Jimmy Cagney on a film shoot in Ireland, lurking around the set of The Perry Como Show or translating the action in a Times Square penny arcade.

These strips, some of which are slated to be reprinted by Seattle's Fantagraphics Books next summer, are fuelled by Kurtzman's sly observations: on the set of The Fugitive Kind, Kurtzman depicts Marlon Brando as a down-to-earth celebrity with quirks—like a tendency to rub other people's arm and his proclivity for public nose-picking.

Largely forgotten except by the most-devoted Kurtzman fans, his work from this time shows a visual experimentalism that can be seen in present-day cartoonists.

His sprawling, wordless two-page spread on the life inside a bustling penny arcade manages to capture far more than mere words could do in the allotted space – a feat echoed by Sacco in a stunning two-page spread in Palestine.

Though not as serious as his editorial precursors, Kurtzman's work during this period marked a turning point in both form and content, not unlike the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer that would emerge a few years later.

This nascent trend of comics reportage would be further championed by Kurtzman in 1960, when he started up Help! magazine.

Over the next five years, he hired an impressive cast of young talent to help fill its pages (including Woody Allen, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam and Gloria Steinem) and made a practice of sending cartoonists like Jack Davis and Arnold Roth on comics assignments to interview Casey Stengel or report on daily life in Moscow.

He also managed to recruit a young cartoonist named Robert Crumb for assignments that included sketchbooks of Bulgaria and Harlem.

These seminal works would eventually serve as inspiration for the next major development in comics journalism.

In the mid-1990s cartoonist Art Spiegelman (as devoted a Kurtzman fan as they come) used these works, along with examples of French comics journalism from an early 20th century magazine called L'Assiette Au Buerre, as part of his pitch to create a "comics editor" position for himself at the popular men's magazine Details.

Riding high on the success of his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, Spiegelman landed the job and promptly began assigning stories to his cartoonist friends.

Though overshadowed by his many of other achievements, his time at Details bore compelling fruit including comics by Kim Deitch (who visited an inmate on death row), Jamie Hernandez and Joe Sacco, whose 1998 strip about the Bosnian war crimes tribunal earned Details acclaim within the magazine industry.

In years since, the increasing popularity of graphic novels and comics in general has only widened the audience for potential works of comics journalism.

At the same time, newspapers, now faced with competition from the internet, have turned to new styles of storytelling in the hopes of attracting a younger readership.

Taking a page from their predecessors nearly 150 years before, many papers, including The New York Times and The Guardian, now regularly turn to cartoonists like Sacco to interpret world events through featured comic strips.

In Canada, the National Post has been particularly open to this, publishing comic reports on everything from the Liberal leadership convention to the Toronto International Film Festival.

Over the past couple of years, Post cartoonist Steve Murray has been sent on so many off-beat assignments that he has become something of a Gonzo comics journalist.

Murray (who also works under the pen name Chip Zdarsky) is grateful for the unique opportunity, but is quick to fess up to its challenges.

"It takes one really long day to write, draw and colour a piece, and of course whatever time I've spent researching," he says via email.

"I enjoy doing it, but it is hard work and, unlike a standard reporter, I have a whole other set of issues to deal with regarding the visuals so it sometimes feels like twice the work."

"The main problem is that I'm presenting things pretty factually, but because it's cartooning most people assume that big chunks are made up."

This is complicated by the fact his dispatches typically employ a guerrilla style of comedy that put Murray the cartoonist squarely in the centre of the action, not unlike Hunter S. Thompson (but, hopefully, more sober).

Though that's likely no longer a problem facing Joe Sacco, both artists agree that comics journalism is finally coming of age as a genre of its own.

Sacco, now 215-pages into what will eventually be a 350-page book about the Gaza Strip, is stunned at the turn his luck has taken since the first issue of Palestine was published.

"[Back then] doing a book about the Palestinians was almost a fantasy project for me, in that I felt I had to do it—but I didn't think really think anyone was going to read it," he says.

"And hardly anyone did read it when it came out as a series; the sales just got lower and lower and lower.

It was only when it came out as a book and the non-comics world saw it, that it started to do well.

Now people are giving my work the time of day because it's in comics form."

"In other words, they're probably not going to read another book about the Palestinians.

But if I do another book about the Palestinians, I know there are going to be people who are going to read it because of the fact that it is a comic.

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During the film's production, Koirala began dating her co-star Nana Patekar; Patekar confirmed their relationship and eventual breakup in 2003.

(meta data) TITLE: Nana reveals his relations with Manisha !

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New Jokes Fake News A Slip of the Tongue The Great Gambler Devil Shopping

Movie Reviews Zero Kedarnath 2 Point 0 Thugs of Hindostan

In Theatres Now Zero The Accidental Prime Minister Bhajjo Veero Ve PK Lele

Trending Galleries Priyanka Chopra and Nick Wedding Reception Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas Mumbai Reception Gurpreet Kaur Chadha Birthday Party Mia Cucina Bistro Launch

Trending Mhara Dholna Song - The Pushkar Lodge MAKHNA Song - Yo Yo Honey Singh AMAVAS - Finito Song Salt Bridge - Aankhon Mein Samaye Dil Song

# Nana reveals his relations with Manisha !

Known for his power packed performances in the films like Parinda, Agnisakhsi, Prahar and Khamoshi Nana Patekar admitted his relationship with the actress Manisha Koirala, in a recent interview.

"Manisha and I were not meant for each other."

"I met Manisha while shooting for Khamoshi and we grew to understand each other.

She often visited my mother and son and they received her with affection.

It was a beautiful relationship but, like all couples, we had our downs too.

We gave a lot to each other, but the relationship did not work out.

Though the actor is still married but right now he is living alone.

"Nilkanti(Wife) and I shared numerous years of happiness together.

We supported each other through thick and thin.

But, over the years, we developed certain irreconcilable differences and grew apart.

Today, we continue to be married but stay separately."

Prev Zero has a decent opening on Box-Office!

Next Kareena: I don't want to be an Alien !

Saturday, December 22, 2018 Zero has a decent opening on Box-Office!

Aanand L Rai's Zero starring Shah Rukh Khan Katrina Kaif and Anushka Sharma has gone ahead to garner...

Friday, December 21, 2018 Yo Yo Honey Singh is breaking the internet with 'Makhna'!

Yo Yo Honey Singh has made his mark in the Indian music industry with his exceptional music and inimitable style... Thursday, December 20, 2018 When Ranveer Singh introduced Kartik Aryan to Sara Ali Khan!

Recently on celebrity talk show Koffee with Karan when Karan Johar asked Sara Ali Khan in a rapid-fire round that whom she wants to date...

After treating the audience with much-appreciated trailer, the makers of Cheat India have now released the first song...

Zero Review: A hero in SRK makes Zero a great entertainer!Kedarnath

Review: Sara Ali Khan shines in this dull and weak script!

Emraan Hashmi - Guru Randhawa show off their swag in 'Daaru Wargi'Here is a proof that Jacqueline Fernandez can pull off any lookYo

Yo Honey Singh shares some BTS moments of MakhnaWhen Ranveer Singh introduced Kartik Aryan to

Sara Ali Khan!Priyanka - Nick look resplendent at their Mumbai reception!Baaghi 3

is all set to roar again, release date revealed!Zero:

Shah Rukh Khan introduces yet another interesting character, this time a chimpanzee!

The most Vulgar songs of Bollywood!The most beautiful faces of Bollywood!The Unconventional Beauties of Bollywood!

Dubai police halt Manisha's car Manisha in new avatarManisha cries foul about Jackie!Manisha: Method Actress

The comeback girl of `Lust Stories`, Manisha Koirala Manisha Koirala Manisha Koirala

Life and career.:1994–1996: Breakthrough and further success.

For playing a Muslim who marries a Hindu journalist against the backdrop of the Bombay riots in the eponymous film, Koirala won the Filmfare Critics Award for Best Performance, the only time it was awarded to a recipient for a performance in a non-Hindi film. At the 43rd Filmfare Awards South, she received her first Award in the Best Actress – Tamil category. Koirala's performances in "1947: A Love Story" and "Bombay" proved to be milestones in her career, and established her in the film industry. The same year, she featured in the musical romance "Akele Hum Akele Tum" opposite  Aamir Khan, for which she received her second nomination in the Best Actress category at the Filmfare Awards.
 The following year, she played a battered wife on the run from her mentally-ill husband in the drama "Agni Sakshi", a remake of the Julia Roberts-starrer "Sleeping with the Enemy" (1991), which begot her positive reviews for her performance. The film was released in close succession with two other remakes of the same film–"Yaraana" (1995) and "Daraar" (1996). A reviewer for the University of California deemed the film to be superior to the original. In her book "Bioscope: A Frivolous History of Bollywood in Ten Chapters", Diptakirti Chaudhuri wrote, "Even in a derivative film like "Agni Sakshi", her performance as a tortured wife [is] pitch perfect against the formidable Nana Patekar". The film was a commercial success, emerging as the second highest-grossing film of the year in India.


Following the release of "Blank Banshee 0", Driscoll began work on his second album, "Blank Banshee 1", released October 20, 2013.

(meta data) TITLE: System Focus: The Evolution of the Voice in the Digital Landscape | The FADER

# System Focus: The Evolution of the Voice in the Digital Landscape

## From synthesised speech to J-pop vocaloids, Adam Harper traces the shifting role of the voice in popular music.

From Kraftwerk to FKA Twigs to Hatsune Miku, what does the changing role of voice say about the modern human?

In his monthly column System Focus, The FADER's favorite underground music critic Adam Harper stares deep into the internet's gloom to unearth emerging musical forms.

You might say that the voice is the most human of all the elements in music.

It comes from deep within our bodies, organically, ever since we came to be human, and indeed long before.

It is probably the first musical instrument that we learned to recognise, and, since it is built into most of us, the first that we learn to use.

Yet the voice is much more than just a sound, however primordial.

It represents a person: their activity, agency, opinions, experience, their self-projection.

In doing so, it differentiates itself from the environment around it, musical or cultural, either drawing power from this context or somehow standing against it.

Or, most intriguingly, doing both at the same time.

In most 20th century popular music, the role of the voice in the musical landscape was fairly clear.

There were the vocals and there was the backing, divided into guitars, percussion, bass, riffs, solos, breaks, and even supporting vocals.

The voice would stand out clearly and tell a story and convey a message.

The voice started to disappear into the guitars, started to drift away from clearly making sense, and started to merge with new technologies—the gramophone, the microphone, distortion, the spinning Leslie speaker, the talk box, the sampler and auto-tune.

What's more, human-like voices started coming from non-human sources, from the vocoder and speech synthesis and, more recently, vocaloids (which I'll look at later).

Today, a major characteristic of 21st century pop music, especially underground, is the erosion of that former distinction between the human voice and the musical landscape in which it stands, especially digitally, and of which it now forms a part.

No longer is the voice merely a figure in the landscape, but it fuses with the landscape itself.

Not only is this sonically intriguing (appealing or disturbing, take your pick), but it has consequences for the way we consider the voice as a representation of a person in their place in the emerging digital world.

There's a tendency to regard the digital world as non-human, as encroaching on humanity, but I think that's quite wrong.

The internet is not just a landscape made up of technology, it is one made up of humanity.

Like it or not, Facebook and Twitter are made of people, and of people's voices in particular.

People's voices and the lives behind them reduced to assertions, opinions, arguments, anxieties, reduced to pieces of data, to samples—but sounding out nonetheless.

And this landscape is reflected and explored in the music it produces, where the lines between the human and its technological environment are no longer clearly drawn.

There are still plenty of artists in whose music the voice is clear and relatively unmanipulated, but the tumultuousness of the surrounding accompaniment nevertheless suggests the voice hemmed in by busy, exotic, unfamiliar environments.

More clearly perhaps than on any of her previous albums, Maria Minerva's Histrionic puts her voice and her persona at the centre of an idealised, impressionistic club experience teeming with delirious colour and sensation, a position somewhere between confusion and empowerment from which she addresses those around her.

Autre Ne Veut rails grandiosely against his fears in last year's Anxiety, his voice squeezed and scrunched tightly inside its twisted pop-synth cradle.

FKA Twigs' largely conventional and polished voice is suspended in a mysterious chamber crawling with synthesized entities on tracks like "Two Weeks," as if she were the Borg Queen.

But plenty of other artists and genres have seen the membrane between the voice and its technological environment begin to rupture.

A continuum has been established which runs from the traditional scenario of vocals plus instrumental technologies, through sampling, chopping, screwing, the voice as an instrument, sample-based synthesis, and synthesised speech.

Perhaps the most famous artist to have taken the voice to new places is Burial, now a huge influence on underground music, who uses speaking voices to populate his imaginary, dilapidated environments, as well as chopping and stitching singing samples together to create entirely new singing voices.

Footwork has taken the sampling of the voice to new extremes, taking such small and repetitious slivers of it that the sense of a human performer collapses almost entirely in a cascade of vowels and consonants, taking on the same character as the accompanying drum machine.

Following DJ Screw, Clams Casino has used voices, often slowed-down or deepened ('screwed' or 'dragged'), as a building material in his hip-hop instrumentals, often entirely removing their capacity to communicate lexical meaning in the process.

James Ferraro has explored a quasi-naive use of auto-tune in his recent, beleaguered songs, his prone, all-too-human voice trickling over angular sculptures of digital crystal.

Oneohtrix Point Never uses choir samples mapped to his keyboards regularly, on one occasion creating an a capella work for which, strangely, no new voices were recorded.

Holly Herndon has used every facet of the voice in her electronic constructions—her song "Chorus" is like a voice that has exploded and is being stitched together into a new form.

Go deeper into the digital world and the voice finds endless new forms, further integrated into its landscape.

Yet go deeper into the digital world and the voice finds endless new forms, further integrated into its landscape.

I had been listening to the music of Oakland-based Nima for quite some time before I realised that her tracks, though they regularly draw on recorded vocals, are not songs per se.

On Spirit Sign and her upcoming tape for Harsh Riddims, SEE FEEL REEL, the voice has partly receded into the musical environment, becoming part of the furniture of her airy and mysterious rooms.

Even with words attached, her voice does not compete with percussion and keyboard riffs.

The final tracks of both albums (called "Landscapes" on Spirit Sign) feature synthesised speech, as if completing a transition from human to machine, yet it's set against some of Nima's most elegant instrumental textures.

At the end of SEE FEEL REEL, a voice almost obsessively repeats crypto-romantic refrains such as I'm... in love... with... the... digital age... over strings, before switching to breathy voice-like tones as if it were dissolving into air.

Nima's music certainly lives in the digital age, and all the elements within it expand to fill the enormous space that results.

Another producer who has been using synthesised speech is Chaz Allen as Metallic Ghosts, also well known as one of the folks behind live-streaming platform SPF420.

Echoing Ferraro's celebrated album Far Side Virtual, where a synthesised voice appears as a touchscreen waiter and a virtual chef, Metallic Ghosts employs them on his albums The Pleasure Centre and Sky Tower 2032 as narrators and characters in a drama.

Yet my favourite Metallic Ghosts release is the multidimensionally weird The City of Ableton, which is ostensibly just an injoke about the Ableton software used by so many producers, depicting it—squarely according to neoliberal capitalist rhetoric—as a city of endless possibilities.

To do this, Allen adopts a musical style that idiosyncratically evokes the urban-planner-simulation game series Sim City, a screenshot from which provides the album's cover.

Both musically and conceptually, the album suggests a dream cityscape as it might have appeared at the turn of the 1990s, a weird, multicoloured, postmodern union of the past and the future, where citizens of all professions glide beatifically down immaculate beige sidewalks past bright red fire stations, neo-1930s banking skyscrapers, parping bandstands, faux-eighteenth-century colleges, and green, green, lawns, all presided over by a moustachioed mayor who warmly greets his public at the exponential tree-planting and ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

One of the crucial components of this digital landscape—now looking rather misplaced, both poignant and arrogant, in the post-recession era—is the voice.

Fittingly, the vocals, and the human beings hinted at behind it, are just yet further objects swirling in the cityscape, forming its melodies, scatting ooh and aah or urging Work it! and Get down like feckless, automated cheerleaders.

It's a landscape we might recognize and enjoy with a little disquiet mixed in.

The technique Allen uses to deploy voices in the track "Mass Transit" is called sample-based synthesis, and involves inputting samples into a synthesiser so that every key plays a sample whose pitch corresponds to that key, allowing you to play a sampled vocal as if it were a piano.

It was also used by Allen-associate Saint Pepsi on his recent EP Gin City (which is akin to a mini tour of different uses of the voice in the online underground) on the track "Mr Wonderful."

When the track's lead tune moves onto a more conventional synthesiser, the effect is not of a singer falling silent, but of a singer showing a different side to themselves.

Sampling processes of all kinds appear in Blank Banshee's album Blank Banshee 1, a masterwork of the new digital psychedelia, and it's quite easy not to really notice that the album is filled with voices at every turn, much like its videos are filled with virtual beings, objects and environments.

Despite the fact that these voices are pitched up, down and all around, they're never more than virtual avatars of their owners: social media masks that are both freeing and constraining.

Freeing in that they allow the voice to move to new places and be new people, constraining in that these surrogate people are not yet as infinitely flexible and free as they would like to think they are, and might still have an air of the uncanny about them.

This double-edged nature of the human user in the modern digital playground, its mixture of strange new opportunities and dangers, might be why one of the tracks goes by the name "Anxiety Online."

But not all digital voices have flesh and blood humans directly behind them.

With synthesised speech, the voice is the digital landscape.

Wholly synthesised speech has been around for decades, appearing on Kraftwerk records of the 1970s in roles such as the voice of energy... a giant electricity generator.

But in the past decade, an entire subculture (mostly confined to Japan but with strong showings in Europe and North America) has grown up around a software series that synthesises song: vocaloids.

Developed by Yamaha and produced mainly by the brilliantly named Japanese company Crypton Future Media, vocaloids offer the user the chance to create a voice that can sing both melodies and lyrics, based on 'sound banks' recorded by human singers (so really, they're a kind of sample-based synthesis).

They appear in a wide range of different voices, languages and genders, and one of the most interesting things about them is that they are personified with given names, images (which typically appear on album covers), even ages and weights.

As such, they are treated much like the J-pop idols they emulate.

Disconcertingly, there are far more female vocaloids than male ones, and they are invariably more popular—probably because women are more likely to be treated as objects, even technological ones (for example, in films from Metropolis through to Spike Jonze's recent Her, about a man who falls in love with a speaking operating system).

The most popular vocaloid is Hatsune Miku [pictured above], whose name means something like 'first sound of the future.'

First released in 2007, her success greatly expanded the profile of vocaloids, eventually causing vocaloid compilation albums featuring her, such as Exit Tunes Presents: Vocalogenesis, to top the Japanese charts.

And long before Tupac appeared as a hologram, Miku (who wasn't even biologically born let alone killed) used the same technology to appear in front of a live band and an audience of fans in 2010.

She has since performed a duet with another popular vocaloid, Megurine Luka.

Miku has even opened for Lady Gaga, and was immortalised on two metal plates attached to the Akatsuki space probe bound for Venus (where else?).

Vocaloids don't quite sound realistic, but that isn't entirely the point.

For me, part of their appeal is in their human yet beyond-human qualities.

One of my favourite vocaloids is Sonika, primarily due to the bizarre, clucking chorus of her song "Sonika Says."

Vocaloid producers around the world have observed a convention of putting a 'P' after their moniker, which stands for 'producer.'

One of the most popular vocaloid producers on Bandcamp is Circus-P, who uses them for the vocal lines of rave pop.

Others include the hypersentimental Empath-P and the trancey Daria-P.

'Vocaloid' is a widespread tag on Bandcamp and Soundcloud, and there are underground record labels devoted to vocaloid producers, such as Vocallective.

While the dedicated subculture tends to use them for pop and hardcore dance, vocaloids have appeared in dozens of different genres, including disco / funk, metal, jazzy hip-hop beats, chilled-out house, indie rock, traditional, trappy witch house, mashup humor, pop punk, and even opera.

It won't be long before vocaloids earn retro appeal, praised alongside all older technologies as 'warm' and 'human.'

In many of these cases, the vocaloid basically operates as a replacement for a vocalist.

Perhaps more interesting are the cases where the vocaloid forms part of a more experimental project overall, where their unique sonic qualities can offer something more unusual.

You might have expected vocaloids to crop up more often in global experimental electronic musics as sonic tools themselves rather than simulations and surrogates (in just the way drum machines came to be used in the 1980s), but currently, they're mostly used that way in Japan.

Mariko's Room is a prolific and varied rock project in which vocaloids appear as unearthly voices draped in effects (try this and this) or as an ironic counterpoint to ultra-lo-fi on the album 堀田 ('Hotta').

Vocaloids blend seamlessly with fractious techno on Cholesterol Records, often ground up and mixed in with the stuttering beats, and they also make sense in the sweetly glitchy electronica of 全自動ムー大陸 (Fully Automatic Mu).

Voltex makes gorgeous footwork-like tracks from joyfully leaping vocaloids and stereophonically pingponging synths.

Then there's tac_ for whom vocaloids are a perfect element gently woven into dainty, elfin compositions.

Another sound tac_ frequently uses is that of the mellotron, which in many ways is the forerunner of the vocaloid, being an analogue sample-based synthesiser where keys were attached to tape loops featuring recorded instruments such as strings and flutes (you might know it from the opening to "Strawberry Fields Forever").

Both dolls designed to emulate more organic musics, the vocaloid and mellotron complement one another not as fake, insufficient, robotic entities, but as toys that have run away to a miniature fantasy kingdom where they can now be loved only by history and nature.

It won't be long, then, before the vocaloids earn the same retro appeal as the vocoder, and they may even be praised alongside all older technologies as 'warm' and yes, 'human.'

Even when it comes to the voice, the technologies we use to represent ourselves are all relative—all tools, all within the bounds of human agency, even when that voice is almost entirely constructed.

The voice was no less a tool, a technology, when it let out its first cry.

It may seem unnatural or fearful that the human voice melts into the digital landscape—where we all become samples—and even more so when the digital landscape seems to greet you itself in a nearly human form.

And like it or not, everything in the musical-digital landscape has a human voice.

A more fluid interrelation of the subjects and objects within it better reflects the richness, self-perception and experience of the modern human.


As Mayor of Letterkenny, McGarvey - at this stage aged 89 - returned to Germany for the first time since 1960, visiting the Thuringian twin town of Rudolstadt and having a vine there dedicated to him and his wife Marjorie and a plaque erected at a vineyard.

(meta data) TITLE: Donegal Councillor Ian McGarvey immortalised in wine - Donegal News

Astrid von Killish-Horn, Katja Trog and Ingo Herlitze presenting Councillor Ian McGarvey with his own vine.

A plaque has been erected in a German vineyard to Mayor of Letterkenny and lifelong teetotaller Ian McGarvey and his wife Marjorie.

Councillor McGarvey, who at 89 is Ireland's oldest elected representative, was part of a delegation that travelled to Letterkenny's twin town Rudolstadt for St Patrick's Day.

It was his first time in Germany since 1960 when he spent a year working there.

As part of the trip, Mr McGarvey was invited to Wienhof Rudolstadt, a local vineyard established in 2010.

There a vine was officially dedicated to him and his wife Marjorie.

Unveiling the plaque that is now attached to Mr McGarvey's vine, Astrid Von Killisch-Horn explained, "The vineyard began back in 2010 at which point it was just overgrown wasteland.

A local woman had the idea of restoring it as a vineyard because it is warm here and a very good place for wine.

She got others involved and we all started cutting back the trees and knocking down walls."

Similar to projects that have been undertaken in Letterkenny, the local probation service was invited to get involved.

They began directing those on community service to the vineyard.

"It is the most beautiful workplace in all of Rudolstadt," said Astrid.

The plaque dedicated to Ian McGarvey and his wife Marjorie proudly on display in Rudolstadt.

The vineyard is financed by companies who sponsor each of the vines.

Around 50 local businesses have their names exhibited on slate plaques.

Right there alongside them hangs the names of Ian and Marjorie McGarvey.

"We are very happy to be dedicating this vine to Mr McGarvey and his wife Marjorie," Astrid Von Killisch-Horn added.

###### Harvey's Point sold as Gysling family take step back

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###### SIPO find against Cllr John O'Donnell

###### The school teacher drawn to Donegal's faces and places

###### Bernie Moran to run for Fine Gael in Letterkenny

###### Take over of estates needs to happen quicker – McGlynn

###### Donegal Councillor Ian McGarvey immortalised in wine

###### Save lives by walking from Darkness Into Light

McGarvey spent a year working in Germany in 1960. He played association football for Swilly Rovers and captained them to the FAI Junior Cup in 1962. He has been a teetotaller (abstaining from alcohol) throughout his life.
 Aged 82, McGarvey became Ireland's oldest Mayor and Donegal County Council's first Independent Mayor in June 2013, succeeding Frank McBrearty, Jnr. Aged 85, he became Ireland's oldest ever general election candidate at the 2016 election. Having earlier been Mayor of County Donegal, McGarvey became Mayor of Letterkenny in June 2018 - he succeeded either Gerry McMonagle of Sinn Féin "or" Jimmy Kavanagh of Fine Gael in that role. McGarvey was at this time approaching his 88th birthday and broke his own mayoral record set five years earlier.


He later bought and revived another doughnut shop.

(meta data) TITLE: Rick Scott the TV image well known, Rick Scott the man is not | Tampa Bay Times

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### Riverview retiree turns ear to police scanners, spreads word to 1,400 Facebook followers

Thousands of Florida mortgages could be at risk because of insurance abuse

Video: Once again, firefall phenomenon wows visitors to Yosemite's El Capitan

Latin entertainer Zuniga writes new biography of friend Debra LaFave

Tampa-area wrestlers share their Andre the Giant stories ahead of ESPN documentary

### Florida Insider Poll: John Morgan would be strongest Democratic nominee for governor

Lawmakers considered forbidding teachers from withholding recess.

Jewish fears of Trump White House mount before Netanyahu visit

Report: Trump campaign aides in repeated contact with Russian intelligence

Gov. Rick Scott hits the road, seeking political payback

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Rays' Archer: Burden to improve isn't just on starting pitching

Fennelly: Jose Fernandez the heartbreak that hovers over Marlins

Five flashbacks: Jonathan Drouin's best plays this season (w/poll)

A look at Drouin's magical moments for Lightning

### For Valentine's Day: Can pomegranates, oysters and chocolate from Tampa Bay restaurants boost your sex life?

Interview: Dashboard Confessional's Chris Carrabba found himself in Florida

Review: 'A Cure for Wellness' so over the top, it's repellent

We tried the Cross-Bay Ferry for errands and fun.

Cookbook review: 'Eating in the Middle: A Mostly Wholesome Cookbook' offers a guide to balance

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### Editorial: St. Petersburg should set vote on Rowdies stadium

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David Brooks: Bonhoeffer, Benedict or Ford

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# Rick Scott the TV image well known, Rick Scott the man is not

After buying and selling everything from doughnuts to hospitals, Rick Scott is trying to make his toughest sale: persuading voters to elect him governor of Florida.

On campaign trail, Rick Scott goes missing

Trump gets slight rebuke from top Florida Republicans, but not Rick Scott

Florida Gov. Rick Scott to feds: Help us fight Zika

Scott's campaign, with a heavy reliance on his fortune, is a product of savvy marketing, a simple message of jobs and careful management of access to voters and the media.

Rick Scott the TV image — bald guy who promises to create jobs — is well known.

"When you come from nowhere — and we started April 9 — no one knew us," Scott, 57, tells a crowd at a fundraiser at Captain Anderson's restaurant in Panama City.

"I'm going to work my tail off to do everything we said we're going to do when we win.

turn this state around, create the jobs and we're going to run this state like a business."

In a year where voters seem to crave outsiders as never before, Scott is well positioned.

If he wins, it will be on the strength of money, moxie and a rags-to-riches profile packaged through saturation TV advertising.

Funny thing, though: Scott can't stand to watch television.

I never see my dad watch TV," says his eldest daughter, Allison Scott Guimard.

"In two minutes, he either falls asleep or goes and does something else."

Already late on a Saturday afternoon, Scott speed-walks to a crowd of 200 tea party members enjoying vanilla and orange swirl ice cream at Mixon Fruit Farms in Bradenton.

Wearing the uniform of a "Let's Get to Work" candidate, starched white dress shirt with sleeves rolled, Scott leaps on stage with his entourage: wife Ann, daughters Allison and Jordan with their husbands, and his mother, Esther, who draws loud cheers from a crowd that recognizes her from a TV ad promoting her son.

I had a mother that told me what to do all my life, and I traded that in for a wife," Scott jokes as Ann winces slightly.

"We got married two years out of high school which is not what you tell your kids to do, right?"

After six months on the campaign trail, Scott is unpolished and at times awkward, talking too fast and sometimes too long.

But crowds respond to his promises of smaller government and his blunt criticism of President Barack Obama's "job-killing" health care changes and stimulus program.

The tightly wound, hard-charging former CEO of the Columbia/HCA health care chain becomes as shy as a schoolboy when voters fawn over him.

He tugs at the forearms of voters who have questions, then directs them to his website for more specifics.

When one asks for his autograph, he scribbles "Let's get to work — Rick Scott."

As Scott leaves the citrus plant, Tad Mackie of Sarasota shouts: "Hey, Rick! Your stage presence is getting a lot better.

Richard Lynn Scott was born in Bloomington, Ill., on Dec. 1, 1952, the second-oldest of five children.

The birth date is significant, his mother recalls, because it was the last day to be accepted into public schools.

As such, growing up, Rick was always smaller and skinnier than his classmates.

"He would have loved to play sports, but he just wasn't able to," Esther Scott says.

Rick's birth father was an abusive alcoholic, his mother says.

She divorced when he was a toddler and married Orba Scott, a long-haul truck driver who adopted Rick.

His adoptive father was a paratrooper and part of the D-Day invasion in World War II.

Scott held boyhood jobs selling TV Guide, working as a fry cook and cleaning phone booths ("the worst job I ever had," he says).

The family left Illinois for Kansas City when Orba got a better-paying job for Navajo Freight Lines.

Rick Scott is 6-1 now but was 5-6 when he graduated from North Kansas City High ("the home of the Hornets") in 1970.

He soon enlisted in the Navy — telling his mother without discussing it in advance, which upset her "a little bit," she says.

"But if he's determined to do what he wants to do I would not have stopped him in any way."

Late in his senior year, he caught the eye of classmate Annette Holland, who'd just moved from Texas.

"It took him all week to ask me out, because he was too chicken," she says.

"Normally I would have said, 'No, I'm busy,' because I didn't think it looked good to be free on a Thursday night for a Friday night.

On a Sunday in August, when Scott's campaign bus cruised through Tallahassee, Ann Scott asked the driver to make a detour so she could check out the Governor's Mansion, a stately two-story Southern Colonial.

"Very charming," she said of the capital city, where the Scotts hope to soon make their home.

While in the Navy and stationed in Newport, R.I., he and Ann salted away enough money to buy a Flavor Maid franchise doughnut shop in Kansas City to provide income for Rick's mother because Orba was disabled and couldn't work.

He soon acquired a second doughnut shop and realized that the profits were not in over-the-counter sales but selling dozens and dozens of doughnuts to corporate clients like TWA and local hospitals.

Business was so good, Esther Scott remembers baking all night.

Tens of thousands of glazed doughnuts later, Scott paid his way through law school at SMU, became a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer in Dallas and met a wealthy Texas investor, Richard Rainwater.

In 1987, they put down $125,000 each and bought two hospitals in El Paso, Texas, launching a revolution in the nation's health-care industry.

The Columbia/HCA conglomerate would balloon to more than 350 hospitals and 285,000 employees.

It would make Scott rich and famous and ultimately lead to his undoing as America's top health care executive.

At Columbia/HCA he convened staff meetings at 6 a.m. on Mondays to the consternation of some aides.

He's a teetotaler and nonsmoker who exercises at 5 a.m. and carries his own food sweetener on the road.

And — "he's not a big fan of losing," says his daughter Allison.

After moving to Naples, he quickly befriended the Rev. Kirt Anderson, who was losing his pastorship at the First Presbyterian Church in a dispute with the congregation's leaders.

Over lunch, Anderson was drawn to Scott: "I felt like I had found an exceptional guy, but I didn't know why," the pastor recalls.

Anderson, with Scott's help, founded the nondemoninational and independent Naples Community Church, where Scott helped negotiate the purchase of a new building and serves on the board of trustees.

"He said to me, 'I've had some very difficult times in my past, too,' " the pastor recalls.

"He said you can't let those things define you.

Six months ago, all most people knew about Scott was that he once ran Columbia/HCA, which paid a record $1.7 billion federal fine for Medicare fraud.

Scott left with a golden parachute of $310 million.

He moved from Connecticut to Naples in 2003, meeting Florida's seven-year residency requirement for candidates with just weeks to spare.

Now he's doing what no Florida candidate has ever done: spent $55 million — so far — of his own fortune in pursuit of political power.

"Because I care about the country," Scott says.

I want everybody in Florida to live the American dream.

Times/Herald staff writers Michael C. Bender and Marc Caputo and Times researchers Carolyn Edds and Natalie Watson contributed to this report.

Steve Bousquet can be reached at bousquet@sptimes.com or (850) 224-7263.

Rick Scott the TV image well known, Rick Scott the man is not 10/15/10

[Last modified: Thursday, November 11, 2010 4:40pm]

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Early life, family, education, and early career.

Scott was in the US Navy for 29 months and served on the USS "Glover" (FF-1098) as a radar technician.
 On April 20, 1972, Scott, then aged 19, married his high school sweetheart, Frances Annette Holland (born February 11, 1952), who was 20 years old. The couple has two daughters and six grandsons. The couple lives in Naples and are founding members of Naples Community Church.
 Scott attended college on the GI Bill, graduating from the University of Missouri–Kansas City with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree. He earned a Juris Doctor degree by working his way through Southern Methodist University. He was licensed by the Texas Bar to practice law on November 6, 1978. Scott made his first foray into business while working his way through college and law school, initially buying and reviving a failing doughnut shop (the Flavor Maid Do-Nut) by adding workplace delivery instead of relying on foot traffic.


The Whitecaps also ended the season with the highest average attendance by selling out all ten home games including the playoffs.

(meta data) TITLE: 2018-19 Season Sets New Highs for Attendance, Viewership, Merchandising and Engagement

## 2018-19 Season Sets New Highs for Attendance, Viewership, Merchandising and Engagement

By NWHL.zone staff, 03/28/19, 11:00AM EDT

Although the Isobel Cup was won by the Minnesota Whitecaps less than two weeks ago, the busy NWHL offseason is already in full stride.

In providing a detailed recap of the 2018-19 season, the NWHL would like to share important data about increases across all key business metrics, along with areas where the league is working to elevate.

Of the 46 NWHL games in 2018-19, 16 drew sold-out crowds – setting a new league record.

The average attendance of the 46 games was 954.

In their first season as the NWHL's first expansion team, the Minnesota Whitecaps sold out all 10 home games at TRIA Rink – 8 regular season games, the playoff semifinal against the Riveters and Isobel Cup Final against Buffalo.

Prior to the start of the season, the team established an alignment with the NHL's Minnesota Wild.

The Whitecaps not only were Isobel Cup champions, but the team was a profitable business venture in their first season.

The Boston Pride sold out their last 3 home games and generated strong crowds all season at Warrior Ice Rink.

The Pride received a strong midseason boost when the club formed a partnership with the NHL's Boston Bruins, collaborating on youth hockey programs and crossover promotion of the sport.

Owned by Pegula Sports and Entertainment, the Buffalo Beauts drew large crowds for their 8 games at HarborCenter and one at Key Bank Arena, the home of the NHL's Buffalo Sabres.

The Beauts organization has also been recognized by players, media and fans for setting a standard in professional women's hockey by providing first-class facilities and additional ice time, enhancing player development.

The Metropolitan Riveters, who are aligned with the New Jersey Devils and have started a Girls Hockey program with the NHL club, sold out their regular season finale and played to large crowds in their seven regular season games and one playoff game at RWJBarnabas Health Hockey House.

They also played their home opener before more than 2,000 fans at the Prudential Center.

"In the last 18 months, four NWHL teams have formed mutually-beneficial partnerships with the NHL teams in their markets, resulting in effective cross-promotion and the development of girls' programs," said NWHL Founder and Commissioner Dani Rylan.

"We appreciate these partnerships and are focused on plans for the Connecticut Whale that will give the team and players the additional support they have long deserved."

On the sponsorship side, in addition to the extraordinary support of Dunkin' since the launch of the league, the NWHL added its first major team-specific sponsorship (TRIA for the Whitecaps, thanks to a major assist from the Minnesota Wild), with Warrior Hockey later becoming a sponsor of the Boston Pride.

The NWHL also signed a new national partner in VEDA, becoming the first sports league to accept a sponsorship by a company in the hemp industry.

However, major sponsorship opportunities remain open.

For example, the Beauts, Riveters, Pride and Whale continue to offer high-profile jersey sponsorships.

"It's imperative that we increase sponsorship sales, locally and nationally," said Rylan, whose staff is working with league partners to identify prospective sponsors heading into the fifth season.

The 2019 NWHL All-Star Game in Nashville drew a crowd of 6,200 - the largest ever for a professional women's hockey game in the United States.

Combined, the NWHL Skills Challenge (sold out at Ford Ice Center) and All-Star Game reached more than one million viewers on Twitter.

"Taking our All-Star events to NHL markets without NWHL teams has proven to be a very effective way to increase the brand awareness of our players and league," said Rylan.

"The weekends in Pittsburgh, Minnesota and Nashville were hugely successful, and we are in discussions to continue this approach in other major cities."

As it has since the league was founded in 2015, the NWHL streamed every game, making every second of NWHL action accessible to fans via YouTube and the Twitter Game of the Week.

Average viewership this season was 70,000, a new high for the league.

"The investment in making every NWHL game available to the public from day one was an important strategic decision for us, and it has undoubtedly paid off," said Rylan.

"We're proud of the work of our production teams and the broadcasters.

A crucial next step for us would be creating broadcast partnerships, nationally and regionally.

These players deserve the biggest stage, and I'm confident the NWHL would deliver loyal and large audiences for networks."

### APPAREL SALES, SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT & JR. NWHL

Apparel sales also established a new high for the league and were up 36 percent this season over 2017-18.

NWHL players again received 15 percent of the revenue derived from sales of jerseys and shirseys with their names on them.

Top-selling athletes in combined jersey and shirseys sold:

"Offering retail jerseys and shirseys with all 125 names of the women in the league has been a good start to elevate player profiles, but we believe we can collaborate with the players to do more to increase their platforms and visibility," said Rylan.

"We are going to speak with the players this offseason about ideas to not only promote their personal brands, but identify more revenue opportunities for them."

Among the notable gains in league and team social media this season…

Thanks to the history-making exploits of Kendall Coyne Schofield, the buzz created by the NWHL All-Star Weekend in Nashville, and the interaction between our players (including Captains Szabados and Stecklein) and fans, tweets from @NWHL earned 4.2 million impressions in February, the most of any month in league history.

NWHL Twitter gained 7,000 followers and NWHL Instagram gained 5,000 followers over the course of the season, while engagement on team Facebook pages increased 143 percent since last season.

Overall, Twitter impressions on @NWHL increased 23 percent from the previous season.

Whitecaps social accounts gained nearly 20,000 followers since May, when they were announced as the league's first expansion team.

This season, the league launched Jr. NWHL – an affiliate program that connects future stars of professional women's hockey to the current players.

The program has been an overwhelming success in building a pipeline not only to future NWHL draft picks, but forever fans.

Jr. NWHL has already signed up more than 100 youth hockey organizations across the U.S. (see map).

To date, the NWHL has paid more than $2.5 million to players.

With the support of the league's resourceful and impassioned investors who believe in our vision and athletes, and thanks to the increasing number of fans, sponsors, and the business successes over the last two years, that number will climb in the coming years.

Of equal importance to the league is player development.

Just two examples of the exemplary work of the Buffalo Beauts organization are 2018-19 NWHL Most Valuable Player Maddie Elia, and 2018-19 Players' Player of the Year Hayley Scamurra.

Elia continues to progress as an exceptional all-zone player, while Scamurra is a member of the U.S. National Team that will compete next month in the World Championships.

Also this season, Riveters defender Michelle Picard has returned to the National Team roster, and rookie Boston goaltender Katie Burt was invited to USNT camp and started one game in the Rivalry Series against Canada.

The league has heard from several players who would like to see more games added to the regular season.

An announcement on the potential expansion of the game schedule in 2019-20 will be made in the near future.

On May 15, 2018, the NWHL announced that it had an agreement in principle to acquire ownership of the Whitecaps and the team joined the NWHL as an expansion team for the 2018–19 season. The then made an agreement with the Minnesota Wild to use TRIA Rink, the Wild's practice facility, as the site for Whitecaps home games. It was reported that the Whitecaps had hired 2018 Olympic gold medal-winning coach Robb Stauber and his wife Shivaun Stauber as coaches, sharing the head coaching responsibilities, but the parties never signed a contract. Whitecaps' founder and general manager Jack Brodt then returned to the coaching position he held prior to joining the NWHL and hired former University of Minnesota player Ronda Curtin Engelhardt as co-coach.
 On August 21, the Whitecaps unveiled their new logo. During their first NWHL season, league commissioner Dani Rylan stated that the Whitecaps were the first NWHL team to turn a profit by having a league-leading 500 season tickets sold, significant merchandise sales, and all home games were sold out through eight games. On March 3, 2019, the Whitecaps finished their inaugural NWHL season as the first seed and regular season champions. On March 17, 2019, the Whitecaps beat the Buffalo Beauts 2–1 in overtime to win the Isobel Cup league playoff championship.


Brett Eldredge was a first-time chart-topper when "Don't Ya" spent two weeks in the top spot at the end of August.

(meta data) TITLE: 10 Best Brett Eldredge Songs

Laura McClellanFrazer Harrison, Getty Images

Brett Eldredge songs are dependable — fans can rely on the fact that if it has his name on it, it's going to be a quality tune, as you'll see in the list of best Brett Eldredge songs.

Though his style has evolved a bit since his early days, Eldredge has avoided delving too deeply into the ever-changing trends of the biz, consistently put out catchy, thoughtful pop-influenced country songs.

Eldredge's vocals and songwriting skills make him a clear standout when it comes to artistry; no one can deny his talent.

But it's his sincerity, lightheartedness and good-natured smile that make him memorable and endear him to so many.

The blue-eyed charmer has a host of well-written songs in his catalog, but we've narrowed it down to what we think are the 10 best Brett Eldredge songs below.

The chorus of "Drunk on Your Love" sinks into your heart like one sinks into a well-worn couch after a long, hard day — collapsing into the cushions with the feeling of finally being home, and all is right with the world.

This catchy yet familiar-sounding tune creates a similar feeling.

Its breezy vibe and hooky melody could lift anyone's spirits, and Eldredge's lighthearted and sincere delivery just sells it all the more.

"Drunk on Your Love" is just a feel-good pop-country song, which earned it a No. 2 slot on both the Billboard Country Airplay and Hot Country Songs charts in 2016, as well as a slot on our best Brett Eldredge songs list.

"Mean to Me" is a simply sweet country love song from the first line to the last, its gentle melodies rolling over the top of acoustic guitar picking and soft percussion to create a lovely serenade.

The tune begins listing out superlatives wrapped in metaphors describing the kind of person Eldredge would like to be for the one he loves, but then turns the lyrics around, saying if he were all those things, he'd be exactly what she means to him.

Written by Eldredge and Scooter Carusoe, "Mean to Me" was the fourth single from his debut album Bring You Back and reached No. 1 on the Billboard Country Airplay charts.

This moody single from Eldredge's album Illinois begins with a soulful edge, telling the story of a girl who makes a guy have trouble maintaining logic simply by her presence…not that he is complaining.

"Lose My Mind" breaks into an upbeat, catchy chorus that almost suggests throwing up his hands and giving in to the fact that he can't overcome her powers.

Borrowing a memorable line from R&B/pop outfit Gnarles Barkley's "Crazy," the rest of the tune was written by Eldredge, Ross Copperman and Heather Morgan.

It's a lighthearted love song that served as the lead-off track for Illinois and earned the artist another No. 1 for his roster.

Fully embracing the pop-inspired synthesizers and drum machines trending in country, "Long Way" manages to maintain a genuine quality in its delivery, keeping the production limited and letting Eldredge's voice do the storytelling.

The ballad creates a scene in which the narrator wants to get to know his love interest better, starting with her roots — where she's from, how she grew up, what her family is like.

The sweet sentiment plays out over the verses and chorus, which asks her to take him the "long way around," showing him every nook and cranny of the town in which she grew up, and by extension, her true self.

The song appears on his 2017 self-titled album, adding to the honest simplicity a self-titled album should embody.

One of Eldredge's early career releases, the success of "Don't Ya" began to carve out a space for the artist in country music alongside long-time vets.

The song served as the second single from his debut album Bring You Back (though it was released two years after the first, in 2012) and marked his first-ever No. 1 hit.

wrote the tune with Chris DeStefano and Ashley Gorley, and though it is a well-told trope — the pretty girl in the bar catching the eye of an interested man — it brings out Eldredge's confident, yet lighthearted personality and introduced him to an official career in country music.

This upbeat, feel-good tune is an ode to a relationship that finally just feels right.

"Love Someone" has all the elements true country fans expect to hear instrumentally — banjo, acoustic guitar, dobro — with overtones of pop that put this song right in the sweet spot for a summer jam.

The punchy four-on-the-floor beat and gang vocals give the song a singalong quality anyone can get on board with, continuing to steer clear of "bro-country" and settling in Eldredge's wheelhouse for a perfect addition to his self-titled album.

Original Christmas songs are always a gamble, but in this case, it paid off.

Eldredge actually amplifies his talent by showing off a different side in "Glow," a big-band-style throwback tune reminiscent of the classic holiday sound of days gone by.

In not only the song, but the album of the same name, the artist shows country fans he could easily be mistaken for a Rat Pack crooner if we didn't know any better, letting his pure vocals shine on this holiday record.

The original song came out of an idea initially unrelated to Christmas, but if it inspired a full album of holiday classics, we're glad he put a festive spin on it.

Eldredge has said this tune was his favorite song he'd ever written, and we can see why.

The sentimental ballad goes a bit meta, zooming out to not only be a metaphor for love, but directly referencing the song itself.

Eldredge has said he hopes the song takes people back to special moments in their lives, and the nostalgic character of the ballad certainly brings that to the table.

The song's well-crafted lyrics and sincere delivery earned it a No. 1 spot on the country airplay charts, marking his sixth career No. 1.

Eldredge's first single off his 2017 self-titled record, "Somethin' I'm Good At" is just a great time from the first note to the last.

It's got an unexpected air about it — a bit of anarchy in the face of formulaic country songs — but keeps its singer-songwriter and country roots intact.

The gang vocals and devil-may-care attitude combined with its self-deprecating lyrics (admitting he can't even change a flat tire)

make "Somethin' I'm Good At" a reminder not to take life too seriously and to have fun along the way — something Eldredge is clearly skilled in

One of the most memorable of Eldredge's hits for sure, "Beat of the Music" makes getting this melody out of your head nearly impossible — in a good way.

The song tells the story of meeting someone special and intriguing in the romantic setting of a beach in Mexico, true to Eldredge's beachy style.

Its hooky chorus glides along, immediately conjuring up the feeling of riding down the coast in a convertible, sun shining and wind in your hair.

-written by Eldredge, the song hit No. 1 on the Billboard Country Airplay charts and was the third single from his debut record Bring You Back.

If those aren't the qualifications to top any list about the best Brett Eldredge songs, we don't know what are!

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List of Billboard number-one country songs of 2013

 After falling from the top spot at the end of January, the song rebounded to the top in April, beginning a run of 19 consecutive weeks at number one.  Its final total was 24 weeks at the top of the chart, breaking the record for the most cumulative weeks spent atop one of "Billboard"'s country charts which had stood for nearly 60 years.  This revival of the song's fortunes was due to the late spring release of a remix featuring a guest appearance by the rapper Nelly, which proved extremely popular on pop music radio.  Thanks to the incorporation into the chart's methodology of spin data from all radio formats, as opposed to just country stations, this support from top 40 radio allowed "Cruise" to hold the top spot throughout the summer.  The remix did not prove as popular on country radio, however, and by the late summer the song was in the unusual position of topping the Hot Country Songs chart but receiving so few spins on country stations that it did not appear in the 60-position airplay listing at all.
 The dominance of "Cruise" on the Hot Country Songs chart meant that most of the chart-toppers on the Country Airplay chart did not reach the top of the other listing; of the 31 songs which topped the airplay chart during 2013, only five also topped Hot Country Songs, and on only four occasions during the year was the same song at number one on both charts.  Four acts who topped the airplay listing during the year achieved the first number-one hits of their careers.  In February Randy Houser gained his first number one with "How Country Feels". Pistol Annies, a supergroup composed of female singers Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe, and Angaleena Presley, reached number one for the first time in June when they were featured on the song "Boys 'Round Here" by Blake Shelton,  Lambert's then-husband.