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CAA has promoted Chris Burrus, Inder Gill, Sophie Kavanagh, Zakaria Laaboudi, Arlen Papazian and Kara Petit to Agent following the participation of each in CAA Elevate, the agency’s program for agents and executives in training.

The Nashville-based Burrus will work within CAA’s Music Touring department. He represents many of the world’s leading musicians, including Nate Smith, Tyler Booth, Erin Kinsey and After Midtown, and is on the teams that support Jake Owen, Matt Koziol and Brandon Ratcliff.

Gill will serve on the Media Finance team, led by Roeg Sutherland and Benjamin Kramer, specializing in the representation of independently financed films. He was one of the lead agents helping to sign Anupam Tripathi, who played Ali Abdul in Netflix’s South Korean smash Squid Game, and is based in Los Angeles.

Kavanagh has been promoted to Agent in the Commercial Endorsements department, and will be based in the agency’s New York office.

In Rolling Stone‘s series At Work, we go behind the curtain with decision-makers across the fast-changing music business — exploring a range of responsibilities, burgeoning ideas, advice for industry newcomers, and more. Read earlier interviews here.

Shane McAnally is a big advocate of finding a crew. When he arrived in Nashville as a struggling songwriter years ago, the Texas native banded together with several other writers, and he championed them through the music industry after his own fortunes began to improve. As he puts it: “My domino fell first of the group.

Singer-songwriter Brandon Ratcliff has fond memories of going to school and spending time in quaint Minden, Louisiana, a small town in Webster Parish that’s just a short drive from where his family lived in more rural Cotton Valley. He hadn’t given much thought to what it meant to move on until he relocated to Nashville and had a lengthy gap where he didn’t make it back home. When he finally did return for the holidays, he was stunned to see how different things had become.

“I remember...

With three free daytime stages and more than 110 artists performing across them, June’s Cma Fest offers plenty of no-cost entertainment options for fans over the event’s four days.

On Tuesday, the Cma announced a slate of artists who will appear on the free stages: Kassi Ashton, Kelleigh Bannen, Dillon Carmichael, Travis Denning, Cale Dodds, Love and Theft, Muscadine Bloodline, Brandon Ratcliff, Tenille Townes and Rachel Wammack are among the names set for the Chevy Breakout Stage at Walk of Fame Park, opposite the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

The hushed intimacy of the duo Ida Mae, a dusty road anthem by the Vegabonds and a new one from the King of Country Music make up our list of the best country songs to hear this week.

Travis Denning, “After a Few”

The singer behind the fake-i.D. anthem “David Ashley Parker From Powder Springs” tells tales of what happens after those drinks are consumed in this sultry jam. It’s slickly produced, but it works, thanks to Denning’s husky vocal and the lovelorn quality in his delivery.

Kelsea Ballerini pulls on a pair of boxing gloves and gets in the ring in the video for her latest single, “Miss Me More.” The pulsing, dance music-influenced tune appears on the Knoxville, Tennessee native’s second album Unapologetically.

In keeping with the song’s lyrical message about the struggle to regain one’s sense of self after the conclusion of a toxic relationship, the video, directed by Shane Drake, depicts Ballerini going into a literal fight for her individuality. She trains like Rocky Balboa — minus the epic running montage — in the early scenes,...

Kelsea Ballerini will visit a series of arenas and amphitheaters next spring when she embarks on the headlining 2019 Miss Me More Tour in April.

Named for Ballerini’s current single, which appears on her second album Unapologetically, the tour gets underway April 11th in Salisbury, Maryland and continues through May 11th in Fargo, North Dakota for a total of 14 shows. Other stops on the itinerary include James Brown Arena in Augusta, Georgia and a hometown show for Ballerini at the Knoxville Civic Coliseum in East Tennessee. Joining her for the...

Patrick Hasson and Juan Carlos Saizarbitoria's co-directed horror flick Blood Shed will be hitting VOD and Amazon on May 6th and right now we've got a clip on tap to help decide if this one will get your ghost!

Gabriel De Santi, Bree Essrig, Cherie Daly, Yasha Blackman, Jillisa Lynn, Brandon Ratcliff , Vida Guerra, Chris Hampton and Bai Ling star.

Synopsis

Loosely based on the true events of a homeless loner who moves into a self-storage facility inhabited by a community of bizarre squatters until they are locked in for the night with a deranged female who hunts them down in search of her lost child.

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(Miranda July, above.)

(This talk with Miranda July originally appeared in Venice Magazine in June of 2005.)

by Terry Keefe

The "ensemble film of people with problems" is a staple of the indie film world these days. The stories often take place in urban or suburban locations and revolve around a group of characters with peripheral connections to each other. Their different paths will cross repeatedly as the story progresses. Then, a tragedy of some sort often brings all the characters together. That might be a suicide, or perhaps a swinger's session that goes badly. There have been so many of these films made that they're a genre of their own. Are you ready to buy a ticket to a different film yet? Don't if the ensemble film of people with problems is filmmaker Miranda July's very unique Me and You and Everyone We Know. At first glance the elements...

PARK CITY -- This first feature by multimedia performance artist Miranda July is a hit-and-miss affair. It has moments of unexpected, offbeat comedy, but most of the time neither the characters nor the situations engage the viewer.

The world concocted by the writer-director is not quite real but isn't pushed enough to be called surreal. Adults act dopey while children and teenagers do and say very unlikely things. "Me and You", which screened in American Dramatic Competition at Sundance, is something of an acquired taste so its theatrical audience will be limited.

John Hawkes plays a shoe salesman who just broke up with his wife. He is often stuck with his two sons as his estranged wife pursues another romance. An "Eldercab" driver and remarkably bad multimedia artist, played by July, unaccountably sets her romantic sights on the newly single salesman. This produces indecision if not downright panic in the salesman.

Meanwhile, his boys pursue their own romances -- of sorts. The 7-year-old (Brandon Ratcliff) conducts a chat room flirtation with an over stimulated adult female on the Internet. His 14-year-old brother (Miles Thompson) is sexually experimented upon by two female classmates. A 10-year-old girl (Caflie Weseman) in the neighborhood takes a less aggressive approach with the youth.

July perhaps wants to demonstrate that everyday life can contain things magical and fanciful. But her script is more capricious than convincing. The featherweight film is backed with music by Mike Andrews that sounds like something you might hear riding a merry-go-round.

PARK CITY -- This first feature by multimedia performance artist Miranda July is a hit-and-miss affair. It has moments of unexpected, offbeat comedy, but most of the time neither the characters nor the situations engage the viewer.

The world concocted by the writer-director is not quite real but isn't pushed enough to be called surreal. Adults act dopey while children and teenagers do and say very unlikely things. "Me and You", which screened in American Dramatic Competition at Sundance, is something of an acquired taste so its theatrical audience will be limited.

John Hawkes plays a shoe salesman who just broke up with his wife. He is often stuck with his two sons as his estranged wife pursues another romance. An "Eldercab" driver and remarkably bad multimedia artist, played by July, unaccountably sets her romantic sights on the newly single salesman. This produces indecision if not downright panic in the salesman.

Meanwhile, his boys pursue their own romances -- of sorts. The 7-year-old (Brandon Ratcliff) conducts a chat room flirtation with an over stimulated adult female on the Internet. His 14-year-old brother (Miles Thompson) is sexually experimented upon by two female classmates. A 10-year-old girl (Caflie Weseman) in the neighborhood takes a less aggressive approach with the youth.

July perhaps wants to demonstrate that everyday life can contain things magical and fanciful. But her script is more capricious than convincing. The featherweight film is backed with music by Mike Andrews that sounds like something you might hear riding a merry-go-round.