Chris Stills - when good artists go missing

A long long time ago when I started working in the music business, a friend of mine said that her distrust of major labels came from the fact that she felt that we only made hits out of the records we liked. I assured her that that wasn't true. If it was that easy, it would be in our best interest to make EVERY record a hit!

I'm sitting at my desk listening to 100 Year Thing, the debut album from Chris Stills, the son of Stephen Stills. This record is completely awesome. There is so much of it that reminds you of classic CSNY in the vocals and melodies but, although the songs are mainly based on acoustic guitar, this record totally rocks! I am loathe to choose highlights since every single song is worthy of the highest praise. I wish I was hyping you on a record that was coming out in January 2008 but, unfortunately, this is a record that was released in January 1998 and disappeared almost as quickly as it hit the record shelves.

It's ten years later and I still can't tell you what happened. The music truly is spectacular but there was no radio that would play it at the time. His story was great (son of Stills and French singer Veronique Sanson) but no media was really interested in covering it. We saw him play once and he was terrific but there was no tour.

There are so many factors that contribute to the current state of the music business and no one is counting the mystery of the disappearance of artists like Chris as one of those factors. By the way his second album came out in 2005. I never heard it but I will say this, if you go to his myspace site, the music you hear there can't touch what I'm listening to on 100 Year Thing.