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Ten North Texas Artists Were Nominated For Grammys, St. Vincent’s Horror Movie Gets a Release Date and Hand Drawn Pressing Looks Out For The Little Guy.

Welp, another year and another Grammy snub for yours truly. But when this year’s crop of noms was announced, a whole bunch of North Texas-tied acts did appear on the list.

Leading the pack was Arlington’s Maren Morris — as we knew she would — with four nods. She’s up for “Best New Artist,” “Best Country Solo Performance” and “Best Country Song,” both for “My Church” and “Best Country Album” for Hero.

Also up for four awards is Fort Worth’s Kirk Franklin. His categories are “Best Rap/Sung Performance” and“Best Rap Song” for Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam,” as well as “Best Gospel Performance/Song” for writing Tamela Mann‘s “God Provides” and “Best Gospel Album” for his own Losing My Religion LP.

At least eight other local/semi-locals are up for awards, too. They are as follows:

• Miranda Lambert — “Best Country Solo Performance” and “Best Country Song,” both for “Vice.”
• Demi Lovato – “Best Pop Vocal Album” for Confident.
• Snarky Puppy – “Best Contemporary Instrumental Album” for Culcha Vulcha.
• Kelly Clarkson — “Best Pop Solo Performance” for “Piece by Piece (Idol version).
• Pentatonix — “Best Country Duo/Group Performance” for their acapella performance of “Jolene” alongside Dolly Parton.
• Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein received two separate noms in the “Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media” category for their Strangers Things Volume 1 and Volume 2 discs.
• Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts — “Best Recording Package” for the bands’ Human Performance LP.
• Leon Bridges — “Best Music Video” for his “River” clip.

Find out who wins when the ceremony airs on February 12.

Her four nods aside, this is an even bigger week than usual for Maren Morris, who will be the musical guest on this week’s episode of Saturday Night Live. And she was one of a few area folks on TV this week, actually. Multi-Grammy winner Kacey Musgraves performed “Present Without a Bow” from her new Christmas record on The Tonight Show, although duet partner from the album version, Leon Bridges, was notably absent.

That Pentatonix bunch and Dolly Parton also did their Grammy-nominated version of “Jolene” on The Voice with the added bonus of judge Miley Cyrus adding her vocal talents as well. In other The Voice news, Austin Allsup, the last North Texan standing on the show, ended his run on the program last week.

On a different kind of screen, as in your computer screen, Troy Cartwright premiered his new “Arkansas” video via Cowboys and Indians magazine (‘s website). Despite the song’s name, the Dallas-based country man filmed this video in Tennessee.

Conversely, on the bigger screen, as in the movie screen, that horror anthology that features a segment directed by St. Vincent will make its premiere in January at the Sundance Film Festival.

Meanwhile, a film that premiered at last year’s Sundance, we’ve learned that the Casey Affleck vehicle Manchester by the Sea features musical contributions from both Son of Stan and Oil Boom, the latter of which’s song “45 Revolutions Per Minute” reportedly has some guitar shade thrown its way by one of the characters. Guess we’ll have to see it now!

In other media, Hand Drawn Pressing was featured in in Forbes. An interesting revelation from the article comes from Hand Drawn founder Dustin Blocker, who says even though the company will boast tremendous capacity with the first new fully-automated press in decades, it plans on always reserving some time and space for small runs by indie artists. Says Blocker: “We were founded with the idea of putting the artist first. So we want to make sure we set aside enough room in our capacity for the small guys. We’re trying to target about 40 percent of our capacity, keep it back for independent artists.”

Moving on, yet another one bites the dust. Dark Rooms’ upcoming December 16 show at Dada is being billed as its farewell from Dallas.

Kind of the opposite of that news is word that the revered funk party known as Cool Out will come out retirement again with a big December 30 show, also at Dada – so not 100 percent opposite, I suppose.

Elsewhere: Salt-N-Pepa was booed by an audience in North Dakota when they voiced support for #NoDAPL; both Sexual Jeremy and Lizzie Boredom earned spots on A.V. Club’s annual “The Year in Band Names” post, one of our favorite annual year-end lists; and folks that buy these limited edition Power Trip hoodies in the next two weeks will have their cash donated to Team Skylar, a childhood cancer awareness organization.

Cover photo of St. Vincent by Heather Abbott. Got a tip for White Noise? Email us!