CMT Blog: 2009 July

Sugarland has been out on the road for their Love on the Inside tour for months now, but if you haven't been able to catch one of their high-intensity shows, don't sweat it. They'll be bringing the experience into your home with Live on the Inside, an ABC-TV special airing Monday (Aug. 3) at 8 p.m. ET. The special's high-def footage was filmed during Sugarland's concert at Rupp Arena in Lexington, Ky., and airs one day before the release of their live album and DVD of the same name. The Live on the Inside album features seven popular covers as well as three of Sugarland's big hits, all performed live, while the DVD features 20 live songs and was shot by critically-acclaimed director Shaun Silva. Here's their video for "Already Gone," one of the songs you'll see performed Monday.

I feel like I got a gigantic dose of country music injected right into my bloodstream at a small Bobby Bare concert last night in Nashville, sponsored by BMI. When he sang "Detroit City," I was singing along on "Oh, how I wanna go home," but I didn't really mean it. I could have listened for another hour because you rarely hear live country music from the 1960s anymore, even in Nashville. Plus, Bare is still in fine form, cracking jokes and covering tunes by the likes of Tom T. Hall, Kris Kristofferson and Shel Silverstein. It was like a living history/music lesson. I thought I might need to pinch myself, until one of my friends leaned over and did just that -- exclaiming, "Country music, Craig!" Yes, I know!

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Kenny Chesney is a huge Joe Walsh fan, so I suspect he has a unique appreciation of the celebrity stereotypes Walsh parodies in his classic song, "Life's Been Good." While it's hard to have a lot of sympathy for people who have every material possession and perk at their fingertips, there's a hell of a tradeoff -- and that's the luxury of true freedom in their lives. While few of us will ever summon our private jet for transportation to our yacht on a secluded Caribbean island, we do have the freedom of anonymity (and total media apathy) to go to the mall or the grocery store without anyone paying any attention to us whatsoever. And we can live our lives without worrying about some nimrod drawing conclusions about casual conversations we have at a party. Believe it or not, the rich and the famous view anonymity as a valued commodity they can't buy.

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You may have never heard of this bluegrassy country rock band KingBilly, but that no longer matters. Because once you've had the legendary pop hero Richard Marx and the Australian leading man Hugh Jackman onstage with you, what else matters, really? I have no idea what went down behind the scenes to get these stars together. I just know that last night (July 30) at Joe's Bar in Chicago, Marx joined the band and did six songs, like "Don't Mean Nothing" and Keith Urban's "Better Life" (which Marx wrote with Urban). Then Jackman hoped up there for a duet on Marx' "Right Here Waiting." The only thing missing, really, was me.

If you've watched The Singing Bee on CMT, you know that funny girl Melissa Peterman takes the show to a whole other level. Every word that comes out of her mouth cracks me up. Especially when she's hitting on -- I mean, playfully bantering with -- the drummer, Scotty Kormos. But Peterman has made it clear that he's more than just a nice pair of sticks. She's even taken to telling herself, out loud, "Enough flirting with the drummer, Melissa." And one time she told Kormos, on the air, that she'd gotten a memo from CMT and that they would prefer it if he'd play with his shirt off.

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It's been a while since I've played Rock Band, but yesterday (July 30) the CMT.com bloggers strapped on our guitars, picked up our drumsticks and started singing along to the latest release in the series, the Rock Band Country Track Pack. Twenty one country songs are included going all the way back to the '70s. I dubbed us the Dot Com Destroyers and we jumped in with Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler." After two or three tries, we actually made it all the way through (the Destroyers never fold 'em). And based on my memory of the original Rock Band, these country arrangements seemed different somehow. But then, playing guitar in a country band is not the same as in a rock band, so I should have expected that. In any case, it's a different experience that fans of the other games may enjoy just for the new challenge, even if they're not country fans. And those who are country fans will find familiar songs from Dierks Bentley, Trace Adkins, Shania Twain and the Dixie Chicks, just to name a few.

Wait. That headline came out wrong. That makes it sound like Kellie Pickler's getting a makeover, when what's really happening is she's giving the makeover. Pickler and the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition folks went to an Ohio family's home to give them the good news: their house is coming down. Pickler will be working alongside the Makeover crew to demolish and rebuild the family's new house, then she'll perform on the "Move That Truck" reveal show. And she'll be Twittering as she pitches in, slings a sledgehammer and perhaps even masters the art of using the nail gun. She says she's thrilled to be a part of "such a magical show because it is all about giving back." The episode(s) will air in the fall.

I'm not really much of an angler. And honestly, not much of a boater either. But to spend a day out on the water with Jack Ingram, I would learn. There's this contest I found, and not only do you get a trip for two to Beaufort, N.C., and two nights at a B&B there, but you get a one-day fishing excursion with Ingram on a Hatteras yacht and a barbecue at the end of the day. No word on whether or not he'll bring his guitar and sing a little. Y'all could get barefoot and crazy together. But maybe if you asked real nice, you'd get a fishing lesson and a spontaneous country concert right there on the water. Oh, yeah. And you get a boat. A 2010 Bayliner 174 Ski N Fish boat. You just have to enter by Aug. 31, 2009.

Her latest MySpace video says a lot about Taylor Swift. And so does Taylor Swift's dad when he says into the camera, "You guys are weird."

And I mean that in a very good way. Swift is a textbook goofball teenager. In this seven-minute video of her summer shenanigans, she's dancing around a bonfire, chilling on someone's boat (albeit with the guys from Def Leppard), cranking Beyoncé's "Halo" in the car with her mom, walking up to a drive-thru window for burgers, questioning her fiddler Caitlin's bare feet in the city, dancing with a little girl at her bass player Amos' wedding, sneaking up on her dad while he shops for Izod shirts, going go-carting, acting out scenes from Twilight and telling her brother he's no good at music. All this set to the Mat Kearney's bittersweet "Closer to Love."

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If you put Toby Keith and Trace Adkins in a dark alley somewhere, that could very well be someone's worst nightmare. All 12-foot-9-inches of combined tough badass hillbilly staring down at you. But if you put them together onstage at the end of a country show, that's a much, much better idea. Apparently, Keith and Adkins have been wrapping their shows with an encore performance of "Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue (The Angry American)." Keith recently told the Palm Beach Post of Adkins, "We came from the same honky-tonk family." I'm a big fan of this trend of bringing the opening act back out at the end of the night to throw a little twist into the encore. For fans who like to leave early to beat the traffic, this might be just the thing to keep them around until the show's officially over.