Country Music Blog: Faith Hill

Some of country music's top songwriters converged last week in Key West, Fla., for the 13th annual Key West Songwriters Festival, where they played free shows in the town's various nightspots and watering holes along Duval Street. The tiny island was overrun with tourists and festival attendees who jam-packed the venues for dancing and late night sing-alongs.With so many people around doing what vacationing, sometimes intoxicated people do, I found it difficult to stay focused on the music at times. However, there were a few ticketed shows at the Hog's Breath Writer's Room and the Tropic Theater, where Jeffrey Steele, Chuck Cannon, Kim Richey, Raul Malo, Robert Earl Keen, Kylie Sackley and other professional tunesmiths played shows with a Bluebird Café vibe and attentive crowd. I know these songwriters love it when artists like Rascal Flatts, LeAnn Rimes, Montgomery Gentry and Faith Hill record their songs, but personally, I always prefer to hear the songs straight from the creator's mouth. The music portion of the festival culminated in a street party where Keen and Steele entertained throngs of people strolling along Duval Street.

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Will she blame this on the Cuervo? Carrie Underwood is up to no good in Las Vegas, playing a bad girl for her video for new single "Last Name."

For a few more months, Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman can still travel alone (without diaper bags and strollers). So off they went to French Polynesia for a second honeymoon.

After that, it was back to Nashville for the CMT Awards and a Predators game.

It's unclear whether Tim McGraw and Faith Hill were actually the "two international superstars in the country music business" who were scheduled to perform, but an Aug. 23 was cancelled in Hamilton, Ontario, because the venue just didn't have the cash to bring everything up to meet safety codes.

British actor Ewan McGregor suffered miserably when his neighbor at a NYC hotel played melancholy country music loud enough to force him into a pair of earplugs..

Hey everyone,

Monday night was AMAZING. I am still smiling. My sister and I sat next to my tourmates Jewel and Chuck Wicks, and behind us was James Otto, who tapped me on the shoulder and gave me the "biggest fan" award. I've grown up idolizing these artists, and I actually got to meet most of them, one in particular, Faith Hill, who has inspired me so much. It was an honor meeting her.

It was so much fun being up on that stage. I got to introduce my tourmate, Brad Paisley, with Sara Evans and Josh Turner, who kept making me laugh during rehearsals that day. Not to mention I was pretty nervous. You would think after performing on TV with 30 million people watching each week the nerves would leave. Well, well think again! :)

The performances blew me away, they were all so amazing. I really enjoyed LeAnn Rimes, Sugarland and Keith Urban. I can only hope to perform up there one day. What an unforgettable night!

Photo: Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images

In the end, it's all about who wore what. For some Web sites, anyway. Miley Cyrus, Carrie Underwood and Faith Hill and others get critiqued for their attire at the 2008 CMT Music Awards. But Hill's rep says a flowing tunic topic doesn't mean the singer is pregnant.

In more post-show news, Jason Aldean gushed over Snoop Dogg, remarking that when he calls you a pimp it's the ultimate compliment. Seriously?

And Taylor Swift gives her play-by-play commentary of the entire night, up until the part where she is FREAKING OUT.

Determined not to be pigeon-holed as just a singer/songwriter/actor, Tim McGraw has written a children's book due out this fall. And his latest greatest hits package is due out later this month.

Yes, Kenny Chesney is known for his stadium shows. But what if you could see him in a small room with only a few hundred people? If you live in Chicago and listen to radio station WUSN you can.

And Billy Ray Cyrus tells OK magazine he's trying to be Miley's BFF. Get in line, dad.

There were many memorable moments in the house at the CMT Music Awards Show on Monday night (April 14). There were of course the ear-splitting shrieks for Miley Cyrus at first. And the same for Keith Urban and Rascal Flatts. But there was also the genuinely spontaneous standing ovation for Alison Krauss and Robert Plant when they walked up the stage steps to receive their Buckle award. The audience gave a similarly genuine ovation after seeing and hearing Faith Hill and Tim McGraw together on the show.

But the musical moment of the evening for me was the powerful and haunting delivery of "Life in a Northern Town," sung by Sugarland, Little Big Town and Jake Owen. It seems at first an unlikely choice for a country awards show. It was written and recorded in 1985 by the British folk-rock group The Dream Academy and ostensibly is about the British singer Nick Drake, who died of a drug overdose in 1974. The three artists covered it on the Sugarland "Change for Change Tour." Subsequently, the concert footage of "Life in a Northern Town" was made into a music video for CMT.

It's full of dreamy, folk music lyrics such as:

They sat on the stoney ground
And he took a cigarette out
And everyone else came down
To listen.
He said, "In winter 1963
It felt like the world would freeze
With John F. Kennedy
And the Beatles."

But the hook is the hypnotic chant of:

Ah hey ma ma ma
Life in a northern town.
Ah hey ma ma ma
Life in a northern town.

All together, these song elements along with Little Big Town's four intricately intertwined harmonies, Jennifer Nettles' sugary yet gritty vocal and Owen's grounded singing make this a gorgeous song. Many people in this audience were seeing Sugarland, Little Big Town and Owen do it together live for the first time. And they liked it very much. Even the young Miley Cyrus fans around me, who had gotten bored once they had seen their Miley, quit their wrestling and whining and grew silent and listened to the song, especially to the chanting.

In an excerpt from author Joe Nick Patoski's new book, Willie Nelson: An Epic Life, you can start to see how Nelson's stubborn ways earned him his icon status.

There is nothing new about him, and that's just what The Tennessean digs about George Strait and his latest album.

Does marrying a musician increase your earnings? This story takes a close look at what star nuptials -- like Tim & Faith -- do to sales.

Lady Antebellum hits People.com to talk about meeting each other, stumbling onto a band name and stocking the bus with Sour Patch Kids. And band member Charles Kelley opens up to the Charlotte Observer about how he just wasn't cut out for the working life in North Carolina.

Hey everyone,

Today is another exciting day. The CMT Music Awards are tonight! I'm getting ready for the show right now, and I'm bringing my sister Marabeth as my date! I can't believe I'm going to the awards tonight. (In a way, I'm glad I got booted from DWTS so I could come.) It's a first time for me, and a lot of my favorite artists are going to be there (Reba, Brad, Sugarland, Tim and Faith, oh geez, so many).

I'm wearing a Roberto Cavalli dress that to me is perfect for spring. Too bad it's 45 degrees here.

Anyways, thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope you tune in to the awards tonight! JH

Every week, I like to see who's at the top of the country sales chart, even though it's usually the same folks - Kenny Chesney, Carrie Underwood, Taylor Swift, etc. But this week I decided to start from the bottom up. You might be as surprised as I am at these low sales by familiar names.

Let's start with the hits compilations released late last year. Faith Hill's The Hits isn't even halfway to a half-million copies, so no gold album there. Back in 1999, Breathe sold more than seven million copies. Meanwhile, Trisha Yearwood's Greatest Hits hasn't cracked 90,000 copies yet. Songbook: A Collection of Hits, from 1997, sold more than four million copies. Both of these singers have released some amazing songs over the years, and they put on a good face for country music (even when that face is screaming out, "WHAT?!?!?) but I think they simply waited too long. Their careers have kind of cooled off in the last few years. Plus, in the digital age, if you already have the older albums on your computer or iPod, you can just add the new tracks for a few bucks.

I would imagine that Blake Shelton and Joe Nichols will release Greatest Hits albums in the next year or so, because their current albums simply aren't moving. Shelton's Pure B.S. is just under 265,000, after nearly a year on the chart. You can add about 11,000 copies to that total when you consider the additional sales of his Collector's Edition, which certainly includes repeat buyers. Nichols is being outsold by Jason Michael Carroll and Bucky Covington, although they're toward the bottom of the chart too.

And who's at the top? Alan Jackson, with Good Time, showing that there is still a place for longevity on the country sales chart - but not as much as you might think.

I've been reading Three Dog Nightmare: The Continuing Chuck Negron Story, a book about the tragic fall and personal resurrection of one of the lead voices from the pop band Three Dog Night. In it, Negron makes a claim that the band was one of the first to pack stadiums with a rock show.

The Beatles had done it before, at New York's Shea Stadium, and there were other bands that played stadiums, though many of them fell far short of filling them out. But I'll bet no one in the Fab Four's mid-‘60s era -- or in Three Dog Night's early-‘70s prime -- ever thought country music would be capable of that.

So this week's anniversary of the first George Strait stadium tour is one worth celebrating. Strait brought in 56,000 fans on March 14, 1998, to Sun Devil Stadium in Arizona for a lineup that featured Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, John Michael Montgomery, Lee Ann Womack and others. And Strait continued doing stadium tours with massive talent rosters for several more years before pulling back to his traditional in-the-round arena format.

What's now amazing is that while the stadium date is still a country rarity, it happens much more frequently than anyone could have predicted in the past. Kenny Chesney is playing 14 of those dates this summer, supported by a rotating list of acts that includes Keith Urban, LeAnn Rimes, Big & Rich, Gary Allan and Luke Bryan, among others. Toby Keith has offered a handful of stadium shows as well.

Strait could likely pick up and fill out stadiums again, if he chose, and you can imagine Keith Urban, Tim McGraw, Brooks & Dunn and Shania Twain (remember her?) doing the same thing. In fact, when the Gridiron Bash -- a strange, college-football-related fan competition -- lined up stadiums across the U.S. for April, a surprising number of country lineups were employed: Alan Jackson in Alabama, Dwight Yoakam in West Virginia, Dierks Bentley and Wynonna in Kentucky, Montgomery Gentry and Taylor Swift in Tennessee.

At last week's Country Radio Seminar, one booking agent noted that outside of such longstanding classic-rock icons as the Rolling Stones and U2, there's no stronger genre for live shows these days than country music.

Considering that a lot of country artists were happy to play high-school gymnasiums and small county fairs at the time Three Dog Night was playing those stadium dates, it's tough to find stronger support for the upward transformation that's taken place in country music.

What's Tim McGraw gonna do with a 50,000-square-foot warehouse? Could the north Nashville property he rented for a month be a practice hall? Or just storage space for his upcoming tour merchandise?

Get some good Georgia cooking no matter where you live. Trisha Yearwood's new cookbook, with foreword by her husband Garth Brooks, is set for delivery in early April.

No, it's not an April Fool's stunt. Strait Country, the George Strait radio station, debuts on XM satellite on April 1.

Want some live music with that strip steak? Eddie Montgomery is planning to build a steakhouse and entertainment complex in the bluegrass region of Kentucky.

It's not quite official yet. But to unofficially kick off the Democratic National Convention, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill and Sheryl Crow are unofficially expected to play at an environmental concert in Denver. Unofficially, of course.