CMT Blog: Video Blog

As an aspiring musician, Suzy Bogguss used to travel around the U.S. in her camper van, singing Western tunes and sweet ballads along the way. She's recreating that experience with her family this summer by visiting lots of natural wonders and playing a few shows, too. She's documenting the journey with several video blogs on her Web site. It sure is fun to hear her yodeling at the pot luck dinner. She's writing quite a few blogs as well, so you can catch up on her visits to the Arches National Park and her rafting trip down the Colorado River, and stay tuned as she makes her way to Yellowstone later this week.

Editor's note: A native of Australia, singer-songwriter is no stranger to Nashville, but she's learning more about the CMA Music Festival through her travels around downtown Nashville this week. Fisher's current single and music video is titled "Don't Chase Me."

Editor's note: Newcomer Shea Fisher is grabbing attention with her spirited video for "Don't Chase Me." This week, the Australian-born singer-songwriter is making her presence known at the CMA Music Festival, meeting fans and learning that the U.S. and Australia are perhaps divided by a common language.

Editor's note: Chuck Wicks will be providing video blogs throughout this week's CMA Music Festival in Nashville. This time around, he takes you backstage at the Country Weekly fashion show at the Wildhorse Saloon.

Editor's note: Chuck Wicks will be providing video blogs throughout the CMA Music Festival taking place this week in Nashville. In this first installment, he talks about the essential items required for survival.

In anticipation of her taping of The Oprah Winfrey Show, Jennifer Nettles put together a little video blog on her personal Web site. And how much of a big deal does she think Oprah is? "So huge, that I'm sure if Jesus comes back in our lifetime, he's probably gonna go there to get the word out." She belts out a little "Go Oprah" chant, then tells all her fans (or anyone else who stumbled onto her site when they Googled "Oprah" and "Sugarland") to watch because it's the best show on television. Nettles ends the video blog with the ever-hopeful sentiment of anyone who has ever seen the show: "Maybe she'll give every body a brand new car. Or maybe they'll all be touched by the sweet message when she and I become best friends." To watch the video, click on "journal" when you get to the homepage.

Five minutes of Taylor Swift is all you need to get up to speed on her exhaustingly crazy whirlwind of a life. You can see bits of Swift on Saturday Night Live hanging with the cast. A little clip of her in a sleek black bob wig in NoHo shooting CSI. Then off to Europe for three weeks, where she gets a double-decker tour bus, checks out her German Wikipedia page, hears her song on the radio (in Scotland!) and admires the Danke signs along the road. But when she gets back to Nashville, she seems pretty grossed out by the leftovers her dad and brother ate while they were left to fend for themselves. We can't all be BFFs with Swift and travel all over the world with her, but this video sure makes it seem like she wishes we were there.

Taylor Swift's sophomore album, Fearless, was released Tuesday (Nov.12), so now we can hear how her songwriting has progressed since her debut in 2006. There was no need to wait to see how she had been keeping busy between releases, though, since she is one of the first major artists to truly embrace and benefit from video blogs, MySpace and the like. In keeping with her routine, here are two more video blogs done for USA Today. I think the second one is from two days ago, and in it, she hints that there will be some surprises for her performance at the CMA Awards (remember the ACMs?). After watching videos like these every week and reading her MySpace posts, you can't help but start to feel like you know her, and I think that's what people love. We've all seen behind-the-scenes footage of movie stars and musicians doing their thing, but most of us haven't watched that same footage of someone who feels like a friend. Until Taylor, that is.