With The 42nd Annual CMA Awards only days away, we thought we’d take this opportunity to offer soundbites from key nominees in the Album, Single, Song, and Musical Event of the Year categories…

Album of the Year

  Brooks & Dunn talk about the meaning of “cowboy” in their CMA Album of the Year nominated Cowboy Town album. (:32)
Kix: “‘Cowboy’ means more than a guy that rides a horse and lassos cows anymore. Cowboy’s just kind of that, that reckless abandon, shoot-from-the-hip in whatever you’re doing. And it’s got a sense of cool about it, too, and…but you can’t really put your finger on one place — not what we’re talkin’ about — ’cause you…cowboys all over California.”
Ronnie: “There’s cowboys all over Wall Street. It’s all over anywhere.”
Kix: “It’s coast to coast…”
Ronnie: “L.A., cowboys everywhere, cowgirls. That’s just, you know, we’ll make it synonomous with a good time.”

  Kenny Chesney reflects on the songs that make up his CMA Album of the Year nominee, Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates. (:22)
“These were the songs that hit me the most, and hit me the hardest and hit me in the right spot, and because there was a bit of me in a few of ’em, and there was a lot of me in a lot of ’em. I do pride myself on bein’ a songwriter, but I pride myself on tryin’ to find the best songs possible, too, and so I did that this time, I think, and was able to have a thread of my life run through all of ’em.”

  Alan Jackson — who wrote all 17 songs on his CMA Album of the Year nominated Good Time — chats about finding song ideas. (:38)
“Some of the better hooks come from if you’re with a group of people, and everybody’s just talkin’, you know, and they’re sayin’ a bunch of nonsense. And a lot of times, somebody will phrase something differently. I mean, something you’ve heard a hundred times, but the way they phrase it will sound like the song. Just the way they put the words together, and it will sound like a song title. Like I’ve said before, you just find ’em wherever. I’ve heard ’em in dialogue in movies or in a magazine ad or billboard or just wherever. And then some of ’em just come clean out of thin air. You know, you just, all of a sudden, you’re hummin’ this melody, and this hook just pops up there (laughs). I don’t know. It’s pretty strange.”

  Carrie Underwood talks about a greater involvement in writing songs on her CMA Album of the Year nominee, Carnival Ride. (:44)
“It was a lot easier to really get in with the writers on this one because I knew a little bit more of what I was doing. I had a lot more confidence about myself, and, you know, that I could potentially have something to bring to the table and just realizing that I had just as much to offer as anybody else. And you know, this was, they were my songs, so just getting in there with them and getting the confidence and everything. I know I still have a lot to learn about it, but it was just, it was easy to get in there and bring somethin’ to the table and be a bigger part of it and really be, you know, one of the writers on the song, not just in the same room with them while they were writing. But it was really cool to get in there and see what I could do, and I, yeah, learned from it and had fun with it.”

Single of the Year

  Kenny Chesney reflects on his CMA Single of the Year nominee, “Don’t Blink.” (:32)
“As good as my life is out there on the road, and as good as everything is, it’s still really hard for me to stop and take it all in. And that’s what touched me about this song. Because, you know, I’ve blinked, and I’ve been on the road 14 years, and it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long. I opened for Patty Loveless in November of ’93, and I’ve not left the road yet. I mean, in some ways, it seems like it’s been, you know, 14 minutes than 14 years. And it all happened in a blink of an eye, and I’m certain in some ways, life is like that, too.”

  Miranda Lambert’s “Gunpowder & Lead” is a CMA Single of the Year nominee, and when the song was first released, she talked about what the song means to her. (:41)
“It’s a really powerful song. It’s definitely somethin’ that people are gonna either love or hate, I think. But I will just go on to say about the song that I was…when I was 14 years old, my parents took in abused women and children, and I’ve never talked about that before. From like 14 to 17, I had to share my room with, you know, a mom and a daughter, and my brother had to share with two brothers, and their mom lived downstairs, and it was a three-bedroom house. And there was four families living there at one time. This song is actually about waiting for a husband to get out of jail, so she can shoot him (laughs). But it came from a really real place in my life, and so I want people to kind of see it for that, and it really has a meaning to me.”

Song of the Year

  Alan Jackson talks about that cool sound effect that opens his CMA Song of the Year nominee, “Good Time.” (:35)
“That’s called a vocoder. And it’s just a…you plug an instrument into, microphone into your instrument, and whatever you say in there, it comes through the instrument and talks that part. And so that’s what that ‘good time’ is. It sounds so funky. It’s not some kind of electronic computer deal we did. It’s actually an instrument. The guy goes in there and speaks that in there, and it comes out. And I think they used it a lot over the years on up until the ’70s and ’80s for radio stations like ‘WKR…,’ you know, or whatever. They would use that system. But I thought that was kind of neat, but nobody’s gonna know what it is if we don’t tell ’em.”

  Brad Paisley considers his CMA Song of the Year nominee, “Letter to Me,” one of his “proudest songwriting moments.” (:38)
“This song is one of my proudest songwriting moments because I’ve never written a song and then cried…and I did that with this. And I tried to play it for my wife, and I cried the first time I played it. And it’s not really that kind of song. It doesn’t make everybody cry or anything, but it kills me because, you know, not everything’s true in it, but not everything had to be, to be as honest actually as it feels. That was the ironic part. By stretching the truth a little bit, you feel like I’m gonna tell ya everything, in the song, and that was what I wanted to do and was to really get the point across that this is something that I wish I could say to myself.”

Musical Event of the Year

  Kenny Chesney comments on George Strait and their CMA Musical Event of the Year nominee, “Shiftwork.” (:19)
“George is dignified but, you know, he’s a guy that likes to have a lot of fun.  We had a lot of things in common on that end. And if I’d ever thought that I was gonna do a duet with George Strait, you know, it would have probably been on some song like ‘Nobody in His Right Mind Would’ve Left Her’ or somethin’, a song like that. And I never did think it would be a big ol’ pile of shiftwork, but I’m glad it is.”