These Are a Few of My Favorite Things

Anyone who has ever ridden in my car knows that I love country music. My iPod is stocked with everything from Shania to Strait, Reba to Rascal and Cash to Carrie. Don't be fooled by my California childhood. I know all the words to all the songs and am totally OK with all the heat I've taken from friends over the years who might call this music "cheesy." Pish posh, people. Say what you want, but when Whiskey Lullaby comes on the shuffle, I am not above shedding a single tear to it's sweet, sweet melodies.

Besides loving the music, I love the culture of country music and the way it's so different from every other genre. Things like it's support of other artist's successes, it's blatant religious themes and it's conservative patriotism are all reasons why country is my favorite! And one of the only times that all these amazing ingredients come together as one to create the world's most perfect storms are country music awards shows.

I look forward to the CMA's, the ACM's, the CMT's and everything in between all year long because no other awards shows have so much glitter, good music and legitimately funny jokes.

A brand spankin' new award show this year was the CMT's Artist of the Year Special where CMT (the Country equivalent of MTV) honored this years biggest acts including The Zac Brown Band, Jason Aldean, Carrie Underwood, Taylor Swift and Lady Antebellum. They got awards presented by country legends and mentors. But the best part of the show was the preformances. Carrie and Jason (I refer to them on first name basis because in my delusional world, I know that we'd all be such good friends) each preformed some of their biggest hits themselves. Obviously awesome, but nothing to write home about (you can watch those here and here). Meanwhile, the rest of the honorees had other artist either cover their songs or play with them.

Maroon 5 covered Taylor Swift's "Mine" and love her or hate her (I happen to love her, she can do no wrong in my eyes) she's what's hot right now in country music. It was fine. I like the original better, but their rendition was a completely different take on it. PS- how cute are Swifty and Gyllenhaal together?

Zac Brown Band played their new single "Colder Weather" which is a song that I already love just on it's own, but with a special guest, Amos Lee it got about 87 times better. ZBB is one of my favorite new artists and every time I hear them perform, I am more and more convinced that they will be around for a long time.

The final great performance was Lady Antebellum's huge hit of the year "Need You Now" covered by the amazing Adele and Darius Rucker (Darius, you will always be Hootie to me). When they first said that they'd be singing together, I didn't quite know how well I would like their voices together, but I ended up really liking it! The embedding code isn't quite working, so if you want to watch it (and I highly recommend you do) click..........here.

All of this to say, after watching the show, I had warm fuzzy feelings in my belly and I wanted to eat a little bit of Chicken Fried on my Big Green Tractor and have Jesus Take the Wheel as I Run to You. Ahhh, yes. Today was the Best Day.

(PS- While I was watching, I saw a commercial for "Letters for Lyrics" which is an awesome program being put on by Ram Trucks and The Zac Brown Band to support our troops. If you click here and write a letter to a soldier, not only do they get great Christmas support from us at home, but they also get a free copy of ZBB's new CD. It takes literally 1 minute just to write up to 700 characters. It's a pretty win win deal, if you ask me.)