The Tennessean (Jan. 2nd 2003)
Listen up, there’s more from Blake
Shelton likes to sing you a story, and he's wondering how his own tale will end
Blake Shelton loves a story song. He loves them so much they're becoming his niche.
"There's a big gap out there for a song that starts with a character and ends with a punch line," he says. "You just don't hear 'em anymore."
Shelton doesn't mean songs that end with a joke. He means arrival, closure. He means the kind of suspense and resolution achieved in Ol' Red, his hit about a convict, a warden, two dogs and a prison break. Or the reconciliation by voicemail that capped off his smash debut single Austin.
Not only do songs like those stand out on the airwaves, which are cluttered with inert declarations of emotion, Shelton believes they give the audience credit for being more attentive than some radio programmers assume they are.
"Do people really listen long enough to follow a story like that in a song? Austin is proof that they do," Shelton says with pride.
Shelton's own story is taking a dramatic turn because of his latest single, a life-journey song called The Baby by Harley Allen and Michael White. It follows a mother/son relationship from beginning to end, and by being specific and universal, it makes the most of its heart-tugging sentiment without being greeting-card sticky.
It is, in short, pure country, and Shelton says he knew the minute he heard it that it needed to be recorded and released. There was never any debate inside the label, he reports. The song looked like a home run.
The Baby is confirming Shelton's hunches with each passing week. The song stands at No. 10 on the Dec. 28 Billboard country chart after only nine weeks, making it one of the fastest-rising songs of 2002. Artist and label are pretty confident the song will go No. 1 early in the new year.
"If (it's) not going to be a big record, than maybe I don't understand enough about the music industry," Shelton says.
Shelton is gearing up to release his second album, The Dreamer, early this year. He's returning from a couple of months off after a year that saw him play about 200 shows around the country and his debut album sell more than a half-million copies. Nevertheless, he's nervous.
"This is the big chance to go away," he said in a recent interview at his label, Warner Bros. "I've been worried about it, because I don't think there's anything else in the world I love this much. I can't imagine doing anything else for a living. And it's such a fickle business. ... I'm always thinking ... this could be the last one."
Though Shelton is only 26, this chance to have a second chance has been a long time coming. He moved to Nashville with stars in his eyes at 17 years old, after a child's lifetime of playing talent shows, small theaters and a few bars in and around his hometown of Ada, Okla. He had met songwriter Mae Boren Axton in Oklahoma, and she gave him work painting her house while he got accustomed to Music City.
At first, that meant sitting at home trying to write one song a night in his $300-a-month Berry Hill apartment. But soon he found a job copying tapes at a publishing company and learning the world of writers' nights and demo sessions. And he was invited into a group of young writers who shared contacts and played at Douglas Corner Cafe.
"For the first time I started networking with people, which is something I had never done," Shelton recalls.
A friend introduced him to Bobby Braddock, who heard his voice on a songwriter's demo tape. Shelton knew of Braddock's legendary success as a writer, including George Jones' He Stopped Loving Her Today and Tammy Wynette's D-I-V-O-R-C-E, both co-written with Curly Putnam. More recently, Braddock was on the charts with Toby Keith's I Wanna Talk About Me.
Braddock helped Shelton secure a writer's deal with music publisher Sony/Tree and took over development of his career. It wasn't long before Giant Records offered the artist a deal. But it was long before anything came of that.
"We got a release date from the record company. And as we'd get closer to the release date, they'd call a meeting and say, 'Well, we've got to push it back.' That happened over and over again for three years," Shelton says. "I probably had six release dates that never happened."
During the interminable wait, Shelton found Austin and added it to the album. Braddock convinced him to make it his first single, and the rest is history. It spent five weeks at No. 1 and earned him a brief CMA awards show performance and R&R magazine's honor as breakthrough artist of the year.
Complicating matters, Giant Records folded and half its roster was dropped just as Austin was climbing the charts. But Giant parent company Warner Bros. picked up Shelton and groomed him as its new male frontrunner.
Shelton still has work to do to clarify his musical personality. Today, he's hovering between a soulful redneck (his term) country singer and just another heartthrob balladeer. While Ol' Red evoked the swampy throb of Charlie Daniels, Austin was a gimmicky tear-jerker.
Shelton's first major tour put him on a triple bill with soft-adult country acts Jamie O'Neal and Lonestar. He recalls that while those audiences ate up Austin and his follow-up, the falsetto ballad All Over Me, they were nonplussed by Ol' Red and his covers of Redneck Girl and Family Tradition.
He has other crowds who see him as a potential heir to Hank Williams Jr. or Charlie Daniels. Somewhere in between may be the path of his favorite artist, '80s hit-maker Earl Thomas Conley, who blended hard country with commercial conviviality to become a giant on radio.
"I've done a lot of things to contradict myself, and that's going to continue to happen," Shelton says with candor, "because I don't really know who I am as a person yet, you know? I'm 26 and trying to figure out a lot of things. That's going to reflect in my music."