The Palm Beach Post (April 21st 2006)

Shelton strives to take his music to ever higher levels

Blake Shelton's love affair with music started before he even knew what love was.

When he was 8 years old, his mother heard him singing in his bedroom and signed him up to perform in the talent portion of a local beauty contest.

Shelton has been studying music and performing pretty much continually since, and the tall, handsome Oklahoman will play his parade of hits Saturday at the Sugar Festival in Clewiston.

"Florida has been my favorite place to do concerts since I started performing with hits in 2001," Shelton said by phone from Nashville, where he was getting ready to perform at the Grand Ole Opry. "I seem to have a strong hold in the Southeast and especially in Florida. We sell lots of records down there. Looking back I think it's because of the song Ol' Red. People really liked the story and I really hit home with it."

The crowd at the Sugar Festival will likely pale beside the crowds Shelton has been playing for the last year as the opening act for Rascal Flatts. Shelton admits that no one knew whether the marriage of Rascal Flatts' contemporary country and his own traditional sound would work.

"You do a lot of things and hope you make the right decisions to get to that next level. (Touring with Rascal Flatts) may be the best decision I've made overall. It made for a good combination, because I was drawing a different crowd than they were and it just worked for both of us."

As a thank-you, the guys in Rascal Flatts gave Shelton a 1977 Toyota Land Cruiser. "They had it totally rebuilt and painted fire engine red, and on the side, it says Ol' Red. I don't know anybody that's been better to me in the business. Jay (DeMarcus) and I musically really connected and he's going to be producing some stuff for me on my next album."

Making the charts

Shelton's voice has matured since he released his first, self- titled CD in 2001. "I think it's from being out on the road a lot. Your voice is a muscle and any muscle you're constantly working out gets stronger. My range is better, both low end and high end, but I think it's really about learning to relax and you convince yourself that these people are here to see you, and when you learn to relax about that and not be afraid of it, I think naturally you start doing everything better."

Shelton's first single, Austin, a love song told on a telephone answering machine, was a smash that went to No. 1. The second single, All Over Me, just cracked the Top 20. It took a song about those country music staples - a cheating wife, a prison term and a dog - to earn Shelton his second No. 1.

Did Shelton hesitate to release Ol' Red, a song about man's best friend? "Oddly enough, I didn't. I knew in my heart that it was a hit song. I've had bigger hits but I still think that's my signature song."

Shelton says his career highlight to date is "my first album, when it went gold. It's one thing to have hits on the radio and another thing to realize that 500,000 people have gone out and spent their hard-earned money to buy a record we made. No one can ever take that away from me. It still thrills me every time I walk by and see those things on the wall."

His musical hero

Shelton's musical hero has always been singer Earl Thomas Conley.

"His voice always got to me. Whatever he was trying to do to me, he could do. If he was singing a partying song, it made me want to do that. If it was a crying song, I was crying. He had the ability to turn a song into a reality."

Shelton took that lesson and ran with for his third No. 1, The Baby, a weeper from the first line to the last by Harley Allen and Michael White. "That song is written from the heart. It's a true story about White's relationship with his mother, right up until the end. They wrote that so honest and so real, there wasn't a lot of flowered-up images, they just laid the absolute truth out there. There's something real sweet and something that's hard to listen to about it too.

"I don't think it's a good idea to try to hold back your emotions on stage. That's your job to expose yourself emotionally, to convince people, to make people feel what you're feeling, to live it. To get them to think about it and forget whatever is going on in their life for the moment. That's why they're coming out to those shows. If it means you cry while you're singing, then do it, or if you laugh while you're singing, then do it. Get them involved make them see you're going through whatever you're singing about."

Shelton's not ready to rest on his laurels yet. "There are always other things to strive for. I want to go to the next level, and the next level after that. It's hard for me to complain about anything. We're on our third gold album and I'm getting to do things other people only dream about.

"I try not to look back too much, I want to save that for one of these days when I'm old and no one remembers me. That's when I want to stop and get excited about the past. I'll be the old man that brags about everything he's done one of these days. It's going to be a lot of fun."

Don't be too surprised if you find him doing it in a rocking chair in Florida.