The Tennessean (Nov. 17th 2008)

Blake Shelton gets cozy in ‘Startin’ Fires’

Picture it: Johnston County, Okla., 2008. A pretty, 25-year-old blonde makes a trip to her town's lumberyard to pick up some white paint.

Her next stop is the gas station, but when she opens her car door, the gallon bucket rolls out and blankets the ground with white paint.

The woman furiously dials her boyfriend, but he doesn't answer. Sometime later, the boyfriend pulls into the gas station and witnesses the scene. He soon learns that his girlfriend is responsible for the pool of white paint, and because of it, he knows just where to find her.

The boyfriend is country singer Blake Shelton, his girlfriend, country singer Miranda Lambert. Her destination, he said with a laugh, was plain to see.

"Here's the best part (of the story)," Shelton said. "The paint went all under her car so she had to drive through it. You can watch as her tire tracks pull out of the gas station, onto the road, go two blocks down the road, and pull right into the liquor store, right up to the front door of the liquor store. And then they pull back out and slowly fade away as they go toward her house. So everybody in town knows Miranda went straight to the liquor store that day after she left the lumberyard. That's the big news in our home town."

And as far as news goes, that's the way Shelton likes it: slow and not much to report. He moved back to Oklahoma from Nashville a couple of years ago to escape the hubbub of Music Row and now spends the majority of his days farming, fishing, deer hunting or maybe watching one of his favorite television shows, The Golden Girls.

"I watched two episodes last night," he said. "The sarcasm is greatness. . . . My sides hurt I laughed so much."

But Shelton has spent a lot of time away from his Oklahoma oasis in the past few weeks. The singer recently wrapped up his first tour with Lambert. Then he had to head to Nashville for the Country Music Association Awards and to promote his new album, Startin' Fires, which is in stores Tuesday.

"Pure BS (Shelton's last album) is an album I made as I was going through a divorce, and if my job is to sing things that I can relate to and sing about things I've gone through, Pure BS is definitely that album," he said. "The difference is Startin' Fires is more of a reflection of just who I am as a person outside of something I'm going through currently. It's about a lifestyle. That's what I love about it ... It's got things I love to do. It's about growing corn and drinking beer and fishing and hunting and things like that."

Shelton said his last hit, the multiple-week No. 1 song "Home" - a cover of Canadian crooner Michael Buble's hit - gave him the leeway to stretch creatively on the new record, "because I think people finally have realized that I'm not going to go away." An example, he said, is lead single "She Wouldn't Be Gone."

"The melody is so much different than anything else on the radio," Shelton said. "It's a song where the guy knows he's screwed up, and as a listener you know he's screwed up and the relationship is pretty much over. In this guy's mind, there's just a hair of hope that if he finds her, he can fix this thing and make it right, even though you know it's probably not going to happen.

"I'm able to sing that song with a lot of energy and a lot of passion because of the desperation that this guy feels. It's written right into the lyrics, and I've never heard anything quite like it."

Humor wrapped in 'Rug'

Shelton said another song on the album provides a real window into the life he and Lambert lead in Oklahoma. They each have a farm, but they wrote the tongue-in-cheek "Bare Skin Rug" around the fire pit one night behind Shelton's house.

"We sit back there and light the fire and drink beer and play our guitars," said the singer. "One night we wrote that song, and we were cracking up while we were writing it because it's just so goofy. We were getting all this pressure from the record company to do a duet, and so we had written this duet and I said, 'I'll tell you what, we'll do it.' And people really want to know what we're like and what our personalities are like and what we do when we're at home. This is it."

"Bare Skin Rug," a ditty about two backwoods country kids figuring out what love is, was recorded the same way it was written - around Shelton's fire pit.

"Everything in the background, everything you hear on that track, is real," he said. "Those are our crickets. It's live. That's me playing acoustic. It's out of tune. The vocals aren't perfect, but we wanted it raw like that because that's a glimpse of what we're like and what we do. Hopefully people will be more interested in that than some big power ballad that doesn't mean anything to either one of us."

Romance has ups, downs

As romantic as it sounds, that isn't to imply that their relationship is void of the occasional bruise. In fact, Shelton said the relationship was still in recovery mode after the couple's recent co-headlining tour. The crux of the problem: Each of them thought the other's tour bus smelled. Though Shelton likes cats, his reasons involved Lambert's small kitten; her reasons involved him just being a guy.

"I think the tour pushed us together to the point where it squashed us a little bit," Shelton said. "I don't think we will be doing that again for a long time, but we found out the things we wanted to find out. First of all, the good news is it worked and people came and we sold a lot of tickets together. . . . I'm not saying we won't do it again, but for now, while we're still developing our careers, I think we're going to wait a couple of years before we try it again."

Now that the tour is over and Shelton is almost done promoting Startin' Fires, life will soon get back to normal for the pair in their small town of about 1,200. The biggest store in the area is a Family Dollar, Shelton said. That Lambert is able to shed her country singer persona and be at home there is one of Shelton's favorite things about her.

"When we're home, there is no mention of the music industry. There's music, but there's no mention of a video or a chart or album sales or anything like that. It's amazing. When we hit the Johnston County line, that stuff all gets left behind us.

"She becomes a completely normal 25-year-old girl - so normal it would blow your mind. And hopefully I turn into just a guy. My priorities are taking care of my ranch, filling up my deer feeders, and all those things I've got going on, and working on stuff. We're not people in the public eye anymore when we get there. And that's my favorite thing about us and why we work together. We have lives outside of music and it's not easy, but it's the thing that keeps us sane."