Country Standard Time (January 2005)

At the bar and grill, Blake Shelton dishes it out

Life's great for Blake Shelton. After all, he just found out two days earlier that his latest single, the catchy "Some Beach" hit the top of the charts, the third time the long, lean Okie has done so.

"If you wrote me a check for $10 million, I couldn't be any happier," says Shelton in a telephone interview from the Nashville office of his record label, Warner.

"I was on stage," says Shelton, describing how he found out about his latest great news. "The way the charts are built these days, a promotion staff can follow a song minute by minute. I was on stage Sunday night in Miami. And we were towards the end of the show. It was almost midnight, and I'd just finished 'Some Beach' on the stage. I got a note passed, and it was from my promotion staff. We did it again."

A juiced up Shelton immediately lit into an encore version of his newly crowned number one song. "The crowd got two versions that night," says Shelton. "We were in the studio about half way through the album," says of "Blake Shelton's Bar & Grill," which came out at the end of October, describing how he found the song.

Album producer Bobby Braddock "brought it in, and I immediately recognized Paul Overstreet's voice singing it," Shelton says of the demo recording he heard. "When I got to the first chorus, we called him and said don't play this for anybody. We had to cut it a few times. The first version was too islandy, and it went over the top a little bit. We were going to approach it like it was a Don Williams record or Bellamy Brothers and let the groove carry the song, and I'm glad that we did."

Jimmy Buffett is another reference point, especially considering that the song mentions "Margaritaville."

Shelton, who hits the road this spring and summer with Rascal Flats, sees the Buffett connection as well. "I could too, not as much talking about the beach, but talking about the personality. Buffett has that kind of personality getting kicked when he's down...It's something that everybody goes through every day, and I think that's what people liked. I loved the humor and love that it's real polarizing. It's the kind of song that you either love it or hate it. More than anything, the overall personality fit with the rest of the album."

"Some Beach" was not the obvious single to send to radio. In fact, it was not even the first single from the disc. The Harley Allen/Jimmy Melton song "When Somebody Knows You That Well" was the first one and did not do very well.

"It was out about four or five weeks and just wasn't doing anything. We decided doing something that was 180 degrees different and try to break out of the ballad thing."

"There was a little bit of question," Shelton says of picking "Some Beach." Obviously, I was coming (without) momentum at radio, and we wanted to do whatever it took to get me airplay in a big way. This was the type of record that could either way. People could say 'we can't risk that' or 'it's going to be larger than life.'"

"Luckily once a few (radio) stations added it, they got a big response (from listeners), and it started moving up the charts. Everyone pretty much jumped on board at the same time."

This is not Shelton's first brush with big time success. "I think the coolest thing for me is there's been a number one hit on each album. That's important to me."

On Shelton's debut, he topped the charts for five weeks with "Austin" a ballad about a man's continued love for his girl.

The follow-up disc, "The Dreamer," contained the number one hit "The Baby." But in an industry where you are only as big as your latest smash hit, the failure of "When Somebody..." did not leave Shelton resting too easy.

"Absolutely, I had been (anxious)," he says. "I'd been worried about that (having hits) since the first album."

"With that first hit being so big and a ballad, it was something I've been trying to recover from ever since then," he says. "It didn't help that my next big hit was besides "Ol' Red" (a humorous song about a dog that helps free a prisoner) was 'The Baby,' another sad ballad. I wanted to do all kinds of music. As you know, sometimes people want to hear one thing from you. I get away with more than just that."

Shelton views "Barn & Grill" as "sort of a concept album, I hate to say that. We wanted to make an album that was (like) stepping into a bar hearing people's conversations around you. The drinking is just a vice, but there are reasons that they do this, and they are there."

"When I play a show and look out at the audience and look at how the country audience is. They're people who like to go out and relax. They're laid back people. They're not stressed out. They're people who like to drink beer and go out on the weekends and forget about things. More than anything, it's an album about real life."

"When we first started talking about this album, it was right when the second album came out," Shelton says. "We (Braddock and Shelton) went out to dinner one night, talking about what we wanted to do. I brought a list of songs with me."

The list contained other people's hits and "songs I wish I could have recorded. What we saw was a lot of songs that could have been in a bar or about drinking, things like 'It's Been a Great Afternoon' by Merle Haggard or the 'King is Gone (So Are You)' by George Jones. There's a bigger picture in all of them. There's a reason that they've been driven to do that."

There is no doubt "The Bartender" adheres to the drinking theme. In the sad sounding song written by Harley Allen, the bartender identifies patrons by the drink they have.

Shelton also incorporates drinking into "On a Good Day," which he wrote with Tony Martin and Tom Shapiro about three years ago.

"I had loved the song," says Shelton. "I just didn't know what to do with it. As we were picking songs, I came across that. It kind of lit me up. That's right down the middle of what we're trying to do. It was even more of a situation that I was the writer on it. It just fit with the attitude (of the CD)."

And if listeners haven't quite gotten the beer joint thing down pat, the album closes with "I Drink" by singer Mary Gauthier and Crit Harmon.

"I still think there's something in her version that we weren't able to capture," says Shelton of Gauthier, who put out several of her own albums in recent years and now is on Lost Highway. "You can tell that's her life. It's about herself, and it's hard to replace that attitude. It's hard to hear that song for me and be sad because the hook is so funny, the way she lays out - this is just a matter of fact, the way she put it 'fish swim, birds fly...' I've never heard anyone put it in words like that. She really nailed the hook. Yet it's so simple at the same time."

Shelton turns in a strong, piano-driven ballad "Goodbye Time," a 1988 hit for Conway Twitty. "The first time I heard that I was watching 'Life and Times' on TNN when TNN used to be the Nashville Network. At the end of the show, they were running the credits, and they showed Conway singing the song live. It just fascinated me. I'd never heard him sing with at much emotion before. I found a copy of the song and kept it for six or seven years and not sure why."

Until now.

"We all knew it was something we needed to do," he says.

Shelton, 28, grew up in Ada, a small town in south central Oklahoma, but he can't blame his family for getting him into music. "Nobody in my family was really into music," he says. "I had an uncle by marriage that plays guitar, and he's the one who taught me some chords, and he kind of started with guitar. I was always really fascinated by it. When I had an album, I'd read who the musicians were and the writers."

Shelton started singing when he was a wee lad of about seven. His mother entered him in singing contest. "I did some country songs or Bob Seger. That was way before karaoke tapes. I sang whatever we had around he house."

By 15, Shelton tried writing his own songs. "By then, I knew the music was more than who I was and what I wanted to do. I was writing some country songs, and they were real traditional too. Being 15, they were three-chord songs with real traditional melodies. That's naturally what I was coming up with. No doubt that was what I was meant to be doing."

"All I knew was that I loved to hunt and fish and listen to my records and figure them out on my guitar. That was about the only thing I would have been interested in."

Shelton self-admittedly wasn't much of a student.

By 15, he already had played the local version of the Opry, the McSwain Theatre with capacity 600.

At 17, Shelton was off to Nashville. "They supported my move because they knew I wasn't going to go to college,' says Shelton of his parents. "It was the only thing I was serious about. I think they figured they'd better support whatever else I was interested in or what was I going to do with my life. They knew I was serious. They knew I wasn't just goofing around."

Shelton hooked up with Braddock (he wrote "He Stopped Loving Her Today" and "D-I-V-O-R-C-E") through a Nashville songwriter friend. Braddock apparently was looking for someone to produce, but it took about a year to get the ball rolling.

Soon enough Shelton had a deal with Giant Records and a big hit with his first single.

One would think that Shelton would be on top of the world. But a funny thing happened on the way to the top - Giant Records folded.

Warner Brothers, which had been under the same musical umbrella, picked up Shelton's debut.

"I was very concerned about it. The only reason they picked up the album was because 'Austin' had been shipped to radio. They had nothing to lose at that point and put a little promotion behind it."

And a little bit apparently went a very very long way. "I don't think anybody saw that coming including myself," says Shelton of the big hit. "It was just a matter of a song created enough buzz out there that it became it's own animal and just kind of took over."

Shelton has been developing, searching for his own musical identity to an extent with "Bar & Grill" being his most country sounding album, perhaps not quite as glossy as its two predecessors.

"I just now feel I know musically what I'm wanting to do. That's basically being a country artist that sings about real life. In the first album, the first two, had a little more of a pop flair to it. I've always been pretty pretty country. This album, I let myself be who I am musically. That's what ended up coming through, a real hard core country album."