Billboard (Jan. 22nd 2014)
Blake Shelton Uses R&B Effect to Make a Country Impression on Latest Hit
[edited version]
They recorded the demo with O'Donnell on vocals two months later at engineer Dan Frizsell's Legends Studio, a recording site in Nashville's Berry Hill neighborhood. Willis introduced the wah effect, and within a few weeks, Big Tractor Music GM Clay Myers got Hendricks to listen. Myers didn't need to pitch the demo to anyone else: Hendricks forwarded it to Shelton, who happens to own property adjacent to the land where the song was written. Shelton cut the master at Ocean Way before the summer was over.
"It's kind of domestic, and that's pretty much what I am now," Shelton notes. "There's a lot of elements of that song that are just so true to mine and Miranda [Lambert's] life together. It's about a guy that's just, as long as he's making her happy, then he's happy."
The banjo lines with the wah effect were missing from the original tracking session, which created some uncertainty—"There's really nothing signature about the actual track without that," Shelton says—but Hendricks welded Willis' demo performance onto the recording. Shelton cut the final vocals after that at the Los Angeles house where he stays during production on NBC's "The Voice."
"The only part of the song that I can't quite figure out, and it's actually my favorite part, is I've never actually smelled a watermelon candle," Shelton notes. "I've smelled pumpkin spice and some Christmas spirit and all kinds of peppermint. I don't know that I've ever smelled a watermelon candle. Maybe I should make them and sell them in my merch."
Other parts are extremely familiar, particularly the bridge's reference to rewriting song lyrics to get a reaction from his wife. "I try to make them disgusting," he says. "I rewrote, ‘These are my people/This is where I come from' by Rodney Atkins, and I changed it to, ‘This is my peehole/This is where I cum from.' Miranda's in the back seat, saying, ‘Don't say that.'"
The second verse's racing allusions bolster the bad-boy piece of Shelton's public image, though he concedes it's not exactly accurate.
"The truth is I'm the slowest fucking driver you've probably ever met," he admits. "I do like to go down dirt roads and stuff, but I don't like going fast. That's the only part that's just kind of me just wishing, I guess, that I had the balls to be sideways on a dirt road fast. But I'm usually driving slow, looking for deer."
In the end, it's a good enough fit that "Doin' What She Likes" caught on immediately after Warner Bros. released it to radio via Play MPE on Dec. 16. In its first month, it's already at No. 22 on Country Airplay and at No. 28 on Hot Country Songs.
The record's balancing acts—the R&B effect on a country instrument, the domesticated rebel, the watermelon candle imagined by a couple guys in the middle of hunting—are clearly connecting. That's not entirely surprising: The song's originators, Kirby and O'Donnell, balanced their reality with their fantasy self-images. They aren't much different than Shelton, who's pretty similar to the men in his core audience.
"We're two hunter dudes," Kirby says. "We don't exactly buy candles, you know. But in our minds, we picture ourselves as that guy."