You Gotta Laugh
Blake Shelton opens up about his high school escapades and good times with girlfriend Miranda Lambert.
by	February 11, 2008
CW recently talked with Blake about Clash of the Choirs, his gorgeous new single and karaoke singing. Here are some excerpts from that exclusive interview with the Oklahoma native. CW: Based on your experience directing your singers for Clash of the Choirs, do you think you might ever want to go into the studio and produce another artist at one point? BS: That would be interesting to do. At this point, if I was to drop everything, I think my strong suit would be helping somebody with their song selection and I know that some producers in Nashville, basically, that's all they do. To me, that's not enough, that's not good enough. I think you need more ideas than that and you need to be thinking more of out the box and arrangements and things like that. And I'm just not so sure, even though I have my ideas of what I like, that it would be the best for me to produce another artist just because I may produce an album that I thought would be good for me . . . and not necessarily be good for that artist and what would make the masses buy into what they are doing musically. I still don't think that at this point, even if I wanted to do it, that I would be very good at it. CW: I love your version of "Home". Tell me about the first time you heard it. A:It's funny I was making the Barn and Grill album and I walked into the President of Warner Brothers, his name is Bill Bennett, and I played him some of the cuts off the album and he said, "What about this song here?" And he played me "Home" by Michael Buble and I'd never heard the song before and I said, "You know what? I'm making my record. I don't need this from you." And I may have turned a deaf ear to it just because of that, just kind of being a punk. I didn't know who he was and I think the way it hit me is, here I am basically still a developing artist myself, I don't want to hear about this other artist that they are excited aout at Warner Brothers, even though he wasn't country, he was whatever genre of music he fits in. He definitely had nothing to do with country. And looking back on it, Bill was probably playing it for me for this reason here. He probably thought it would be a good thing for me to record and I probably took it as, "I don't care about any other artist's album right now, I'm trying to make mine." But, I remember that meeting distinctly because a year or so later—and Miranda is always putting music on my iPOD for me that she thinks I'll like—and I ended up with "Home&uqot; on my IPOD and listened to it and fell in love with it. Then the next thing I knew I was walking around singing it all the time and I ended up learning it and performing it a few times. And last November, I believe during CMA week, they did a fly away contest with some fans and had a private party at the Warner Brothers building and I performed "Home" and I remember as I was performing it, I looked up and I saw Bill Bennett standing there and he kind of had a smirk on his face. And it was like it hit me, wow, he was right. There's something about this song for me. After I performed it I said, "Well Bill, that's for you. I should have paid attention to you a while back. You know what you're talking about I guess." The bigger thing was, the entire staff at Warner Brothers got really excited about it and it's kind of a strange deal. What we've decided to do is we went in and recorded it just to see if the magic was really there and everybody's gotten excited about it now and they are relaunching the Pure BS album with "Home" as a cut on the album. For more on Blake Shelton, check out the Feb. 25 issue of Country Weekly.