Luke Bryan (winning 1^st CMA Entertainer of the Year) OC: …big deal for me. :55
“Definitely looking back and winning my first CMA Entertainer of the Year award is something that I’ll never forget. It’s all of those memories of everything it took to get here and all the sacrifices and all the honkytonks and the late-night concerts and moving to Nashville and leaving your family and your friends, it all came together on that night. To get that from your peers of fellow country music artists was pretty amazing. You never forget it. You forever feel vindicated and you feel appreciated and you feel like you’re a member of a club, and you know no matter how long you live that you left an indelible mark on this industry based on how you go about it, how you entertain and perform. It was a big deal for me.”

Luke Bryan (CMA Entertainer win) OC: …hard to describe. 1:05
“To try to understand you would win your first CMA Award and it’s the Entertainer of the Year…I have longed and sought after many years to get one of these in my hands. To get the respect of the CMA Board and all of its voters and win this is a ginormous deal, something I could not express out on stage when I was winning it, but I can’t help but in the back of my mind want some of that respect from this body of people. So, I’m just really humbled. I think about just the hard work it took to get here, and I’m really just so blessed that this is from the CMA and I’ll never take a second of it for granted. I, honestly from the bottom of my heart, I go out on stage every night and try to sing it and perform it and entertain it like it’s my last and now, it’s like, Whew! It’s hard to describe.”

Chris Stapleton (tour set) OC: …how that works. 1:05
“Well, the set’s actually — I haven’t talked a whole lot about it – but it all functions from a sonic place. I built, people look at it and it looks like a Thunderdome and don’t know what it is. It’s a giant diffuser is what it is, so it’s meant to tune a stage every night to a certain, we cut out all the bad bass and all the bad high and so, garbage in and garbage out. A-it helps us hear better on stage and we don’t have to wear any in-ears (monitors), but also it hopefully gives more consistencies sonically in the show. Now, after we built it, we put some lights on it and it happens to look like the Death Star or something, but that’s how we wanted to approach music. We still stand in basically the same configuration we would stand in a 300-person club; we’re just in a bigger room and we made our own little room on stage that hopefully makes us feel a little more cozy, and hopefully the result is that it seems to be to try to create some of that feeling in a much larger room, you know? Some of the intimacy of playing a smaller place in a larger room would be my hope and dream for how that works.”

Chris Stapleton (tour set) 2 OC: …some of that. :18
“Dreaming up things on napkins over years, I would always draw things like ‘What can I do to make this better and easier to play on and in and hopefully have the result of something that sounds better up front?’ This is a march in that direction and hopefully it achieves some of that.”

Keith Urban (winning EOY in 2005) OC: …magical night. :43
“What I remember about the Entertainer of the Year category in 2005 was that first feeling when people say it’s just an honor to be nominated, and I thought, ‘I know what that means! I know what that feels like,’ because for me it was a huge honor to be nominated so soon into my recording career. To be in that category, it just felt unbelievably quick for me. And then when they read my name out as the winner, I think I actually said, ‘I thought I was just rounding out the category,’ because [laughs] I thought you’ve got to have four or five people in the category. I truly did not expect that to happen. It was just such a magical night.”

Luke Bryan (Blake on Idol) OC: …that he’s had. :58
“It started with Blake saying to the world that I was just dumb. So, Blake lobbed the first grenade at me, so I’m just going to have to get my artillery together. I think it’s all gonna be healthy and friendly, and I mean when the Idol deal went down, Blake sent me a text going, ‘Man, so fired up for ya. Nobody deserves a big ole TV opportunity more than you.’ But it’s all fun and healthy, and you know, Blake and I approach this business very similarly. We love to sing. We love to find great songs, and we love to smile and laugh and care our way through this business. Blake’s been one of those guys that had to work and scrape for every bit of recognition that he’s had.”

Billy Currington (Halloween) OC: …Halloween. :17
“You know, when I was a kid, I loved the trick and the treat. I loved dressing up. I was always wanting to be Dracula. That was my favorite guy. But, of course, who doesn’t love going door-to-door and getting these buckets of candy? [laughs] So, love, love Halloween.”

Brothers Osborne (carving pumpkins) OC: …or something. :25
“With our dad every year, we would go looking for pumpkins, and we would all get our own pumpkin to carve, and he would buy the biggest pumpkin that they had. It was huge. I mean, it was way too big for any one person, but he would love carving. He’s kind of an artsy guy. He was a great drawer and stuff, and he would carve the most terrifying, vicious looking, scary pumpkin you’d ever seen in your life, and it would be massive. It would be like on a 50-pound pumpkin or something.”

Brothers Osborne (Halloween candy) OC: (John) …go stale. [laughs] :34
TJ: “I would say, Snickers, Baby Ruth, Kit Kat and Reese’s too.” JOHN: “I always hated those houses that would give you bad candy, though. You’re like, ‘C’mon. Step it up.’ Spend the extra dollar on a bag, you know?” TJ: “A house when we were growing up used to give out whole candy bars. It was the best. You were like, ‘That house – that’s the honey hole of candy.’” JOHN: “I love it, and I love like at the end, like three or four days after Halloween you would see what candy was left, and it was always like those crappy cheap candies, and they would just go stale.” [laughs]

Brothers Osborne (zombie costume) OC: (John) …was so fun! :29
TJ: “Literally, you can dress up like a zombie and drag your foot behind you all day and make weird noises, and everyone finds that completely acceptable.” [laughs] JOHN: “One year I dressed up as a ‘90s redneck zombie with a mullet wig and an Alan Jackson denim coat. I never once broke character. That’s part of the thing — you can actually not break character and get away with it. And everywhere I went, even when I ordered a drink, I ordered it like a zombie that was falling apart. [laughs] It was so fun!”

Canaan Smith (Halloween) OC: …cornfields. :37
“I grew up in a Christian family. We went to a private Christian school for a while, so they didn’t allow us to celebrate Halloween like I do now. We did what was called a Hallelujah Party instead, and you still dress up and still get all the candy, but you go to the high school gym. You play games, you just do, like cornhole and the dunking booth and all kinds of stuff and win prizes, but it was nothing ever scary. I think they had like rules about what outfits you could and couldn’t wear. But now I just love freaking myself out and going to, I love going to haunted houses and haunted cornfields.”

Darius (Halloween) OC: …I’m into. :06
“Halloween’s big for me, because the kids love it. It’s my kids’ favorite holiday, so anything they’re into, I’m into.”

Dierks Bentley (Halloween) OC: … …around home. [laughs]  :23
“Oh, when I was a kid, I was all into fireworks. Growing up in Arizona, we couldn’t get ’em, so we’d have ’em shipped in illegally. I still remember the name of the guy we’d call. His name was Joe, and he’d bring in, ship ’em in a package with no writing on ’em. We were all about M-80s in the mailboxes and bottle rocket wars. To me, as a kid, Halloween was fireworks, was blowing up stuff around home. [laughs]”

Easton Corbin (Halloween) OC: …pretty warm. :26

“My grandma made a werewolf outfit for me, and I wore that one year. She got this fake hair and glued it to sweatpants and a sweatshirt. That was a hot outfit. I mean, it got pretty warm.”

Eric Church (Halloween) OC: …Franklin Street. 1:18
“My favorite Halloween costume really came, I remember when I got a little older my first year of college, there’s this thing they do every year in Chapel Hill, North Carolina – Halloween on Franklin Street. We drove down from Boone, North Carolina. I had a bunch of friends that went to University of North Carolina, and we didn’t have costumes and didn’t realize until we were on the way that we had to have costumes. So, we stopped at a costume place in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s Halloween, so there’s a run on everything and couldn’t find anything. And we end up getting sent around, driving around town. We end up finding this hole in the wall place, but they had the full costume, Sesame Street outfits. The real deal. The real ones [with] feathers and fur. We were Elmo, Cookie Monster and I was Big Bird, and the Big Bird was the actual Big Bird. It’s about 7-foot-4, and yiou looked out of the body and then you had these straps that went on since the head was a lot higher. There’s a lot of beer involved in Franklin Street, so we get down there and as the night went on, my straps broke, so the head would pivot. And so, I would be walking one way and the head would be facing the other, and it just became this funny…I didn’t know the head was on backwards. I had no idea. I see out of the body, so I’m just kinda walking around and people were talking to my ass-end. [laughs] The whole time peiople’d come up and start talking and go, ‘Hey, turn around.’ And I’d turn around, and they’d go, ‘No turn around.’ It was a mess. That year, there was no other Big Bird on Franklin Street.”

Jon Pardi (Halloween candy) OC: …during Halloween. :06
“Man! The candy corn is pretty good, and that’s seasonal, so it only kinda pops out during Halloween.”

Jon Pardi (Halloween) 1 OC: …the Superman. :15
“Man, I went through phases of costumes – the Superman costume, then it was a ninja, then I was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle one year. I remember rockin’ the Superman.”

Jordan Davis (Halloween costumes) OC: …jet black. :49
“I can remember being really big into Power Rangers. I always liked the Red Ranger. I remember being Red Ranger one Halloween. I remember me and my br4other being big into the Ninja Turtles. I was Donatello one year, which I think was the purple turtle. I think, though, my favorite Halloween was I was in college and I went as Luigi from Mario and Luigi, and I actually grew a legit mustache and dyed it jet black and ran into an e-girlfriend at the costume shop and completely forgot I had the mustache on. So, when Is saw her, she was like, ‘So, you’re going with a mustache nowadays, huh?’ [laughs] I remember being like, ‘I swear this is part of my Halloween costume.’ [laughs] When I dyed my mustache, my top lip was black for a week. Like I really did dye it jet black.”

Jordan Davis (Halloween candy) OC: …some Starbursts. :21
“My favorite Halloween candy [is] probably Reese’s or M&M’s, although I love the variety of Starburst. It’s one that I feel like I only eat at Halloween, because I feel like at Halloween one of the popular ones is the two-piece Starburst things. So, probably Reese’s, M&Ms and throw in some Starbursts.”

Jordan Davis (no candy corn) OC: …they’re awful. :05
“You know what I never got? The candy corns. I’ve never been a candy corn guy. I think they’re awful.”

Lady A (Dave Haywood costume memory) OC: …50 feet. :20
“I was a die (1/2 of a pair of dice) for Halloween. I had a big cardboard box that I had painted white and had the polka dots and stuff. And I remember I was walking up this hill to go to this hill and literally fell back down the entire hill [laughter], rolling in this giant cardboard box that I couldn’t do anything about, because I rolled down about 50-feet.”

Luke Bryan (Halloween costumes) OC: …always has. :20
“Me and Caroline did one year where I dressed up as the old lady, and she dressed up as, she called herself a dirty old man. So, she went around acting like an old man saying snide comments to everybody. That was a fun one. The main thing is Caroline is big, she loves Halloween and always has.”

Luke Bryan (Halloween) OC: …your teeth. :21
“You can find out a lot about your neighbors by what kind of candy they put out. So, well, like full bars of Snickers bars, that’s what, and Reese’s cups, [but] the old chocolate popcorn ball of stuff, that’s no good either, like Dots – you get Dots one time of year and they pull your teeth.”

Luke Bryan (Halloween) 2 OC: …with all that. :33
“My tradition for Halloween is Caroline picks the outfit. I never know what I’m wearing. So that day, I’ll talk to the neighbors ‘cause I have a tractor back there and I’ll go get my tractor and get a big long trailer, and then I’ll run down to…a couple miles from the farm, we’ve got a big hay farmer that keeps hay and you run in there and pay him for his hay bales. And I’ll load the hay up and get the hayride ready and we’ll take all the kids behind the tractor and have a fun Halloween with all that.”

LINER Billy Currington (Trick or Treat)
“Trick or Treat, baby.”

LINER Brandon Lay (Halloween)
“Hey everybody! This is Brandon Lay, wishing you a Happy Halloween.”

LINER Brothers Osborne (Halloween)
“Hey! This is TJ, and I’m John, and we are Brothers Osborne. Happy Halloween.”

LINER Canaan Smith (Halloween)
“Hey! What’s up guys? I’m Canaan Smith. Happy Halloween.”

LINER Carrie Underwood (Halloween)
“Hi! I’m Carrie Underwood, wishing you a Happy Halloween.”

LINER Clare Dunn (Halloween)
“Hey! This is Clare Dunn, wishing you a very Happy Halloween.”

LINER Darius Rucker (Halloween)
“Hey! What’s up, y’all? This is Darius Rucker, wishing you a very Happy Halloween.”

LINER Dierks Bentley (Halloween)
“Hey! It’s Dierks Bentley, wishing you a Happy Halloween.”

LINER Eric Church (Halloween)
“Hey! This is Eric Church, wishing you a very Happy Halloween.”

LINER Eric Paslay (Halloween)
“Hey! This is Eric Paslay, wishing you a very Happy Halloween.”

LINER Jordan Davis (Halloween)
“Hey! I’m Jordan Davis, wishing you a Happy Halloween.”

LINER Kacey Musgraves (Halloween)
“Hey! It’s Kacey Musgraves, and I hope you have a Happy Halloween.”

LINER Lady A (Halloween)
“Hey everybody! We are Lady Antebellum. Have a safe and Happy Halloween.”

LINER Luke Bryan (Halloween)
“Hey! What’s up, y’all? I’m Luke Bryan, wishing you a very Happy Halloween. Boo!”

LINER Sam Hunt (Halloween)
“Hey everybody! This is Sam Hunt. Happy Halloween!”

LINER Tyminski (Halloween)
“Hey everybody! I’m Tyminski, wishing you a Happy Halloween.”