Alan Jackson (CMA Music Fest) OC: …all about. :28 [NOTE: There’s a slight buzz underneath audio.]
“My daughter – three daughters – and about 10 friends every year, we have to pack into vans and get ‘em out here. They come every night. They come every night, not to see me, they come see everybody else. So, it has become more of a local event, and of course it evolved tremendously since I first started when it was Fan Fair at the old fairgrounds and signing autographs in a hot buildings. But the fans are the same, and that’s what it’s all about.”

Darius Rucker (CMA Music Fest) OC: …awesome. :48
“Music Fest is like nothing else. I say all the time that country music is the only genre that could have something like that. It’s truly amazing, when I come that weekend, people are everywhere and they want to be your best friend. It’s always cool and I love coming here. The thing that always gets me is the show. The fact that you can get that many superstars at one show all playing for free, for the same goal, to entertain those people that are in that stadium that come here for the whole week from all over the world. They come here for one week to see country music, and it’s amazing that those artists say on Friday and Saturday night, this is country music come on out. That’s awesome.”

Dierks (fans) OC: …commitment. [laughs] :22
“I know a lot of the early fans by name, because we played a lot of shows at a lot of small venues where we’d be around a lot after the shows. I’m not gonna say her name ‘cause I don’t know if she’d want me to or not, but she has like a dog print of Jake, my dog’s Jake, but she has this dog print on her shoulder with my name in the middle of the tattoo. So, tattoos are always, that’s a big deal when somebody gets your name tattooed on part of their body or something. It’s kind of a scary thing, because it’s kind of a lifelong commitment. [laughs]”

Dierks Bentley (signing a baby’s head) OC: …child’s brain. :13
“A baby’s head with a sharpie. Yeah, like a two-week old baby. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it. The woman was like, ‘Please.’ I was like, ‘Alright.’ The head at that point is so vulnerable, transparent, so I’m just hoping they didn’t get any ink in the child’s brain.”

Easton Corbin (CMA Music Fest) OC: …wouldn’t work. :25
“CMA Music Fest, it’s a great opportunity to hang out with your fans and stuff. The great thing about the country genre is it’s one of the only genres that really has a festival dedicated to their fans, and I think that’s great because without the fans we wouldn’t be here. They’re the ones that make it work. Without the fans to buy records and listen to the radio and come to the shows, it just wouldn’t work.”

Easton Corbin (fans) OC: …being here. :24
“My fans mean a great deal to me, especially the fans that come out to the shows and the ones that make it to every show around their home or in that vicinity. I even have people come here every time, in these meet-and-greet lines or maybe at the fence over there by the when you’re getting off the red carpet, I try to always make it a point to recognize those fans and just let them know how much that I care and how much I appreciate them being here.”

Eric Church (CMA Music Fest) OC: …to see.
“Well, I think it’s what makes country music unique. Find me another format that happens in, it’s just not something that happens. I think it’s about what we were talking about earlier; country music is the one for mat where the fans…the music is really about them. And we’re them; we’re not different than them. We’re not a lot of the rock stars and a lot of the other guys where they’re their own person, they’re their own agenda…they’re not like the people that are listening to them. It’s different in country, we are. We come from there, we are that. I think it’s just a great thing for them to be able to come to our town and to get just this barrage of music. We’ve always tried to do it a little different when we’ll have different events, a couple years ago we made the fans find us…they had to find clues around town of where we were playing and then when they found out they could post it and tell people and then that night we had a full show. We started that day with no people, we didn’t advertise, we said, ‘We’re playing, find us.’ We called it ‘Midnight Church.’ So at midnight we played the Rutledge. They found us, and they were out the door, and they found us there. It was really cool to have some fun in our town and just do stuff like that every year. I’ve done, last year I did a show where I did 3 nights in a row at a place. The first night was me and my band, the second night was an acoustic show, and the last night was me and the songwriters that helped me write this record all sitting up there playing songs and telling stories. It was three different takes on basically the same songs. Just unique. It’s my favorite thing about doing it, is when people come to town, we able to do some shows that we’re not able to do throughout the year because we’re touring a certain way. This is a chance for us to have a little more freedom, creatively, and give the fans something maybe they don’t get to see.”

Eric Paslay (1st autograph) OC: …first autograph. :42
“The first autograph that I ever got was in Branson, Missouri, and it was Shoji Tabuchi, and he’s a great fiddle player, and I always remember that, you know if you go to Branson, you know who he is. But I was a 9, 10 year old kid, and I always remember that. Every time I meet a kid, I don’t know if it’s their first concert. It could be their 100-thousandth, but whenever I sign an autograph for a kid, I really make sure it’s special and memorable, and with anybody, but especially with kids. I still have that Shoji Tabuchi autograph, you know? Because it meant that much. I didn’t know he was until we saw him, but he tore the place down playing the “Orange Blossom Special.”

Jon Pardi (performing live) OC: …really loud. :19
“To get up on stage, it feels like home. It’s like, ‘Yeah, this is where I want to be.’ I’d rather be there than a lot of places. I love just getting up on stage not matter where it is. It’s fun to get up and entertain people and have a good time, make everybody feel a part of the show and get up there and play my guitar really loud.”

Josh Turner (weirdest things he’s signed) OC: …Sharpie, though. :10
“A toothpick; an unused toothpick, let me throw that out there, an unused toothpick. It was quite challenging, actually, and it didn’t look anything like my autograph. It took a really small Sharpie, though.”

Keith Urban(CMA Music Fest) OC: …love it. :25
“I love it! It’s like summer camp. I mean, it is! It’s a chance to obviously see a lot of people I don’t normally see. I don’t know. It’s just palpable. Since Fan Fair, it’s just been that sort of week-plus of energy; the town just explodes, and what it is we love about this genre and the community aspect of it. I always love it.”

Kip Moore (favorite thing about performing live) OC: …it gets. :17
“I’d say that my favorite thing about being on the road is the fact that I get to play music each and every night with my best friends. There’s nothing better than that than playing with your best buddies and seeing the joy that you bring to other people’s faces playing the music that you love to play. I mean that’s the best it gets.”

Lady Antebellum (Music Fest) 3 OC: …really cool. :25

“When you see the same fans, these die-hard fans that camp out outside the radio remotes and the hotels, and all of these places, and you start recognizing them, I think that’s when you start going ‘Wow, this is a special and unique industry.’ You talk to them by name and give them a hug. I can’t think of any other genre that has that kind of connection. The people that come back the same time every year, you know where they are going to be. It’s really kind of a fun thing. It’s really cool.”

Lauren Alaina (fans) OC: …me wrong. :30
“My fans helped me grow as a person in lots of different ways. I grew up in front of them. I was 15 on American Idol, so they watched me grow up and kind of helped me mold into who I am, because I worked at CiCi’s Pizza, and now I’m traveling all over the place. It’s like I learned responsibility through all of it. I learned who I am as a person, ‘cause my fans have made me stronger, they’ve made me more responsible, they made me believe in myself 10 times more, because I thought I was going home every week on American Idol, and they proved me wrong.”

Luke Bryan (CMA Music Fest) OC: …for this week. :33
“It’s a great week. I truly love this week for hundreds of reasons. I always remember my first ones and starting out and doing River Stages and always dreaming of coming over here and performing at LP Field (now Nissan Stadium) and all of the stuff building the fan base early in the week. It’s an amazing week for Nashville, and it’s a great week for me. And then I get to be home and do all this stuff. It’s always been a fun week for me. A lot of my family always comes in for this week.”