HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY FROM UMG NASHVILLE (AUDIO)
We’ve got some thoughts and feelings and more about love, romance and marriage from several of your favorite country artists. A few are new and some have become our favorites over the years. Which country stars are romantic? Which ones have a good reason to celebrate the holiday that’s all about love?
“We got a lot of history together now, and we’re happier than we’ve ever been. So, she’s still beautiful, and she’s always inspired songs. I mean, one of my early hits was a song called ‘I’d Love You All Over Again,’ I wrote for her for our 10th anniversary. I mean, there’s been a zillion songs that have pieces of our good days and bad days inspired, and they continue to.”
“Yeah, I remember my first girlfriend. I was in first or second grade, but anyway, I remember it was Valentine’s Day and your mom going, ‘You’ve got to give your girlfriend something, and you’ve got to go give it to her.’ I’ll never forget — we got her a box of chocolates or whatever it was. I remember going down to her classroom and knocking on the door, getting her to come to the door. I remember handing it to her, and then I took off running.”
“Chocolate’s every woman’s friend – in their time of need or in their time of happiness or in their time of sadness or madness, chocolate is my friend. Anything with caramel in it, ooooooooh. White chocolate’s good too. You can’t beat some good white chocolate.”
“You know, I’m not a huge Valentine’s Day person. I used to actually have a gig in Nashville back before I had a record deal. And we’d always play on Valentine’s Day and make sure everyone was wearing black when they showed up. We always had the kind of anti-Valentine’s Day party. So I’m not a huge Valentine’s Day person, but I should probably say I am. So my wife and I are going to have a nice dinner and go out and spend time together, but that’s not really true.”
“You get married and that’s a long-term, bigger image of what love can be. Then you have a child, and your heart gets spread so thin and it’s so vulnerable, like it’s a really tough, tough feeling, and it can kill you. It can really be painful at times, and at the same time, it’s so great. But it definitely stretches your heart…and it doesn’t change anything, it just makes your heart, I think it just makes it bigger. I think you just find that you can love more than you ever thought you could before.”
“True love to me is when you love a person in spite of all their fallibilities, and for me, I have a lot of ‘em. I’m definitely at times hard to love, and that’s what’s great about Katherine and the way she loves me. She loves me in spite of those things and really for those things.”
“If you don’t have love, I mean what do you have? You know, you have love for your wife or your husband or your children or your dogs or your horses or your golf clubs, you know? Love is what makes the world go ‘round.”
“One thing Summer has taught me is that gifts are cool, diamonds, blah, blah, blah, but to take your time and clear your mind and write something about what she means to you on a card is probably the most least expensive and the biggest price you can give her is just to write and tell her how much you love her on a little card. That’s what she taught me for Valentine’s Day, so I just do that. It’s way cheaper. (laughs) And of course, I always say to her, ‘Babe, every day is Valentine’s Day for you.’” (laughs)
“My college roommate was getting married in New Orleans. My wife was in New Orleans for a totally separate wedding. Both wedding parties were staying at the same hotel, so we met, the first time, in the lobby of the hotel. I’m actually wearing a necklace that has the coordinates to that hotel. Then the next day, me and my brother walk into a bar in New Orleans, and her and her friends were sitting in the corner, and I was like, ‘Hey-that’s the girl from the lobby.’ She was actually dating somebody at the time. But we kind of exchanged numbers and stayed in contact, and about two months later, a month later, she came into town for CMA Music Fest and told me that she no longer had a boyfriend, and here we are.”
“When it comes to Valentines, Kristen is way more romantic than I am. I’m not a very romantic guy. I have worked on it. I’ve tried to get a little bit better over the years. Kristen loves chocolate so she’s good for a big chocolate box, but here’s our thing about Valentine’s Day, and this is the God’s honest truth. We’ve been going to Olive Garden on Valentine’s Day since we met. We’ve continued that tradition. I think it started with her and a friend, they used to always go to Olive Garden on Valentine’s Day before they started dating, or before they got in a relationship. So, we have carried that out, so this year will be our, I believe our eighth Valentines in a row where we go in for endless salad and bread sticks. So, if its Valentine’s Day, and you’re at an Olive Garden, we could be next to each other. So, yeah, hope to see somebody out there at the table next to us just hammering on some breadsticks. So, happy Valentine’s.” (laughs)
“If you ask my wife Jennifer if I was a romantic, she would definitely say, ‘Yes,’ but she knows that sometimes my hectic schedule and our busy lifestyles can kind of interfere with the romantic side of things. But we do try to make efforts towards being together and having adult conversations and taking time away from the children and doing things that husbands and wives do, so we’ll definitely try to continue that for a long time to come.”
“Early on, I asked my wife when we were dating, I asked her one time, I said, how’s your heart? She said it’s open. And I was just, oh, what a beautiful, a beautiful thing to not only hear, but to be able to say. And I’d never thought it. And it made me ask myself, wow, is my heart open? Is it really? I think it is, but maybe it’s not, maybe not as much as it could be. And that’s a beautiful thing.”
Kimberly: “Well, I wasn’t planning on falling in love, at all. I didn’t want to…I wasn’t sure that I ever would. So, my husband now and I were just really good friends, and after my late husband died all my friends were calling me, all the time. Just checking up on me. He was just an old friends. We had known each other for about six years and he started calling me just like everybody else did. But, he started calling me more than everybody else did [laughs]. We had both been through similar losses, he hadn’t lost a mate but he had lost a close friend, so we kind of bonded over that. I grieved, kind of, at him a lot. He took my grief, I had a lot of grief left, and he just took it and listened and accepted it and was so understanding and let me talk about my late husband all the time. We still talk about him a lot, and he’s totally fine with it. He says that, that made me who he fell in love with and he never minds if I bring anything from the past up which is just really sweet. I was shocked, I remember when I first realized that I was having feelings. I just thought, OK, this is so weird. What is this? I haven’t felt this in a long, long, time. This is weird. But, eventually I allowed myself and it’s been the most beautiful gift of my life. It pulled me out of the deepest hole that I’ve ever been in and healed me.”
“Caroline and I, we had a love song in college. It was Lenny Kravitz’ [starts singing] ‘I just can’t get you off of my mind.’ That’s it!
”I married my college sweetheart. We dated back in college and broke up for nearly six years, and while I was off doing my Nashville stuff and touring and writing songs, she was finishing getting her career kind of going. Man, we just kinda bumped into each other one night, and it was like bam, here we are married.”
“From the moment I met Josh, he never shied away from sharing what’s on his heart. For me, sharing what’s on my heart is sometimes hard, but he always created the environment and dynamic of it’s totally normal to open up and let people to see that side of you. And so, the more we spent time together, the more I kind of adopted that mindset of like, ‘Okay, I can be vulnerable. I can take risks. I can put myself out there and maybe get rejected, but maybe it could be awesome.’ Our relationship is that to a T. I was skeptical at first and I was scared, and he was scared. And we both just, we went all in, and I felt so safe to go there with him and he’s always made me feel that way, you know?”
“So, I usually play songs first to probably my wife when I come home, whether it’s a song I wrote that day or a song I worked on in the studio. I love coming home and playing it for her and getting her initial reaction, and it’s usually a good indication of whether or not it’s a good song.”
VALENTINE’S DAY LINERS
“Hey! This is Billy Currington. Hope you have a very Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hey everybody, it’s Brad Paisley. In the words of the late, great Buck Owens, ‘Love’s Gonna Live Here.’ Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hey, this is T.J., and I’m John, and we’re Brothers Osborne. Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hey y’all, it’s Bryce Leatherwood. Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all. All the love in the world.”
“Hi! I’m Carrie Underwood, wishing you a Happy Valentine’s Day. Send me some chocolate.”
“Hey everybody, this is Catie Offerman, wishing you all a very Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hey y’all! This is Caylee Hammack, wishing you a Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hey, I’m Dalton Dover – for all the lovers out there, I’m wishing you a Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“What’s up y’all? This is Darius Rucker, hoping you have a very Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hey, it’s Dierks Bentley, hoping you have a very Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hey! This is Eric Church, hoping you have a very Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“This is George Strait, wishing you a Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hi! It’s Jon Pardi, and I hope you have a very Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hey! It’s Jordan Davis, hoping you have a very Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hey y’all, it’s Josh Ross, wishing you a Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hi, this is Kacey Musgraves, and I hope you have a Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone. This is Keith Urban. Make the day special for your ‘Once in a Lifetime’ love.”
“Hey! We’re Little Big Town. Happy Valentine’s Day!”
“Hey y’all, it’s Luke Bryan. Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hey everybody. I’m Parker McCollum, wishing all the lovers out there a Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hey y’all, this is Priscilla Block wishing you a Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hey everybody, this is Reba McEntire, wishing you and your sweetheart a Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hi! This is Sam Hunt, wishing you a very Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hi, this is Shania Twain. Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hey everybody, I’m Michael and I’m Tanya, and we’re The War And Treaty, and Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Hey, it’s Tyler Hubbard, wishing y’all a Happy Valentine’s Day.”
