Dierks Bentley (CMA Fest 2022) OC: …host it. :22
“It was so great to be back (in person) at CMA Fest especially hosting it. After two years of CMA being away, CMA Fest being gone, those fans came back with a vengeance, so excited to party and hang out, so loud. So, for me to get a chance to not only play the show, but actually host it with my buddy Elle King, that is just, I just feel so lucky. That was so much fun and so looking forward to seeing the show air on ABC in August, and just so truly lucky to have a chance to host it.”

Luke Bryan (CMA Fest 2022) OC: …experience. :56
“It was crazy. To leave the stadium and over 80,000 people and go straight to Blake’s bar for the Spotify event. And I got a little carried away. I never get to play rowdy bars anymore, so after I kinda got to roast Blake, I attempted to sing ‘Some Beach,’ and I did not know any of the words-sorry, Blake. Anyway, just being in his bar, I got in front of the crowd and I really kind of got caught up in the moment and played for maybe a little too long. But then, after I got done there, I ran across the street to my bar. I bought my whole bar a Two Lane (beer) and it was just a wild night and so good being in the mix in CMA Music Fest with all the fans doing a concert, bar hopping to Blake’s bar (and) my bar. It was a pretty crazy experience.”

Carrie Underwood (CMA Fest 2022) OC: …good time. :24
“Everybody is super-excited to be back at CMA Fest. It’s a staple in country music. It’s been going on for so many decades. I just feel like not having a proper CMA Fest was just kind of gut-wrenching. But people are excited-the fans are excited, the performers are excited, I’m excited, so it’s gonna be a good time.”

Carrie Underwood (Ghost Story video) OC: …really difficult. :32
“The music video, if you’re gonna usher in a new era, I want to do it big. I don’t know what the next ones are gonna look like, but that one I was like we can kind of go over the top, but that’s what we wanted. We wanted it to be beautiful and imaginative, because I feel like the song is, so a lot of really great imagery that’s written into the song and we just wanted to kind of bring that to life. It was a fun day shooting the video, but the trapeze was unexpectedly difficult. It doesn’t look difficult, but it’s really difficult.”

Carrie Underwood (making a new album during the pandemic) OC: …right now. 1:37
“Making an album in the middle of the past couple years, it definitely had its challenges, like I was writing on ZOOM a couple of times with a few different writers. It was a little trickier to figure out little things like that, scheduling and logistics and everybody was dealing with something all the time, BUT the fact that I was in one place a bit longer than usual. I feel like we definitely took advantage of that, and I was able to really focus in on making this album with fewer distractions than normal. I wasn’t leaving town constantly to go do things, and it was just nice to be able to have large chunks of time where I really got to focus on this album. I do feel like after the past couple of years, people are ready to get out. I mean we see it in the festivals and the things like that I have been doing, the one off shows here and there and our Vegas residency, people are ready to reenter the world and get together and celebrate things, and music brings people  together like nothing else. So, I certainly feel like that. I’m ready to get out there and go on tour and stuff like that with this album and I feel like people are really ready for it too. And it definitely made me just want to make music that is, for the most part, just positive and happy and fun, because I feel like that’s kind of a gap that we all have in our lives right now.”

Carrie Underwood (Axl Rose) OC: …life, you know? :16
“I mean, I feel like Axl was my personal pinnacle of you know…I mean, I’m not shy about my love of rock music. The Stagecoach performance was one of the best moments of my life, you know?”

AJ (fave 4^th of July memory) OC: …very cool. :58
Well, this one is hard to beat. A couple of years ago, maybe longer than that now, I had an old boat in Florida. It’s like an old antique motor yacht, and it was kind of a cool old boat. I had taken that boat, I’ve always wanted to take it up north like to New York and up in that area, up in the northeast where it’s so pretty. So, we took the boat up there and Denise and the girls, we all went up. They like going to New York City, which I don’t really care about going to the city. So, I got to stay in my boat there at the harbor tied up, which was cool anyway. So they spent time in the city a few days and then that was Fourth of July, and we went out in the Hudson River that night and they shot the fireworks off and we were anchored out in front of the Statue of Liberty and New York City was behind us, and the Statue of Liberty and the fireworks were going off sitting on that boat. That was the coolest thing and my girls still talk about that. I mean, that was the coolest thing on Fourth of July I can ever remember. I can’t top that one probably. It was emotional sitting there watching the Statue of Liberty and thinking about all that. It was very cool.”

Billy Currington (4^th of July) OC: …of my life. :16
“My best memories would be hanging out with my mom, brother and sister on the beach on Tybee Island right off the coast of Savannah, Georgia. We’d go there every year, and we’d light our own fireworks and watch the ones that they had for us. They were the best times, some of the best times of my life.”

Carrie Underwood (favorite Fourth of July memory) OC: …work out. :51
“I think my favorite Fourth of July memory would be going to the fireworks stand and picking out which fireworks I wanted to do. I must’ve been like 7 or 8, and I came home and made a list of what order I wanted to do them in, because I wanted to put a show on for Mom and Dad, and of course I couldn’t wait until it was dark outside (laughs). So, I made my Mom and Dad get the lawn chairs and come out to the backyard and watch some not very dramatic fireworks at like six o’clock in the evening, but I was so proud of myself, and I was so proud of the show that I put on. So, I feel like that was a little training for what I do now – putting on shows, figuring out how it’s all going to work out.”

Darius Rucker (fireworks) OC: …off once. :15
“Oh, I love fireworks. We had the bottle rocket fights and all that good stuff. I was the typical little crazy kid, you know. In South Carolina, it was always legal, so we shot fireworks when it was legal. We did all that sort of stuff. I almost blew my hand off once.”

Eric Church (4th of July) OC: …freedoms. 1:17
“The Fourth of July for me, growing up we would always go to the lake, we didn’t live on the lake but we would all go to the lake. Had a buddy who had a pontoon and we would always get on the pontoon and you go out and you’d tie all the pontoons together and just have a big time. This was before, I was younger then, the adults were having more fun than we were, you know it was just to go swim in the water and shoot off fireworks. Basically, water tailgating is what it was. And then as we got older, same thing…we would just, us younger kids had our own boat and we had as much fun as the adults.”

Jon Langston (Fourth of July) OC: …either way. :17
“The Fourth of July is usually different every year. We’re usually playing shows, or we’re out on the lake or at the beach, or sometimes I’ve said, ‘I’m staying at home,’ shooting fireworks off the back porch or something. That’s probably not the safest thing, but we have a good time either way.”

Jordan Davis (Fourth of July) 2 OC: …really cool. :17
“Probably baseball games, firework shows at baseball games. We’d go to Shreveport Captains games, so yeah, we’d do that or barbecues and fireworks. I can remember being on the lake for a couple of Fourth of Julys. We’d take the boat out and we’d watch the downtown fireworks show from the boat, which was really cool.”

Josh Turner (fireworks) OC: …of money. [laughs] :20
“Yeah, we had fireworks around, especially my Daddy’s family. All the individual families had a lot of competition with each other and tried to outdo each other to try to see who had the biggest and baddest fireworks and all that. [laughs] My daddy, I think, was the smartest one. He just went out and bought maybe $25 worth of fireworks and let everybody else put on the big show, so he saved a lot of money.” [laughs]

Keith Urban (coming to America 1^st time) OC: …as I could. :39
“1989 was the first year I came to the States, and it had always been my goal, but I had no plan on how to get here. It was just a case of keep playing, keep getting better at what you do, and then hopefully, somehow, some way I’ll end up over here. The guy who was managing me at the time, we just planned a trip over here – it was actually for the New Music Seminar in New York. And we came over for that, and then we did a trip down to Nashville, and I was shopping my little demo around. I think I humored everybody more than anything else [laughs] with my tragic, ill-fitting demo for the time. So, I left there, but I was just so committed to coming back as quick as I could.”

Luke Bryan (4th of July memories) OC: …we used to. :21
“Some of my favorite Fourth of July memories were spent on Lake Blackshear down in Georgia with my family. I was always kind of in charge of driving home from Tennessee and picking up all the fireworks and my nieces and nephews always got excited when I rolled in because they knew I had all the fireworks. But, it was always a great memory, and I miss not getting to do that as much as we used to.”

Luke Bryan (Fourth of July plans) OC: …on the fourth. :15
“My plans for the Fourth are always to be on the boat somewhere in the water, and buy a few fireworks, send ‘em up in the sky for the boys, but it’s always a boat and water, whether it’s in the Gulf of Mexico, whether it’s in Georgia…we don’t have a total plan yet, but we’ll be having a good time on the fourth.”

Maddie & Tae (Fourth of July) OC: …it’s perfect. :29
TAE: “One of my favorite Fourth of July traditions – I’d say it’s a tradition ‘cause it happens every year, but I’m not always able to make it – is that we go to my grandparents in Oklahoma, and we all line up lawn chairs right in front of their garage and we just light fireworks. We always do it far away and then we light it, and we always run back and watch the fireworks, but that’s probably one of my favorite memories.” MADDIE: “My birthday is July 7th, so I always get built-in fireworks for my birthday, and sometimes we actually celebrate it on the 4th, because there’s fireworks everywhere, so it’s perfect.”

Parker McCollum (Fourth of July) OC: …days of my life. :23
“My favorite Fourth of July memories growing up are actually kind of dangerous now that I think about it, but we used to have fireworks wars where we’d shoot like roman candles and bottle rockets. We’d always go to my grandma’s house, pop fireworks and we’d end up shooting ’em at each other and having wars; no eye protection, no nothing, just shooting bottle rockets at each other’s faces. But it was so fun; some of the best days of my life.”

Priscilla Block (Fourth of July) OC: …we get crazy. :26
“I love Fourth of July. I usually always have a Fourth of July party. It is known that there is a slip-n-slide at my house on Fourth of July. You know, it’s such a great holiday to just bring friends together and, I don’t know, we get wild on the Fourth. We get crazy.”

Sam Hunt (Fourth of July) OC: …good time. :39
“My granddad on the other side of my family, he would always take a lot of pride…fireworks were actually, I’m from Georgia, and most of them were illegal, I’m pretty sure, growing up. But over in Alabama, that’s where all the firework stands were, and we only had to drive 10, 15 minutes to get to the Alabama line, so we could go get a bundle of fireworks pretty easy. But he would always take a lot of pride in going and finding all the good stuff and coming back with a big pile. He’d have his torch out there at the end of the driveway and we’d all eat homemade ice cream and put down towels on the driveway and he’d shoot off fireworks for 30-45 minutes. Such a good time.”

Travis Denning (Fourth of July) OC: …will love. :51
“Fourth of July in Warner Robins, Georgia is an event. It’s something else. In fact, forever they’ve thrown an Independence Day concert, and back in the day, it was huge. It was the biggest thing they did all year. They would actually have the concert in the MAC (McConnell-Talbert Stadium), which was the high school football stadium that Warner Robins and Northside and Houston County shared. I mean, one year they had Wynonna play and then they had Josh Turner one year, Darius Rucker. I mean it was like a big deal, and there’d be 15,000, 20,000 people there, and I think it’s so cool that there’s a little bit of a legacy of people coming together in that town and making something happen, you know? I’ll never forget going to those shows and thinking, I was more proud of what the city had done. I was like, ‘That’s just so cool that they could put together a show like this, an event that everybody will love.”

Tyler Hubbard (Fourth of July) OC: …that freedom. :43

“Hey! This is Alan Jackson, wishing you a happy and safe Fourth of July.”

“Hey guys! I’m Billy Currington, wishing you a Happy Fourth of July.”

“Hey y’all! I’m John, and I’m TJ, and we are Brothers Osborne, wish you a very Happy Fourth of July.”

“Hi! This is Carrie Underwood wishing you a Happy Fourth of July.”

“Hey everybody, this is Catie Offerman, wishing you a safe and Happy Fourth of July.”

“Hey everybody, this is Catie Offerman. Happy Independence Day, y’all.”

“Hey y’all! This is Caylee Hammack wishing you a safe and Happy Fourth of July.”

“Hey y’all! This is Caylee Hammack. Happy Independence Day, everybody!”

“Hey! This is Chrissy Metz, wishing you a safe and Happy Fourth of July.”

“Hey y’all, what’s up? This is Darius Rucker, wishing you a very, very happy Fourth of July!”

“Hey y’all, what’s up? This is Darius Rucker. Happy Birthday, America!”

“Hey everybody! This is Dierks Bentley, wishing you a Happy and safe Fourth of July.

“Hey this is Eric Church, wishing you a very happy Fourth of July.”

“Hey y’all, this is Jon Langston wishing you a safe and Happy Fourth of July.”

“Hi, it’s Jon Pardi, wishing you a happy Fourth of July.”

“Hey! I’m Jordan Davis, wishing you a Happy Fourth of July.”

“Hey everybody, Keith Urban here, wanting to wish you all a fantastic and safe summer. Enjoy the sunshine. Hopefully, you’ll get to spend some time with the ones you love, and hopefully, we’ll also get to see you out on the road.”

“Hey y’all. This is Kylie Morgan, wishing you a safe and Happy Fourth of July.”

“Hey! We’re Little Big Town. Happy Fourth of July!”

“Hey! This is Luke Bryan, wishing you a very happy Fourth of July.”

“Hey y’all, this is Luke Bryan, celebrating the land of the free, the home of the brave and country music.”

“Hey everybody! I’m Maddie, and I’m Tae and we’re Maddie & Tae, wishing you a safe and happy Fourth of July.”

“Hey! This is Mickey Guyton, wishing you a Happy Fourth of July.”

“Hey everybody. I’m Parker McCollum, wishing you a Happy and safe Fourth of July.”

“Hey, it’s Priscilla Block, wishing you a safe and Happy Fourth of July.”

“Hey everybody, this is Reba McEntire, wishing you a safe and Happy Fourth of July.”

“Hey everybody! This is Sam Hunt, wishing you a safe and Happy Fourth of July.”

“Hey y’all! It’s Travis Denning, wishing you a safe and Happy Fourth of July.”

“Hey y’all, this is Tyler Hubbard, wishing you a safe and Happy Fourth of July.”

Carrie Underwood (kept radio & live show in mind) OC: … Denim & Rhinestones. :53
“It’s important to have all of the things in mind when making an album of where you’re going to be playing this album, what you’re going to do with it, what your hopes are. So, we definitely tried to think of how these songs were going to sound and feel on the radio, playing them on TV shows or whatever, but also of course factoring in the live aspect of it. We definitely had kind of this overarching tone that we wanted to make sure everything was going to sound really good in an arena. So, yeah, it’s one of those things that you always kind of have in the back of your head. You don’t want to make an album of songs that you really love but kind of fall flat when you get in front of people. So, I feel like I’ve learned that over the years, for sure, and it was definitely in our minds when we were making Denim & Rhinestones.”

Carrie Underwood (Reflection to tour) OC: …be good. :53
“I think everything that I do I learn from along the way and get to add certain things to my, you know, my bank. You learn what works in different areas and what doesn’t work in other areas. And I feel like our Las Vegas residency Reflection has definitely taught me a lot. I feel like it helped a lot in the confidence department, in my confidence department, because we got to put together just this incredible show. You know, it wasn’t necessarily just a concert, it was a show and I love that. I feel like there’s so many elements of that that I’m gonna take with me as we plan and ultimately take the Denim and Rhinestones Tour out on the road. So, I’m excited to see what we do with everything that we’ve learned, and I think it only makes me a better performer and artist. So, it’s gonna be good.”