Each year on February 14th, many people exchange cards, candy, gifts or flowers with their special someone. The day of romance we call Valentine’s Day is named for a Christian martyr and dates back to the 5th century.
Over 150 million Valentine’s Day cards are exchanged annually, making Valentine’s Day the second-most popular greeting-card-giving occasion; 2.2 million marriages take place in the United States annually, which breaks down to more than 6,000 a day.
Thursday is Valentine’s Day (February 14th), and 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 aren’t? Which ones have a good reason to celebrate the holiday that’s all about love?
Audio / Alan Jackson talks about his love for wife, Denise, over the years.
DownloadAJ (Valentine’s Day) OC: …continue to. :24
“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.”
Audio / Billy Currington recalls his first real Valentine’s Day.
DownloadBilly Currington (Valentine’s Day memory) OC: …took off running. :21
“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.”
Audio / Carrie Underwood is all about the chocolate most couples give each other on Valentine’s Day.
DownloadCarrie Underwood (Valentine’s Day-chocolate) OC: …white chocolate. :14
“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.”
Audio / Dierks Bentley explains the realities of Valentine’s Day.
DownloadDierks Bentley (Valentine’s Day realities) OC: …that’s awesome. :53
“I’m gonna be the voice of truth and honesty for Valentine’s Day for a lot of the guys out there listening and for some of the girls listening, as well too. You may like this; you may not, but Valentine’s Day is a really difficult day for guys. When you’re single, it’s stressful for like a month leading up to it, and inevitably, you do something wrong. You don’t get the wrong thing or you say too much, and she’s wanting to get engaged faster than you want to get engaged. I don’t know. It’s just a very stressful holiday. I’m at a time in my life where I got a five-year-old, a three-year-old and a zero-year-old, and we’re just really trying to survive on a day-to-day basis. I mean, we get about four hours of sleep, and we’re literally in survival mode. So, I think there should be a hall pass for guys in that phase of their life. It doesn’t take much at this stage for us to get excited. A dinner alone is heaven. I mean, if we can just have a dinner and a glass of wine, that’s awesome.”
Audio / DIERKS BENTLEY SAYS THE MOST INTERESTING GIFT HE AND HIS WIFE CASSIDY HAVE GIVEN EACH OTHER WERE MIXTAPES OF SONGS.
DownloadDierks Bentley (Valentine’s Day-most interesting gift he’s given his wife) OC: …formulate yourself. 1:19
“When ‘What Was I Thinkin’’ was released in 2003, I didn’t know what my life would look like, and all of a sudden, I found myself out on the road full-time, just gone. So, the place where I was staying, I had some friends pack it up and move it into a storage facility. This year, I got that whole thing dumped back out into my house. I’m going through just years of old stuff, and in there I found some letters that she and I had written back and forth when we were dating. I was working at The Nashville Network and she was working out in San Francisco and found some letters I had written her and I’d gotten back and some stuff she’d sent me, including a CD of songs she’d been listening to, back when you made CD mixes and there’s like these three hearts on that CD. I just found that it was so meaningful for me those gifts you give each other before any money, before anything else was going on, just music, giving of mixtapes was so cool. She reminded me of a mixtape I sent her. I’d sent it to her via FedEx, because it was so important she get this as quickly as possible. This was sadly before, I guess we had internet back then, but you really couldn’t send songs over the internet. I think the most interesting thing I’ve given her and she’s given me was just mixtapes, because there’s nothing like music to put into words and the thoughts you have in your head that you can’t formulate yourself.”
Audio / Eric Church says his wife, Katherine, loves him in spite of everything. “Like Jesus Does.”
DownloadEric Church (Valentine’s) OC: …love song is. :18
“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.
Audio / Jordan Davis talks about a couple of his favorite love songs.
DownloadJordan Davis (love song) OC: …well done! :25
“I guess Valentine’s Day gets you to thinking about love songs. You know, me and my wife’s first dance was ‘I’m Gonna Lose You’ [by] John Legend and Meghan Trainor. I think that’s just an amazing love song. I think also a love song that I heard the other day? ‘Strawberry Wine’ from Deana Carter? Great love song. I listened to that a lot. Ooooh Deana Carter. Well done.”
Audio / Josh Turner says his wife would call him a romantic, but now that they have four children, it takes a bit of work to make time for each other.
DownloadJosh Turner (Romantic) OC: …long time to come. :26
“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.”
Audio / Keith Urban talks about the support he and his wife, Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman, give each other, which is especially important when two creative artists are married to each other.
DownloadKeith Urban (Nicole support) OC: …very important. :17
“I feel very blessed that I have the support of my family like I do. It’s a beautiful thing having two artists because we understand the passion and the responsibility of what we get to do. It’s very important.”
Audio / Little Big Town’s Kimberly Schlapman says falling in love with her husband, Stephen Schlapman, came as a big surprise.
DownloadLittle Big Town (Kimberly falling in love) OC: …healed me. 1:20
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.”
Audio / Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild and Jimi Westbrook had a chemistry performing together, but it wasn’t until they each found themselves single…at the same time…that sparks flew romantically. The pair, who wed in 2006, have a son, Elijah.
DownloadLittle Big Town (Jimi & Karen fell in love) OC: (Kimberly) …to be together. :48
JIMI: “We were in the band a long time before there was ever anything which is interesting. I think there was always something underlying there that we were kind of trying to ignore. And then when the opportunity came, when all of us, ended up single kind of at the same time, a very strange turn of events for the band in a lot of different ways. And those feelings, you were able to come out with them finally. It was like, we’re single. Let’s get together. And, you know, she has a beautiful heart and she’s absolutely gorgeous and I just love her dearly.”
PHILLIP: “Get a room!” [laughs]
KIMBERLY: “They’re a perfect match. They really are. They were meant to be together.”
Audio / Little Big Town’s Phillip Sweet was ready for love when he met Rebecca, his wife since 2007.
DownloadLittle Big Town (Phillip – reasons fell in love) OC: …real love. :17
“I think everything that I had gone through before had prepared me to be ready to see that there was genuine love there for me, and my Rebecca. So, it was just a great time, I wouldn’t have been ready before I met her…Now it’s just been a really great journey to heal through the past and to know real love.”
Audio / Luke Bryan talks about his favorite love song.
DownloadLuke Bryan (love song with Caroline) OC: …That’s it! :11
“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!”
Audio / Luke Bryan reveals what he’s doing on Valentine’s Day this year.
DownloadLuke Bryan (Valentine’s Day 2019) OC: …somewhat romantic. :33
“For Valentine’s Day this year, I’m working every day around Valentine’s. I’m doing Idol. Actually, Idol is filming on Valentine’s Day, and so I have approached Caroline about maybe flying out to L.A. I think we’re gonna have a short taping day at Idol, so maybe we can have a Valentine’s dinner at one of her favorite restaurants in Los Angeles. I’ll try to make it somewhat romantic.”
Audio / Luke Bryan talks about marrying Caroline, his college sweetheart.
DownloadLuke Bryan (married college sweetheart) OC: …married. :27
”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.”
