Alan Jackson Closes CMA Fest

Alan Jackson closed out the 2012 CMA Fest in Nashville Sunday night.  His performance capped an evening that also featured Martina McBride, Rascal Flatts, Dierks Bentley, Scotty McCreery, and the return of The Mavericks.  Before taking the stage, Alan came back to speak with the media about CMA Fest, his new CD, and his 23 year recording career:

How has CMA Fest changed over the years? It’s not as hot! When it was at the fairgrounds it was 150 degrees in those old metal buildings.  So it’s a much cooler venue, it’s beautiful, big stadium, lot of people.

Talk about your interaction with the fans: I think they feel like they’re connected with you, and they are, they like knowing about you personally, and it’s not in a nosey way, they’re sweet and they care and they wanna know about you.  They get freaked out if you shave your mustache off, or now they fuss about ‘You won’t let your hair grow out long any more,’ and I tell them it won’t grow long any more.  The funniest thing was I wore those holey jeans since I did the Chattahoochee video, and I’ve heard a million times, usually from a lady like my mama, who’d say ‘I know good and well you can afford some blue jeans without holes in them now,’ and they’d thought it was terrible I wore them raggedy blue jeans.  I told em it cost more to make em look like that than when you buy em off the rack.

Tell us about your first apartment when you moved to Nashville: When we decided to move here, I called and rented an apartment over the phone, and I didn’t know anything about Nashville.  When we arrived it was Labor Day weekend, and there were children running all over the place, and it was different than what they described, and Denise had to help me carry our sofa up two flights of stairs to this apartment, so she wasn’t happy about it.

Talk more about fan reaction to your mustache: I never have cared much about that, and a lot of time I shave during the winter when I finish touring, and that’s what happened in December, I just shaved one day, and the video came up suddenly, so I shot it without it, and my wife said she liked it because I didn’t have a mustache when we got married. A lotta people said they liked it, some people fussed about it, so I grew it back, got tired of hearing about it.

Talk about the song When I Saw You Leaving, what was Denise’s reaction? Like most people who know what it’s about, she cried. If you don’t know, when we found out Denise had cancer, this song just came out, I never told her I wrote it, didn’t play it for her, and we did this album, and included this song for her and it’s a lot of emotions that were going through my mind at the time.  I tried to write where it wasn’t so obvious, I was hoping people would relate to it, and I think she’s proud I put it on there.

Can you talk about recording the song with Zac Brown: It’s a fun song, Zac & I did that other song together, he’s from Georgia, so am I, and this song is about growing up in the rural south, the Dixie Highway runs from Canada to South Florida, and that’s where the album title came from, I grew up in Newnan Georgia, which is 30 Miles West of the Dixie Highway.

Tags: alan

Category: VIDEO