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Blake Shelton and Garth Brooks are each superstars in their own right, but when Garth called Blake to propose recording their hit duet, “Dive Bar,” the star of The Voice reverted back to simply being a fan.
“Garth — that’s still weird for me to say — reached out to me back in April,” Blake explains. “It was just a day or two after the ACM Awards, and we had a telephone conversation.”
“I won’t say a disastrous conversation,” Blake continues, “but it was awkward a little bit because he’s Garth, and I’m the guy that wanted to be a country singer because I saw his first television special.”
“Everything that I said sounded something like, ‘Hey you remember that time you sang “Friends in Low Places?”‘ Blake laughs.
Garth was so impressed by Blake’s performance on the ACM show, he wanted to collaborate.
Blake recalls the conversation: “He goes, ‘I don’t know if you meant it or not — and don’t tell me if you didn’t — but the way you sang ‘God’s Country’ on the ACM Awards… he was very complimentary in what he said to me.”
“And I told him, I said ‘Man, I think you just mistook me trying to hit some of those notes as passion,'” he jokes.
“By the end of the conversation,” Blake remembers, “he just said, ‘I’ve got this song that I’d like for you to listen to, and maybe if you like it, then we could record it together.’ I literally think I said, ‘Buddy, I haven’t heard it, but I’ll do it.'”
Garth and Blake’s duet, “Dive Bar,” is already a top twenty-five hit, while his collaboration with Trace Adkins on “Hell Right” is not far behind.
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