Blake Shelton wasn’t about to let a little rain get in the way of his performance. The singer was recently at Gillette Stadium, opening for George Strait, where he sang several songs, including his current single, “Hell Right,” in spite of the downpour.
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“Gillette Stadium with [George Strait] in the rain … Hell right!” Shelton captioned the video.
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Shelton has been headlining tours more more than a dozen years, but when the King of Country asked him to serve as the opening act for several of his shows, Shelton was happy to oblige.
‘It was awesome,” Shelton told PopCulture.com and other media, recalling when he found out Strait wanted Shelton to join him. “I mean George Strait, there’s really nothing to say. You just say, ‘George Strait,’ and that’s it. So to get the call that George wanted me to come out and tour for him – I had opened for George in 2007 I think or 2008, for his tour that year which was I think 17 shows. It was one of the greatest things I ever did outside of my career, just being a country music fan and being able to stand on the side of the stage every night, watching, and get a chance to visit with him a few times.
“Not as many times as I wish I could have,” he continued. “But, that’s George Strait. It’s like ‘Where did he go, how did he get here?’ He’s sneaky, he’s like this secretive guy. To be able to now, flash forward, many, many years to get that call, I don’t know if it was George himself – I’d like to tell myself it was that asked for me, but I’m just happy to be doing it.”
Shelton might be a big fan of Strait, but the admiration between the two seems to go both ways.
“He’s a great guy,” Strait said of Shelton. “Great singer, songwriter, just a really good guy. I enjoy being around Blake.”
“Hell Right,” a duet with Trace Adkins, is Shelton’s current single. The song, which follows Shelton’s successful “God’s Country,” came at a time when Shelton thought he had already recorded everything he was going to record, at least for a while.
“The first time I ever heard ‘Hell Right,’ [producer] Scott Hendricks sent it over to me — and we had pretty much decided that we were finished recording for a while, and I wasn’t even thinking about it,” Blake told Nash Country Daily. “But he said that HARDY had written a song and he wanted me to hear it, so with the success of ‘God’s Country’ and just knowing how talented that guy is, I thought, ‘Man, I better at least listen to it even though I don’t see myself going in and recording.’
“About three-quarters of the way through the song, I decided, ‘Oh, my God, I’m not done recording. I’ve gotta go cut this song,’” he continued. “It’s just so much fun and just so infectious. It seems like something that would be great to have out this summer, like, ‘Let’s do this thing, let’s get it out now.’ It’s one of the reasons that I’ve been so excited about not releasing an album because it’s awesome to be able to react to great songs and just get ’em out there to the fans.”
Photo Credit: Getty images / Jeff Kravitz
