Cole Swindell ‘Would Have Never Believed’ He’d Be Nominated for CMT Awards

The 2019 CMT Music Awards take place in Nashville on Wednesday, June 5, and Cole Swindell scored two nominations this year, for Video of the Year and Male Video of the Year for “Break Up in the End.”

“It feels great,” Swindell told PopCulture.com of the nominations. “Growing up, CMT was always on TV. As a kid, if you’d a told me I would be here today I would have never believed you because I was just a huge fan, and I knew the videos right when they came on, before the title came up. I would know if it were Tim McGraw or whoever it was, so to be honored at the CMT Awards with a nomination or two of them that’s even better. Anytime you’re nominated it’s a big honor.”

The CMT Awards are fan-voted, and Swindell noted that while that may make things a bit tougher if you’re going up against massive artists for the honor, he appreciates his fans supporting him.

“It depends on if you’re going up against the huge, huge artists, they’ve got a big fan base that you may not have a good chance, but it’s also, hey, they deserve it,” he explained. “They’ve got that many fans and it’s better to me than people sitting around who don’t buy the music and don’t really listen to it getting to vote on stuff that you worked all year on.”

“So I’m all for the fan voting,” the Georgia native continued. “It gets them all fired up, and the artists, for me to see my down-home crew — that’s what I call my fan club — out there on social media and tweeting, it makes you feel good that they think we’ve got a chance to win and that’s good enough for me. That makes me think that we’ve got a chance.”

The nominations are Swindell’s second and third CMT nods, as he was nominated in 2014 for Breakthrough Video of the Year for “Chillin’ It.”

“Break Up in the End” was released as the lead single from Swindell’s 2018 album, All of It, and earned the song’s writers, Jon Nite, Jessie Jo Dillon and Chase McGill, a nomination for Best Country Song at this year’s Grammy Awards. The track also scored Swindell his eighth No. 1 song and is the only one of this top-charting singles that he didn’t help write.

“I just try to write the songs or I just record what I love,” the 35-year-old explained “I want to feel it and that’s one of the songs that, it’s so well written but I think a lot of people can relate to that. I’ve had a lot of fun songs, and every now and then you gotta put something out that people, it may make ’em shed a tear, but it’s real and that’s why I love country music — it’s real feelings, it’s real people and that’s what it’s about and I’m glad that I’m in this genre. I get to be around people that love music.”

Photo Credit: Getty / Jeff Hahne