Monday, November 19, 2007

Jennifer Nettles Does It Again With Another Awards Show Surprise

Sugarland blew me away on the CMA Awards and their latest coup was last night's Beyonce "duet" on ‘Irreplaceable’ at the 2007 American Music Awards (click at watch it, first in on stage performances from last summer and now on national TV)

"A good thing about a good song is it can be played in any genre. I'm up for anything. I love it." -- Jennifer Nettles

PS - I seldom engage in online disagreements with the folks who post comments on this blog, but I must respectfully at least partially disagree with "Anon" (below) who cast stones at these kind of award show duets with non-country artists.

Click here to listen to the entire 3:30 performance by Nettles and Knowles and see if you don't agree that they do what live music performance coaching expert Tom Jackson calls "Performance Plus."

Maybe I'm swayed a bit by the fact that Edison Research's Larry Rosin actually suggested that a country artist ought to do a duet with Beyonce in his CRS '07 research presentation as a way of bringing Hispanics to country music, but I'd say they propel the song to a new level and use all the possibilities a live performance offers to take a familiar song to new places to engage the audience in ways they've never heard or seen before. To me, that's what live performance should be about!

A special thank you to Jim Murphy (303-784-8757) for the great TV audio clip, who proves that one way you become the VP of Country Media at Jones Radio Networks in Denver is by being smart enough to always have the digital recorder going during every awards broadcast!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Personally, I thought it was a mess! Beyounce and Jennifer just didn't mix well together. I don't think that is one that Sugarland would want replayed too often.

Someday hopefully the AMAs would actually let someone play country music.

Anonymous said...

I disagree, Anonymous. I am a huge Sugarland fan and have seen them live 3x. Each time they played "Irreplaceable" and I personally think they do it very well. They put a great country/bluegrass spin on the song. I love that they were so bold to actually perform it on the AMAs WITH Beyonce herself. That's what Sugarland is all about...being spontaneous and keeping things interesting, being different. I love them for it, I give them props.