I was in the CFIS studio earlier this week, leafing through one of the music books we have there for reference. This book listed all the singles each country artist had charted with (Top 100), and as I leafed through it, I found myself seeing names of people I had the chance to interview in one way or another. A couple of the ones I remembered where artists who appeared at the Merritt Mountain Music Festival, which I attended for a fair number of years. Many of the artists would come to the media area about an hour before they went on stage, and do a 15-minute session with the gathered scribes. I usually made sure I had a few questions for each artist, from the ones just starting out to the headliners, and I usually ended up asking about 90 percent of the questions in each interview. That came out when Lonestar was in there one day. About halfway through the interview, lead singer Richie McDonald looked out and said: “How come he’s asking all the questions? Doesn’t anybody else have any?” One of the other media people, who had also been there a number of years, said, “yeah, but he’s asking good ones.” In two consecutive years, we had Brad Paisley and Keith Urban as headliners, and each of them came to the media area. For each of them, I had the same basic question: “A session guitarist in Nashville said the two best guitarists in Nashville right now are Brad Paisley and Keith Urban. How does it feel to get that recognition from someone who plays guitar for a living?” Both of them answered that it was quite flattering to get that kind of recognition, but Keith had a further comment. “I think that quote came from Brad,” he said with a smile in his Australian accent. “You might notice his name came first.” I mentioned Lonestar earlier, and a media session with them a few years later brought an unexpected response. I started by mentioning that I knew they had called themselves Lonestar because all of them were from Texas. They nodded. “That’s the Lone Star state,” I said, “but the nickname is two words, and your name is one. Why did you go that route?” Dead silence for a few seconds as they all looked at each other. Then Dean Sams, one of the guitarists, raised his hand. “Is there a security person here? Can we have this man escorted from the room?” They eventually decided that what happened was on one of their first albums, the name of the band (which at that time was two words) was written across the front of the cover, with the point of a star between the ‘e’ and the ‘s’. “I think someone at the record company decided it was one word being split,” McDonald said, “and that’s what happened.” By the way, I did hear the answer, since nobody from security threw me out.