I continue to follow good decisions with bad ones - especially in the sleep area. For instance, after 14-hour nonstop productivity day, I should have just gone to bed, but instead I stayed up another hour and a half to watch the first part of the CMA awards - including Faith Hill's poor reaction to Carrie Underwood winning female vocalist of the year. (Cheers to Jason for first pointing Ms. Underwood out to me way back when she was still one of several American Idol constestants left . . . ). Faith has tried to pull it off as a joke, but that's a little hard to believe.

Not that I totally blame her. The CMA awards are a little strange . . . Carrie Underwood, like Gretchan Wilson before her, won both the horizon award for newcomers and top female vocalist of the year. It seems odd to give the same award to both. And Faith, despite being a powerhouse of country music (albeit one that's becoming marginalized a bit by her pop style), has only won the award once. That's unusual, considering the CMA likes to give out awards to the same performer in the same category for a few years in a row. The extreme example is Brooks & Dunn, who've won top vocal duo 14 times in the last 15 years.

Which is another pet peeve of mine - Brooks & Dunn are great, but there's other good talent that should be rejected. My pet peeve isn't really w/ Brooks & Dunn though so much as it is with the fact that Big & Rich haven't been recognized EVER for ANY CMA award. They're still fairly new - only two CD's out (though a third one must be in the works) but they got beaten in the Horizon award, and now they don't really qualify for it, and the CMA doesn't seem to have any intention of giving the award to anybody besides Brooks & Dunn. Heck if I know why.

It was an all together disappointing results tally for me, I think. I would have like to see Sugarland get the Horizon Award - especially if Carrie Underwood got female vocalist. Carrie's outsold them and gotten more media and radio air time, but Sugarland has made some big splashes this year too - and they are fantastic singers as well as Carrie.

All in all though it appears to be a good year for Country music. There's a lot of recognition going on that country has got a remarkable portion of damn good song writers, as acknolwedged by such varied sources as John Bon Jovi and the Washington Post:

http://www.cmt.com/news/articles/1526126/20060314/bon_jovi.jhtml?headlines=true
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/06/AR2006110601050.html