CMA Music Festival in Full Swing!

June 10, 2011: The lineup for LP Field tonight is tremendous: Ashton Shepherd, Dierks Bentley, Keith Urban, Sugarland, Lady Antebellum, and Reba.

By all accounts, the CMA Music Festival is holding up pretty well at age 40.

While longtime festival-goers and music industry folk alike can lapse and call it "Fan Fair" out of sheer habit, young talent is also well-served at the venerable annual gathering of country music fans.

 From the buzz surrounding American Idol final duo of Scotty McCreery and Lauren Alaina to the dozens of up-and-coming artists getting a chance to showcase their talents on stages around Nashville, country music's future continues to unfold in front of appreciative, if warm, crowds.

Thursday continued a string of a dozen straight days of temperatures above 90 degrees in Middle Tennessee, and traveling from stage to stage to check out new music meant getting your sweat on, whether you wanted to or not.


Ready for the ride: Many artists use CMA Fest and the opportunity to connect with fans as a way to celebrate career achievements, but Keith Urban used the platform to look ahead, specifically at his new Get Closer tour, which launches next week in Biloxi, Miss. Urban and his band invited several hundred fans and industry onlookers (including the folks at Samsung and AT&T, which have signed on as title sponsors for the tour) to get an 11-song glimpse of the new production at Municipal Auditorium, where they've been rehearsing the show.

The new stage set, including a huge circular projection screen and roller-coaster-like rigging above and in back of the stage with rolling lights that provide tremendous visual impact, is a far cry from Urban's club days coming up. "We had no money, no budget, but I went to the hardware store and bought these four sections of pre-fabbed white picket fence," Urban said. "I got wire and hung them from the ceiling of the stage at unusual angles and then put lights through them, just to make them a set piece. So to go from that, to be able to put this kind of thing together, there's no shortage of gratitude for me for that."

For more information contact:

http://www.cmaworld.com/cma-music-festival/index