The year Blake spends in Nashville is horrible; Luke is just about the only thing that keeps him going, but even he has a hard time putting a positive spin on all the rejection. Blake is ushered into every record label in the city for meetings and demo recordings, after which they all say the same thing: he’s got potential.
And Blake knows what they mean; he could be successful, but he’s been distracted. Blake knows it, and Luke knows it, and it takes a serious pep talk spanning at least a week before Blake starts from scratch.
He strips everything back, starts working on new songs, and after submitting some, gets invited back to Warner where he had the initial meeting. The smile he gets from the executive when he’s finished with the live performance pretty much says it all, and it’s from that point on Blake knows he has one of two options; bottle up absolutely everything he’s ever felt about Adam and keep it there, or let everything flood in. And while the latter would probably improve his music, it would also deem him unable to perform each and every song he writes. So the former is the way to go.
He records Austin, sees it go to number one on the Billboard Country chart. He quite literally cries into Luke’s shoulder that night.
From then on, things are steady. Blake works hard, he writes songs, he chooses songs that others have written, he splits his time between the road and the studio and in the house he’s sharing with Luke, and then he spends what very little that’s left helping Luke with his own career. He’s had some success, but he’s only now really attracting the record label attention.
When he does get there though, they travel together, perform together, steer clear of L.A., because Blake has heard Adam’s voice on the radio, and going back seems like the worst idea possible. It’s a voice that’s just impossible to ignore, and it’s gotten to the point where Blake has to try to detach the voice from the boy -- man, he thinks now -- in order to get by. There are only so many times he can change the radio station with other people in the room before people start to realize that every time it’s because of Maroon 5.
Fuck, are the songs catchy though.
Past that, he simply cannot deal with Adam’s face on the TV. His voice is bearable; his face, his body, his tattoos, are not.
Pure BS is a new experience, and it does well. He makes a hard appearance on Nashville Star as a judge, and then another on Clash of the Choirs, but his heart isn’t entirely in it, and while on tour, he can feed off of the audience and forget about the loss. On TV, not so much.
The re-release happens not long later, and then the next EP a little while later, just as Luke is recording a follow-up to his first album. His dreams pretty much come true when he duets with Trace Adkins for Hillbilly Bone, and it’s safer territory, it’s light-hearted and Trace is a great guy.
There’s the greatest hits, the Grand Old Opry invitation which was pretty much his greatest goal in music, and then there’s Footloose, and then, after the awards shows and the craziness of that year, comes the invitation to work on The Voice.
Mark Burnett, the guy who had had so much faith and patience with him back in L.A., had finally seen his own dreams pay off; he had become the king of reality television, producing hit after hit featuring everyday folks chomping on spiders and vying for cash. The latest venture is a singing competition (as if there aren’t a million of those on TV already), and Blake is kind of reluctant; his experiences with television, after all, haven’t been great successes. But everyone tells him what a great opportunity it is, and the producers don’t want to take no for an answer. Blake finally gets on a plane back to L.A. for the first time in years, all for one meeting.
