What’s next for Miranda and Blake?
The power couple are moving on, and so are their careers
“They’ve done a good job of being stewards of their careers in the way they announced it.” Hunter Kelly, Nashville entertainment producer for ABC Radio
Everyone at Nashville’s Basement East Wednesday night knew Miranda Lambert was in the club.
“We all saw her,” says Patrick Thomas, director of programming for the syndicated Big D &
Bubba radio show, who was there to attend a listening party for Lambert’s friend Ashley Monroe. “We all wanted her to get onstage.”
When Lambert took the stage to sing with Monroe, just one day after her divorce from Blake Shelton was finalized, “the whole place went crazy,” Thomas says.
“It felt like there was genuine support and excitement,” says Leslie Rouffe, a radio promoter who also was part of the invitation-only audience.
If Lambert’s reception at her first post-divorce performance is any indication, the rough waters she and Shelton have experienced in their personal lives won’t spill over into their careers. In an industry in which both are respected for their music and personalities, they’ll probably find more support than repercussions.
“The industry is very respectful, unlike out in the Internet world, where everybody’s trying to make sense of it by figuring out what caused it and who’s to blame,” says Sherod Robertson, who runs the Nashville trade publication Music Row. “Probably, the industry is more saddened than anything else, because we all love both of them.”
Shelton, 39, and Lambert, 31, announced their divorce last Monday. “This is not the future we envisioned,” they said in a joint statement. “And it is with heavy hearts that we move forward separately. We are real people, with real lives, with real families, friends and colleagues. Therefore, we kindly ask for privacy and compassion concerning this very personal matter.”
There’s no need for the country music community to separate into Team Blake and Team Miranda, experts say.
“They’ve done a good job of being stewards of their careers in the way they announced it,” says Hunter Kelly, Nashville entertainment producer for ABC Radio. “I don’t think either one of them wants to see the other’s career suffer as a result of this.”
When country star Jason Aldean divorced his wife and married former American Idol contestant Brittany Kerr, he continued to have radio hits and pack stadiums and arenas.
“In Jason’s case, he was spotted cheating, and he doubleddown on what was going on,” says
Country Weekly managing editor Jon Freeman. “You’ll still see people on Twitter and Facebook having not-so-kind things to say about that situation. I don’t think his trouble affected him with radio or sales, but the fans, it seems like they have cooled somewhat.”
Since announcing their engagement in 2010, Shelton and Lambert have racked up awards, winning five consecutive pairs of trophies for top male and female vocalist from the Country Music Association and dozens of other honors from various organizations. In the country industry, such winning streaks rarely run longer. With only a few thousand eligible voters in some cases, it might take only a few dozen people to decide to put the spotlight elsewhere to change an outcome.
“They’ve been winning all the awards; were we approaching the end of the love affair with that?” says Gregg Swedberg, vice president of programming of iHeartMedia in Minneapolis. “These things are cyclical anyway.”
Unless ugly details emerge in the coming months, Swedberg believes Lambert and Shelton have enough career momentum on their own to survive no longer being a celebrity couple.
“It will be a different narrative, but both of them have enough popularity where there’s still plenty of stuff to talk about,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be about each other.
“The only thing that’s going to hurt them is if they start putting bad records out, and neither one of them’s doing that.”