Want to talk to Kellie Pickler? Log on to Twitter in the wee hours.
"Sometimes, if I can't sleep, I'll sit up til three in the morning and answer people's questions," Pickler said in a July 23 telephone interview aboard a tour bus in Wyoming. "If you're out on the road and you can't sleep, it gets lonely, and if I don't have anybody to talk to, I'll just get online. There's usually somebody in the world to talk to then."
Pickler tweets under the username "therealpickler." Her best friend, Taylor Swift, introduced Pickler to the social networking site earlier this year, when the two kicked off the Fearless 2009 tour. The tour, which includes opening band Gloriana, will come to the Bryce Jordan Center in University Park Aug. 29.
Article Photos
"(Taylor's) Internet savvy, so she knows all that stuff," Pickler said. "She taught me how to do it, and now I'm addicted. It's just so fun, so easy to talk to people, to talk to your fans."
By Pickler's account, Swift is "the only female" in country music who can sell out a show.
"It's really amazing for country music to have two females touring together," she said. "I mean you don't often look at the top 10 and see two females in the top 10. It's very, very hard - country music is very male-dominated."
Swift and Pickler have been best friends for a few years, Pickler said, since they were on tour with Brad Paisley. It was on Paisley's tour bus that they wrote Pickler's hit "Best Days of Your Life," a jilted woman's taunt to her ex-lover that he has already had the "best days" of his life - with her.
"All my songs are personal, that I wrote," Pickler said, "but yeah, it's amazing to have a song that you've written especially do well on the charts."
The song recently entered the top 10 on the country charts. Swift sings back up vocals on the song, which put her in the country top 10 twice this week - her own song, "You Belong With Me," is No. 3 on Billboard's country charts.
"We're just excited to have written it together," Pickler said. "When we wrote it, we had no idea either of us would even record it. It's been really cool, taking our friendship into the studio, recording and writing together. We're pretty much inseparable at this point."
The two have been encouraging fans to request "Best Days of Your Life" on their local radio stations via Twitter - they want it to hit No. 1 on the charts.
"We've been praying about it - we want to have a big, pink, girly party when it does," Pickler said with a laugh.
Still, Pickler's a newcomer to such festivities - raised by her grandfather in Albemarle, N.C., she shot to stardom after finishing in the top six in the fifth season of "American Idol" in 2005. Her first album, "Small Town Girl," was released on Halloween 2006 was certified gold in three months, producing three Top 15 singles.
"I've been so blessed, since 'Idol,' really," Pickler said. "I can't even half the time grasp everything that has happened."
In September 2008, Pickler released her self-titled, sophomore album; five of the tracks were co-written with Swift. On tour, the two perform one encore song together, "I'm Only Me When I'm With You."
"We have so many inside jokes, it's hard for us to look at each other and try not to laugh," Pickler said. "I don't know how many times we just bust out laughing in the middle of a song. We have these little inside corny jokes, and we'll see each other and start laughing."
Staff writer Ashley Gurbal is at 946-7435.
