10 Things You May Not Know About Brantley Gilbert

All BG fans know that the country singer/songwriter is a home-grown Georgia boy who is signed to Big Machine Records' Valory division. These are the ten things that you might not know ...

1. At a very young age, Gilbert started his love affair with music. He told USA Today, "My mom said I was 3 when I put my first show on. I had a little plastic guitar and a plastic microphone, and she said my door was cracked one day and the music was blaring. She looked in my room and I was playing in front of the mirror. And I thought I was doing an excellent job, but she said it sounded pretty hideous."
2. Gilbert starting writing and singing original music when he was 13, but it was a hobby rather than a calling at that point.
3. While in college, studying to be a marriage and relationship counselor, he worked as a special-needs counselor at Friendship Elementary in Gainesville, Georgia.
4. When BG was 19, he had been drinking when he jumped in his truck and took off down the road near his hometown of Jefferson, Georgia. He went offroad and his truck flipped several times before crashing into a tree. Gilbert was ejected out of the vehicle, flew about 15 feet into the air and then landed on his feet before collapsing. He realized that God must have had something special for him to do with his life and turned to music to fulfil that something.
5. Gilbert has been sober since 2012. He said, "I am still around it. I still party my butt off, man," Gilbert said. "It's just some people can do that and have a good time with that, some folks can't. I got to a place in my life where I needed to take that friend in my life out, you know what I mean? So I could get back to the real ones. People ask me, 'Why do you sing songs about drinking, if you had a problem with it and you don't drink anymore?'" He continued, "Cause when I drank, I drank 10 times more than the majority of people drink in 10 lifetimes. I earned my stripes. I can sing drinking songs for the rest of my life if I want to."
6. One of his favorite holiday treats is what he calls Phlegm (but you can call it Chocolate Delight and if you make it, you'll see why!).
7. BG is says he has always been a huge fan of Brian McKnight and he thinks it would be "interesting" to work with Eminem.
8. He said living in Nashville wasn't for him because he didn't get along with the homeowners association. Between the multiple chandeliers in the house, the inability to shoot any guns off of the porch and the ridiculous rules, it just didn't work. He shared an example with K102 about one issue where something was a problem at BGs house, yet not at anyone else's house - There was a walking path that went right behind his backyard and he got a letter from the HA saying that the pool equipment was showing. His response was that he had not touched the equipment since he had moved in and it had been that way and hadn't been a problem for the previous owner.
9. His song, "Saving Amy" came from personal experience. it was about a friend of Brantley's from high school who's boyfriend was killed in a car wreck the night he proposed. He changed the girl's name to Amy without realizing that another friend, a young man named Joseph Hensley, had proposed to his girlfriend, who WAS named Amy and then was hit by a train on his way home. The only thing that survived that accident unscathed was his Bible. His BG's cousin reminded him and he said it clicked and he felt like he had "a little bit of help writing that one."
10. "She’s My Kind of Crazy" is another personal experience song. He says that it was about a girl he dated who was "just kind of goofy" and "playful all the time." She would " get on my nerves to the point you just couldn’t take it anymore, but you just couldn’t really get mad at her. She was too cute and that’s kinda where that one came from." And yes - the girl in question knows that the song was written about her!

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