Country Jam announces more acts

The calendar’s slowly filling up, and with each new act added to this year’s Pinnacle Homes Country Jam lineup, this year’s country music festival looks a little sweeter.

Pinnacle Homes Country Jam officials announced today the additions of:

• Taylor Swift, Kellie Pickler and Jack Ingram.

• John Anderson.

• Ray Scott.

These new faces add to a schedule that already includes the likes of Rodney Atkins, Western Underground and Toby Keith, to name a few.

But get this.

There’s still seven slots that need to be filled at western Colorado’s largest musical festival of the year.

This year’s event will be June 21-24.

Tickets are already on sale. Check www.countryjam.com for more information.

In the meantime, here’s a look at three of the recently announced performers.

Taylor Swift

Just 16 years old, Taylor is at an age where most teenagers are only beginning to find their identity and lay tentative plans for the future. But there’s never been much doubt in Taylor’s mind about her calling. Growing up on a farm in Wyomissing, Pa., music was ever-present in her home. Inspired by her maternal grandmother, a professional opera singer, Taylor took up singing early in life. At 10, she began performing around town at karaoke contests, festivals and county fairs, and even recording rough demos at a studio.

At age 11, she performed the national anthem at a Philadelphia 76ers NBA game in front of thousands of fans. But it wasn’t until she picked up a guitar at age 12 and learned to write her own songs that Taylor discovered how readily she could channel the turbulent emotions of growing up into her music. That year, she wrote “The Outside,” a heartbreaking lament about loneliness. Before long, she was spending every available moment playing and writing. “I was playing four hours a day until my fingers were bleeding and my mom called me to dinner,” she says.

Kellie Pickler

Just two weeks before the release of her debut album, “Small Town Girl,” Kellie Pickler was still unpacking boxes in the decidedly uptown condominium she had leased in Nashville, her new hometown.

“I came across photos from when I went to audition for American Idol, when I was standing in line with all those thousands of people in Greensboro..”

The journey that took Kellie Pickler where she came from to where she is today is one of beating the odds. Even before she made it to the finals of the fifth season of one of the most influential televised talent shows ever, signed a contract with 19 Recordings/BNA Records, criss-crossed the country with the American Idols Live! Tour 2006, Pickler has triumphed over what could have easily been her destiny.

“There’s a difference in running from your problems and overcoming them.”

A tough life growing up, Kellie lived with her grandparents most of the time.

“My grandmother and I would bake cakes, plant flowers in the spring and bulbs in the fall. We would sit on the swing on the front porch, and I would just sing my heart out. Jesus Loves Me, Amazing Grace. I loved to sing.” Her grandmother’s death when she was a sophomore in high school left a void in her life and a hole in her heart that has yet to heal.

“Of all the things I have been through in my life, the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through is the loss of my grandmother. She was always there for me, and then she was gone.”

Kellie, living with grandfather Clyde, and searching for a way out, entered a local beauty pageant, hoping to win scholarship money to continue her education after graduating high school. “My talent was singing, of course. I sang ‘Broken Wing.’”

Kellie won the pageant.

Other success would follow, but she wanted more.

Friends alerted Kellie’s attention to the fifth season of American Idol.

“They announced they would hold auditions in Greensboro. So my grandpa Ken and I loaded up and off we went. It was an adventure.”

The rest is history.

Jack Ingram

Around the time Jack Ingram started writing songs and performing, he was studying psychology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

“Music and psychology come from the same place,” he says. “It’s about studying why people tick. I write songs to figure out my world, why people act the way they do, why they make the decisions they do.”

Lucky for his fans, Ingram chose a career in music — and discovered an altogether different kind of therapy. He weaved his questions about life into songs whose depth and incisive wit were matched only by their melodic resonance and insistent hooks. And instead of charging a hundred bucks an hour to listen to our problems, Ingram took to the stage and channeled his emotional searching, his quest to find a place in the world, into one of music’s most explosive live shows.

You can hear that onstage electricity in full roar on “Live - Wherever You Are,” Ingram’s first release on Nashville’s new Big Machine label. The company is the brainchild of industry vet Scott Borchetta and country superstar Toby Keith, in whom Ingram has found an unlikely kindred spirit.

“He says what he means, he does it his way and he takes a stand,” says Ingram.

“It’s great to be a part of that, because that’s how I’ve always been as well. I know exactly who I am and what I want to sound like.”

In addition to an exhilarating document of Ingram’s onstage acumen, “Live - Wherever You Are” features two new studio tracks — his first since 2002’s acclaimed Electric. One is the first single, the surprisingly tender “Wherever You Are.” “It’s a love story,” he says, “about doing whatever it takes to get where you need to go and going through all the obstacles you have to go through.”