Jon Pardi is a relative newcomer to the country music scene but he still managed to roll up to the CMA Awards earlier this month in style, in a chauffeur-driven red Bentley. And although the ride itself left him admittedly "dumbfounded," it was his experience on the red carpet that ended almost as quickly as it had started.

The singer, whose debut hit, "Missin' You Crazy" is climbing the charts, wasn't a CMA nominee and wasn't scheduled to present an award, so he didn't have those all-important credentials needed to take part in the photo ops and interviews artists do when they walk the red carpet. But he ended up crashing the festivities anyway!

"[Our driver] pulls into the red carpet entrance where all the vehicles are going," Jon explains, "and this kid comes up to us and starts flipping through his pages after the driver said my name. After [the kid] gets done looking through the pages, he goes, 'Naw, he's not on the list, but I saw him at the [Capitol] Street Party [which took place in downtown Nashville earlier this fall], and he was awesome. You guys are totally cool. Come back here.'"

As the Marines on duty at the entrance to the carpet opened the car door for Jon to exit, the singer was recognized by a handful of girls who asked for his autograph. He then found himself in front of photographers who were taking photos of all the artists as they made their way into Bridgestone Arena for the show.

"I was like, 'We gotta go. I'm not supposed to be here,'" Jon recalls. "I took pictures very awkwardly. I didn't know what I was supposed to do. I had no publicist. I just had J.R. [my road manager], and he didn't know what he was doing. [laughs] It was crazy. People were just taking pictures ... 'Snap, snap, snap, Jon, snap, snap.' I just went past all of the interviews. I didn't want to get into even more trouble. Then we get to the end of where you're supposed to go if you're a regular red-carpet [artist], then we get to another list, and they're like, 'You're not on the list. You guys [have] got to go back out and around to the other artists' entrance. Our 10 seconds on the red carpet was extremely over after we got in an elevator going upstairs. At the end of it, we went in and got a beer and said, 'That was fun. We just crashed the red carpet.'"

Jon's "Year of the Pardi" continues with several tour stops between now and Dec. 21, when he'll play Joe's Bar in Chicago at an "end of the world" bash.

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