Duet Partners Carly Pearce + Lee Brice Have Both Been Tripped Up by Wedding Song Snafus
Carly Pearce and fellow country star Michael Ray got married on Sunday (Oct. 6), in one of the most-anticipated country music weddings of 2019. Before the big day, Pearce reflected on the high level of fan interest in the ceremony, laughingly telling The Boot and other outlets that while she hoped to keep some elements private, she knew her wedding would be a celebration, and she didn't intend to stand too much on ceremony.
Case in point: Pearce cracked up remembering how Jake Owen spilled the beans to DJ and radio personality Bobby Bones about his participation in her and Ray's wedding. Early in Ray and Pearce's engagement, Ray heard Owen sing his song "Made for You," during St. Jude Children's Research Hospital's annual Country Cares Weekend, and asked if he would perform the song at his and Pearce's wedding.
Owen excitedly agreed, of course, but Pearce says she told her husband-to-be, "''I don't want you to tell anybody about that. I want that to kind of be a secret.'
"Next thing I know, I see an article on Twitter that's like, 'Jake Owen Is Wedding Singer for Carly Pearce and Michael Ray,'" Pearce adds. "It was on the Bobby Bones Show, and I was like, 'Lord have mercy.'"
Pearce clicked on the article, sure that it was her fiance -- who had been especially excited about booking Owen -- who had slipped up. "I thought, 'Michael blew this, because he was excited and he told somebody,'" she recalls. "But actually, Jake was sitting there!
"It was so funny to watch him go in his head, 'Telling, telling, telling,' and then go, 'Oh, oh, oops, oops, oops, I don't know if I was supposed to say that!'" Pearce continues. "So I joked and was like, 'Tell Jake I'm mad at him.'"
Pearce's response was all in good fun, of course. "To this day, I'm totally not mad at him. It's sweet how excited he was about it, and for us, and it was kind of him to mark that date off on his calendar so many months ago," she says. "But he totally thought I was mad. He did slip up, but I forgive him."
Owen isn't the only country star to accidentally spill the beans about a special wedding performance. In fact, Lee Brice -- who duets with Pearce on her brand-new single, "I Hope You're Happy Now" -- has some experience in that department, too, from when he played the role of wedding singer at his own wedding to his wife Sara in 2013.
"I got in trouble," Brice admits with a laugh. "I wrote "I Don't Dance" for our first dance, and nobody had heard it, but I loved the song so much. So one day, I was onstage -- this is before we got married -- and I was like, 'Hey guys, I wrote a new song. This is special for my bride-to-be. What do y'all think?' And I played "I Don't Dance.""
The crowd loved it, and Brice felt great about the performance -- until he got offstage, and saw that his phone was blowing up. "[Sara] was like, 'What did you do?!' And I was like, 'I don't know. What did I do?' She's like, 'You played our song that we're gonna have our first dance to for everyone else to hear, to then go use for their wedding before we even get to do it.'
"I go, '... I guess I did. It will not happen again,'" Brice continues with a laugh. "So that was the last time I played it until the first time I sang it to Sara."
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