Annie Clements Music

I Gurm Little Big Town…

Posted on 21. May, 2010 by annie in Notebook

Let’s talk about the word “gurm.” A most unpleasant term, reminiscent of words like “germ” and “worm.” Can be used either as an adjective or a verb. Versatile. The first time I heard it was when Miranda Lambert said it to me. I had no idea what she was talking about at that point…

A dirty word…

Waaaaaaaaaayyyy back in the day (like, 2006) we shared a bill with Lambert in a cornfield somewhere in the midwest. I hit it off with some guys in her band who invited me to stop by their bus after our set. I knocked on the bus door and Miranda answered. I told her I’d been asked to stop by and she said, “Sure, come on up. I’m sure everyone’s gonna want to gurm you.” Or something like that.

She stepped off, I stood there confused, and then I boarded the bus for drinks and chit chat. No gurming as far as I could tell. I went back and asked my band mates what “gurm” meant, in the same way a kid hears a dirty word at school and has to go home and ask her parents about it. I got a general definition, something along the lines of how a crazy fan will hang all over you in an uncool way. Hmm…

Searching for answers…

4 years later (this week) I finally decided to look up the definition of “gurm” in the Urban Dictionary:

1. Gurm

A person who displays uncool, groveling, embarrassing, obsessive, inappropriate, or presumptuous behavior in a way that oversteps boundairies or portocol, witout realizing that they’re out of line.

Uh oh.

Turns out I’M the guilty gurmer and I’ve been gurming my fave band Little Big Town for a while now. I basically want to be both Kimberly and Karen. Like Sunday night at our show in Columbia Maryland. We decided to play “Life in a Northern Town” (a past collaboration with LBT and Jake Owen) and have opener Jake Owen join us. And since Little Big Town wasn’t there, I figured I’d sing the parts of both Kimberly AND Karen.

(On a side note, if you’d been a friend of mine as a little girl and Little Big Town had existed back then, I would’ve made you come over to my house everyday after school to play “Little Big Town” and I’d get to be BOTH Kimberly and Karen. Not one or the other. You’d either have to be Jimi or Daisy Pearl while I got to be some hybrid human being named KimberlyKaren or something like that.)

I finally got my chance at the show on Sunday.

Gurm in a Northern Town…

We hadn’t run through Life in a Northern Town with Jennifer at sound check so I hadn’t exactly told her that I’d be singing both Kimberly and Karen’s parts. Cut to show time. In the middle of the song, when it came time for the 2nd verse, I sang Kimberly’s line. Jen then looked at me, presumably to see if she was gonna step up and take Karen’s “hey yeah, yeah” at the end of Kimberly’s part. But I just kept right on singing. Jen smiled and raised her eyebrows in a “Go ahead, Gurmy!” sort of look.

The awful truth…

This made me reflect on my life. I started looking back on my life-experiences with Little Big Town. The pictures I’d taken of them. The videos. My collection of Little Big Town look-a-like Barbie dolls. The incessant viewings of Karen’s Facebook profile. The way I watched them night after night and sang and danced on the side of the stage in such a fitful manner that eventually, no one would go out there with me. The signs were everywhere…

Gurm alert.

Here are some photographs of me at Little Big Town’s fan club party last year.

But I also gurm Miranda…

So it turns out Miranda had pegged the wrong gurm. And this couldn’t have been more evident then last month when Blake Shelton opened for us at a Dr. Pepper corporate show in Las Vegas. I was backstage getting ready when someone casually mentioned that Miranda was about to sit in with Blake. Guess who dropped her makeup with a clatter and ran to the side of the stage, knocking people over so she could get there in time to watch Lambert with rapt, wide-eyed delight?

Gurm alert.