Music. According to Kim.

I was just skimming over the list of all the performers for the show this year and it looks like this is the year of the collaborations. There's always a few, but it seems like there's more than usual this time. Zac Brown Band will be joined by Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, Hunter Hayes will be performing his new single with Jason Mraz, Keith Urban and Miranda Lambert are singing their new duet and Taylor Swift will be performing with Vince Gill and Alison Krauss among others. And then Alan Jackson and George Strait will be teaming up to honor George Jones. There'll also be a special tribute to Kenny Rogers that will include Rascal Flatts, Jennifer Nettles and Darius Rucker. I don't know; just seems like more than usual this year. Should be interesting. In any event, in Part 1 of my predictions I talked about Entertainer, Male Vocalist, Female Vocalist, New Artist, Group and Duo. Now it's time to shift focus a bit. Starting off with…

Wanted to stop this off by saying that if you have any thoughts about anything I write about, I'd love to hear them. Whether you agree or disagree, I welcome opinions of all kinds. All I ask is that everyone remain respectful. I had a comment come in last night on one of my reviews that I ended up deleting due to the use of profanity. That's something that I'm not going to tolerate. There's no need for it. I don't like deleting comments, but I will remove any that include profanity. Right now I allow anonymous comments and I'd like to keep it that way. Hopefully that comment will prove to be a fluke; it's the first one I've gotten that I felt I had to remove. I really don't think this will be a big problem, but I wanted to get this out there. So now that that's taken care of, here's the rest of my ACM thoughts, picks and predictions. Kicking it off with...

I'm going to start this off with mentioning that the eligibility period for this years CMAs started on July 1st, 2011 and ended on June 30th, 2012. I point this out because I was pretty surprised by a couple of the songs up for this award. Not because I don't like the songs, but because it seems like it's been so long since they were released. Come to find out, when a song comes out doesn't really matter. What matters is when it reaches its peak chart position - which has to be somewhere in the top fifty. So there we go. I still think it's weird that a couple of these songs are in the running, but then, I am not a member of the Country Music Association. For anyone interested in how the voting process works and what the criteria for all the awards is, you can read about it  here . That all said, my picks have more to do with my own personal preferences and factors that I think should be considered. That should go without saying, but I wanted to make it clear. Me...