How Blake And Gwen Steered Clear Of Miranda Lambert At The ACMs

During the 2020 ACMs, Miranda Lambert blew us all away with her rendition of "Bluebird" at The Bluebird, in Nashville, Tennessee.  And if you tuned in a little too late to Blake Shelton (Lambert's ex) and Gwen Stefani's (Shelton's current flame) ACM Awards performance, you'd be forgiven for thinking they were also belting out their love ballad from The Bluebird. Not so. Instead, the opening of their duet saw them in front of a green background. Blake, snapping his fingers to turn the set into a virtual concert hall, said "I wish we could be [there]." But did he really? 

The Bluebird, as Lambert fessed up in a during People's pre-show, has a "special place in her heart." It's there, when she was just 18, that the reigning queen of country met her longtime producer, Frank Liddell. He'd come to hear her sing. Then, there's the fact that, in many ways,  "Bluebird," (Lambert's hit song), is a clear sign that Lambert is finally over her painfully public divorce from Shelton, and ready to move on. (With a new, ex-model, NYPD-employed husband, no less. But we digress.) 

Was Lambert, perhaps, reclaiming both her heart and marking out her territory (a space that marked her career as a musician) during the 2020 CMTs?  If so, it might make sense that Shelton and Stefani stayed far, far away from Nashville.

You probably remember the 2019 ACM Awards well. Not because Keith Urban won Entertainer of the Year (although we love him) or because Miranda Lambert lost Female Artist of the Year to Kacey Musgraves, but because of Lambert's polarizing ACM performance (via Billboard). 

During the 2019 ACMs, Lambert, as the Twitterverse would gleefully tell you, changed the lyrics of her hit song "Little Red Wagon" to take a swing at Shelton and Stefani who were sitting in the audience (via Country Music Nation and Cosmopolitan). We'd rehash the significance of the "I got the hell out of Oklahoma"  lyric change, but it's probably still fresh in your mind. And don't even get us started about whether or not Lambert really whispered that Stefani was "built on botox and filler" (via Celebrity Insider). 

This year, Twitter is staying surprisingly tame. Lambert's fans are solidly in her corner, gushing about her performance (via Twitter). And Shelton and Stefani's fanbase are off in another part of the Twitterverse, assuring the pair that their's was the best performance of the night. Of course, thanks to Shelton and Stefani, there's was no in-person, meet-cute to stir up controversy or ghosts of ACMs past.