Blake Shelton's 2008 CD, Startin' Fires, photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Nashville.

"Good At Starting Fires" will be widely seen as an ode to girlfriend Miranda Lambert, but it is on the album's closer, "Bare Skin Rug," that the musical riches inherent in that relationship--and the irreverence of which they are capable--get their first full workout following Miranda's splendid harmonies on "Home."

"Everyone expected us to come out with a big power ballad and we did just the opposite," he says. "Obviously, we want to write and record together--we'd be crazy not to. But we certainly wanted to approach it in a way that isn't cheesy. I can get away with things--people expect about anything from me--but Miranda protects her image fiercely. She's the tough girl in country music. We ended up writing a song about a couple of hillbillies who meet up in the mountains. They're young, they're virgins, and, damn it, they're tired of waiting. That's what it is. And we decided, 'Let's just do this how we wrote it.'"

The result, recorded live in front of a friendly campfire, is a modern redneck classic.

Taken as a whole, Startin' Fires is a richly nuanced look at one of this generation's most engaging singers and certainly one of its most interesting characters. Last year's star turn on the NBC miniseries "Clash of the Choirs" and Blake's appearance as a judge on "Nashville Star" have helped raise his profile across the board, introducing his irreverently skewed personality to millions of new fans.

It's a long way from Ada, Oklahoma, where he dreamed early on of a career in music. In fact, he once got a bit of inspiration from the man who produced Startin' Fires."

"I remember seeing a story on an Oklahoma City TV station about Scott Hendricks," he says. "They said he was an Oklahoma guy who had moved to Nashville and made good, making these huge albums on big artists. I used to think, 'It would be so cool to meet him some day. Maybe he'd give me a shot.' Then, not long ago, he fell in my lap when he became A&R chief at Warner Bros. We decided we wanted to make this record together, and I'm really glad we did."

Blake cut his teeth on the Oklahoma City club circuit while still in high school. He was part of the entertainment for an event in Ada honoring Mae Axton, writer of the Elvis classic "Heartbreak Hotel." She saw him perform and told Blake she thought he could get a record deal if he moved to Nashville and that she was willing to help. That convinced him to move just two weeks after graduation. He worked with Hoyt Axton, Bobby Braddock and Earl Thomas Conley, among others, en route to his record deal, and his debut single, "Austin," shot him straight to the top of the charts. It also became his first No. 1 video, a group that would ultimately include "Heavy Liftin'," "Goodbye Time," "Home," "Nobody But Me," "Some Beach," "Don't Make Me," "The More I Drink" and the song that still gets as passionate a reaction as any.

"'Ol' Red' was not a huge hit at radio," he says, "but it's my signature song. To this day, that's the one people hold up signs for in concert."

Thanks to those songs, Blake's stature as a singer has grown steadily through the years, and his presence everywhere from network television to Youtube has raised his profile even more. Now, with the release of Startin' Fires, Blake steps into the forefront as both one of the country's premiere vocalists and one of its true personalities. It's a position he declares himself grateful to be in.

"I think," he says with his trademark smile, "that I've got the best of both worlds."