Kellie Pickler photo by Kristin Barlowe, courtesy of Sony BMG.
Taylor Swift photo courtesy of Big Machine Records
July 26, 2007 — Kellie Pickler and Taylor Swift have a lot in common: they're both young blonde country singers on tour with Brad Paisley, and they also look up to one another, the Charlotte Observer reports.
"She's 17, but I refer to her as my big sister," Kellie says of Taylor. "I'm obnoxious and immature. She's reserved and well put-together. She keeps me in line."
"I love the way she acts," Taylor says "She will never tell you something she doesn't mean. I respect that, and...the fact that she came from a situation where she wasn't given much and made the most of her life."
For his part, Brad jokes that his two openers are "horrible" to deal with on the road. "You have Taylor who's in chatrooms, she's got her high school friends out, there's giggling," he tells Dial-Global. "She has the catering room divided into cool tables and nerdy tables. It's like high school. It's crazy. "
As for Kellie, Brad says, "She wants to have judges out there every night, and that's just ridiculous. I keep telling her, 'This is not a reality show, Kellie. This is the real thing. This is reality. It's different.' But she just says, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but which way should I look? Which is the camera?' "
All joking aside, Brad says Taylor is "an amazing human being," adding, "At 17 years old, she goes out there and has this great ability to reach the people and say the right things." And he says Kellie is "the closest thing to Dolly Parton I've seen in a long time, in a charming sense."