An Open Book

It's not easy being beautiful and beloved -- take it from us.

And Kellie Pickler.

She's blindingly blond, curvy as a racetrack and occasionally mispronounces words like "salmon."

As such, she's become a pincushion of punch lines, a leggy stereotype, the exasperated beauty queen who occasionally wears her tiara like a crown of thorns.

And that hair color doesn't help.

"I went to management, and I was like, 'I'm coloring my hair black,' " Pickler says from a recent tour stop in New Orleans. "I get so aggravated some times, because I feel like people just don't take me seriously, and I am a very, very serious person. I'm very business-oriented. There's a difference between being a singer and an artist, and I want to be taken seriously as an artist."

Of course, the former "American Idol" contestant turned rising country music star certainly has played her role in cultivating a fun, yet flighty public persona.

There was her now infamous appearance on "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?," where Pickler earned her share of guffaws by not knowing that Hungary is an actual country.

And then there was her tenure on "American Idol" itself, where she first earned her stripes as a lovable yet loopy fan favorite.

Upon once being told that she was ballsy on the show, she responded by asking, "What's a ballsy?"

Some have accused Pickler of playing up the aww-shucks ditziness, and in truth, speaking with the chatty 21-year-old North Carolina native, she comes across as quick-witted and sharp-tongued, and we're pretty sure she could thump Jessica Simpson at Scrabble.

"I never think about what I say before I say it, and that always comes back to bite me in the ass," Pickler says of her occasional public foible. "When I was on '5th Grader,' it was like, 'Holy (expletive)!' It's hard to be in this industry where you're surrounded by people who constantly want you to be a great role model. I don't know how to be anything but myself, and it's really hard to be the good girl all the time. I'm tired of being the good girl."

Candid and forthcoming, Pickler seems to be cut from a different cloth than her happy, shiny country peers.

For one, she co-wrote a handful of songs on her debut, "Small Town Girl," the top-selling disc from a new country artist in 2007, which earned Pickler her first gold record.

Moreover, she's much more of a traditionalist than many fresh-scrubbed country singers nowadays, more interested in the earthy roots of the genre than its poppier present.

"I understand that the music is going to change, but the lyrics have changed so much," Pickler says of the evolution of country. "You listen to Tammy Wynette or Dolly Parton, and the lyrics are so killer. They were risk takers. Now, you have to be so careful, you worry so much about what kind of image this is going to create for you. But really, it's that real, raw stuff that people relate to. And I'm not holding anything back on this next album."

Pickler didn't hold back much on her debut, either.

It's a personal, emotional disc, tender as a fresh bruise, where Pickler addresses her up and down family life in unflinching fashion, from the mother who left her when she was 2 years old to her alcoholic father, who recently served a three-year prison sentence for assault and battery.

It's sentiments like these that she chose to mine, instead of overly relying on outside songwriting help.

"No one knows you better than you," Pickler says. "My writing is like my diary, all my personal thoughts and feelings and emotions. It's all there. That's my favorite part about what I do. If I had to choose between whether or not I had to sing or song write, I'd song write."

Despite having made the rounds on the beauty pageant circuit when she was younger, where contestants get well-schooled on the importance of presentation and saying the right things, Pickler seldom seems to put much stock in watching what she says.

She strives to be an open book, even if some of its pages contain the occasional misspelling, the stray run-on sentence.

"Everything that you've ever seen is real, but there's so much that you don't get to see," Pickler says of her public image. "All you get to see is maybe a three or four minute interview on television or a four-minute song on 'The View.'

"I'm so tired of being branded as a comedian," she adds. "I want people to know me on a different level other than just, 'She's funny.' I have my dark side. There are certain things that people don't know about me -- and they're going to, for sure. I think I'm going to shock a lot of people."

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0476.