"You know what? I would be skeptical of myself if I wasn't me," she said. "I'm serious. I mean, 'What's this dance-star chick doing trying to come over to my format?' What's been cool is the minute they talk to me and know that this has been a passion of mine."

"Nashville is a different kind of town," said CMA producer Richard Deaton. "Julianne didn't make her record out here or in New York. She came to Nashville. She worked with writers. She worked with producers. She became ingrained in the community. I think Nashville is real accepting of people who do that.

"And the other thing is, she made a great record."

She's definitely got the country-music twang down — although it's certainly not something she acquired growing up in Utah and London.

"When I lived in London, I had a full-on English accent. Nobody knew I was American," she said. "And then I came back and I was American with a Utah accent. And then I've been in Nashville for a couple of months. I just pick it up wherever I go."

She's also getting better at doing interviews, dodging questions about politics (her father, Bruce Hough, is a former GOP state chairman) and her former fiance, Zack Wilson, who was on the winning team on ABC's "Dance Wars." And, asked to name her favorite "Dancing With the Stars" partner, she exclaimed "You can't make me do that!"

She did, however, have a bit to say about each of them.

"Well, Apolo (Anton Ohno) was my first, so, obviously he's very special," she said. "That came out wrong. You know what I mean, right?

"Helio (Castroneves) was a little handful, but he was great. We were like the best of friends. And then Adam (Carolla) was just fun. And there was no pressure — we knew we weren't going to win."

She said she wasn't at all bothered about the many, um, unflattering things the shock jock said about her on his radio show.

"I didn't care at all. That's just Adam talking," Hough said. "He talks and talks and talks and whatever comes out of his mouth, I know that's just his schtick."

Hough also got an early education into the tabloids' schtick — she got to read a lot of "romance rumors" about herself and both Ohno and Castroneves.

"It's funny. The fact that three months before that I was reading the magazines and saying, 'Oh, they're so together. Why are they lying?' And then I'm reading (about herself) and I'm, like, 'We are so not together. Why are THEY lying?"' she said with a laugh.

"You see other people on the show get together and actually end up staying together," she said. "I'm the only one that gets rumored to and I've never even touched them, except when we're dancing."

As for her real personal life, she said, "I'm single and loving it!"

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com