Feature

Sugarland by the sand

Success could not be sweeter to Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush of Sugarland. This Atlanta-based duo has quickly become one of country music’s hottest acts by playing by their own rules instead of Nashville’s.

While their colleagues enlist the help of songwriters to make them stars, Nettles and Bush are going against the grain and composing their own music. This formula has worked out well for them in 2008, with them taking home numerous awards from the CMT Music Awards and the Academy of Country Music Awards for their song “Stay.”

And it just keeps getting better with their latest album “Love on the Inside” already shooting up the charts. When I spoke with Bush, he could not have been happier with the success of a project very dear to the duo.

SC: You guys look like you have so much fun in this band. What’s your favorite thing about being in Sugarland?

KB: Oh, my gosh! In this band? It’s hard because this is the dreamy, fairy-tale version of a band. This is the band where things work out. You come up with this idea that you think is this crazy creative idea, and everybody says, “Sure.” You get up on stage every night and feel like you really do reach people. It feels good to have a meaning to your job beyond its regular end. Does that make sense?

SC: Absolutely.

KB: At the end of the day, no matter what job you have, it’s best that you love it. You’ve busted your ass. You have given it everything you’ve got, and in the end, Sugarland is bigger than we are. That’s all you can hope for, you know.

SC: Whatever you’re doing is working. “Love on the Inside” is shooting up the charts left and right, and it’s only been out a couple of weeks. How does it feel to have such instant success with an album?

KB: Well, I think it’s both shocking and heartening (laughing). It makes things sound like a heart attack. It’s shocking, because you know, I don’t know how easily I’m able to sit on a bus and accept that we have the number one album in the country and the number one song in the country at the same time. I don’t know how that works. We just kicked like Miley Cyrus in the teeth with sales, and that’s just fascinating to me. It’s a story within itself. It shows me that the public who are purchasing albums still believe in music.

SC: “Love” seems to be the theme with this album, and it’s a very time-honored concept in music. How do you feel that Sugarland has tackled this subject?

KB: We thought that if we were going to try and tackle this topic, you gotta kinda come at it from a modern perspective, which means you’re dealing with the topic of love, but you’re doing it in the way that we deal with it every day. It’s not just dealing with romantic love anymore. You’re dealing with love-lost, love-found, pining love, regret. You’re dealing with self-love, probably one of the hardest topics to touch. How do you like yourself? Do you like yourself? Millions upon millions of people look in the mirror every day and ask that question. As a songwriter and as a recording artist, part of your job is to voice the inner-voice of other people and connect them together if not to you. Using love as the thread, it was a pretty big job, and I think we did alright at it!

SC: I read where you wrote most of the songs while you were on the road. How did you find time in your schedule for it?

KB: You know, country music is a little different from pop music in that country music tours all the time. We start in February, and we end in November. So, there’s not really an off-season or on-season other than Christmas. Whereas, my brother is in a pop band, they go out for sixth months at a time and come home. We go home once a week, once every two weeks. So, you really find a good rhythm out on the road of when you have time to create.

Jennifer and I are like shaking atoms, you know, like electrons shooting around an atom when we’re around each other. When we do say, “Let’s write,” we actually get it done. The second record we did (“Enjoy the Ride”) we wrote in really about two weeks if you added up the days all together, which was pretty magnificent considering we were under a lot of pressure. This time, we gave ourselves almost a year’s worth of writing time to throw away songs, finish the right ones, to re-write the ones we’re in. I think it makes a difference. Our contemporaries and our peers many times get the help of songwriters to provide them with content. In Nashville, it’s pretty common to go back to Nashville and get songs.

SC: That’s one thing that I find very unique about Sugarland.

KB: It was always the way we wrote in Atlanta, so we really never got inducted into the cycle in Nashville. We’re still writing our own stuff.

SC: I read that you guys also took more time in the studio. How was the recording process different for y’all this time around?

KB: We took about a month off and took three or four weeks and did it all at one time. We did it back in our hometown of Atlanta in a relatively famous studio (Southern Tracks Studio), and we got to sleep in our own beds. What that did is that it required all the musicians and all the engineers and everybody to be uprooted from their lives and come to us in Atlanta rather than uprooting us and taking us to Nashville and L.A.

We’re living, breathing and drinking the album, and everybody else gets to go home to their families and kids. We just reversed the process. What it did was a bit of immersion that happened to everyone working on the record. They went chest-deep into the way Jennifer and I see music. It allowed us to create something that has a lot of unique textures to it; it’s got a lot of intention. It’s got a lot of heart, because these guys were going back to the hotel and thinking about it.

SC: What all was said and done, what were your first impressions of the finished product?

KB: It wasn’t too long ago! We turned this thing, and they were going to release it in September, and the single (“All I Want to Do”) went so fast that they asked if we minded if they moved the release date. We were like, “Oh geez! Can we get it all done?”

On the expanded edition, we put a last-second cover on there from an artist that we kinda like. We didn’t really get to hear all the way through until about two weeks before it hit the shelves, so it’s relatively new to us as an entire collection. I’m really happy with it. I’m happy, because, Jennifer and I always wanted to make records that you could drive in your car to. That was the intention with our first two. Goodness knows how many miles we’ve logged individually, much less between us, driving across the Southeast. Really, it’s the other place you listen to music besides while you’re on a treadmill.

SC: 2008 has been a stellar year for Sugarland with the Academy of Country Music and CMT giving you tons of attention and the success of your new album. What’s left to do?

KB: We’re out right now, but we’re going out on a headlining tour in the fall. We’ve decided to take out a couple of ladies, an Alabama native, I see. We’re taking out Kellie Pickler and Ashton Shepherd as opening acts. I’m really excited about that, because women headliners don’t take out women openers in country music very often.

Stephen Centanni is Lagniappe music editor. Contact him at scentanni@lagniappemobile.com.

Archives