Sunday, July 27, 2008
A+E, Music, In this Issue...

Sugar High

Atlanta’s blockbuster country duo isn’t settling for anything less than the world

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

BY KEVIN FOREST MOREAU

Here’s how good Kristian Bush has it these days: Things are going so well for Sugarland, the multi-platinum country music powerhouse that comprises Bush and Georgia native Jennifer Nettles, that he has to think about setting some new career goals.

The exuberant guitarist was reminded of this fact a couple of weeks ago. Sugarland was in the middle of one of the seemingly endless series of road jaunts that defines its existence these days, promoting its new album, “Love on the Inside,” when Bush and the band’s keyboardist—Kristian’s brother Brandon, who also plays with the adult-contemporary band Train—started chatting about achieving one’s dreams.

“He said, ‘Man, you need to start putting a new list together soon,” Kristian recalls with a laugh a few days later.

Indeed, Bush has crossed quite a number of accomplishments off his to-do list in the four years since Sugarland’s major-label debut, “Twice the Speed of Life,” began taking country radio by storm. The band’s debut single, “Baby Girl,” reached No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles and Tracks chart, and seven of its eight subsequent singles landed in the Top 10, including two No. 1s (“Want To” and “Settlin’,” from 2006’s “Enjoy the Ride”).

The duo earned a Best New Artist nomination for 2006’s 48th annual Grammy Awards (they lost to John Legend), and has racked up numerous awards and nominations from the Academy of Country Music, the American Music Awards, Country Music Television and the Country Music Association. And both “Twice the Speed of Life” and “Enjoy the Ride” have been certified double platinum.

Certainly, country music fans have registered their approval of Sugarland’s brand of contemporary country, which, like much of the genre, relies on a healthy dose of pop and rock. But they’re not the only ones familiar with the pair. Nettles’ duet with Bon Jovi on the 2006 Grammy-winning crossover “Who Says You Can’t Go Home” raised Sugarland’s profile among folks who don’t know Kenny Chesney from Kenny Rogers; ditto the duo's “Irreplaceable” duet with Beyonce at last November’s American Music Awards, and the use of their hit “Everyday America” for a “Good Morning America” promotional campaign.

There’s no getting around it: Everywhere you turn, Sugarland is there. Last month, “All I Want to Do,” the first single from “Love on the Inside,” debuted at No. 27 on the Hot Country Singles chart and quickly rocketed to the Top 5, prompting the band’s label, Mercury Nashville, to bump up the album’s release date by two months. And just last week, Entertainment Weekly dubbed the group “the most exciting country act since the Dixie Chicks.”

As the “regular version” of “Love on the Inside” prepares to drop this Tuesday, July 29 (a deluxe fan addition, including five extra songs, was released July 22), the duo’s career is indeed traveling at twice the speed of life. As CMT’s Brian Philips, formerly of Atlanta alt-rock station 99X, says in Entertainment Weekly: “I think they’re bigger than country music.”

It’s easy to picture Bush and Nettles boarding their tour bus each night, paraphrasing that famous bit of dialogue from “Pinky and the Brain” on the WB’s “Animaniacs”:

“Gee Jennifer, what do you want to do tomorrow?”

“The same thing we do every night, Kristian—try to take over the world!”

NOT SETTLIN’

Not bad for a group that faced its share of skepticism when it formed and outlined its ambitions back in 2002.

“People thought we were nuts when we said we wanted to start a bad-ass country band and play arenas,” Bush says. “They really thought we were crazy.”

No one’s calling Sugarland crazy today. But some of the items still left unchecked on Bush’s list might raise a few eyebrows.

“I think we can write a musical,” he says. “One of my dreams is to write a James Bond theme song. I think Jennifer’s voice would be great for it, and I think musically I could make your hair crawl. But it’s the kind of thing where you almost have to imagine it to make it happen.”

Visualizing success has been a big part of Sugarland’s modus operandi since the very beginning, both in its lyrics (see the “seize the day” attitudes of “Something More” and “Settlin’”) and in the way it approaches its career.

“I think you have to prepare for it, or else you end up not getting there,” Bush enthuses. “I think the hardest thing to do in entertainment is to prepare to succeed. Most people prepare to fail. You know: ‘If things don’t go well, here’s how we’re gonna part.’ It’s human nature to say, ‘What’s the worst-case scenario?’”

It’s hardly surprising that Sugarland, known for its themes of self-empowerment, would take the exact opposite tack. “We have tried to consciously communicate to the people at our record label to prepare to succeed,” Bush says. “People ask, ‘What’s it gonna be like when it’s over?’ But instead of having that conversation, what about asking yourself, ‘What happens if we succeed? What happens if this really works? What happens if you plan to release your record in September, and then the single goes Top 5 in six weeks?’”

What, indeed? It makes a certain amount of sense that in these tough economic times, Sugarland’s songs about grabbing the reins of your own fate would resonate with Middle Americans as strongly as Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can.” Even the duo’s heart-wrenching breakout hit “Stay,” a stark ballad written from the perspective of “the other woman,” is ultimately about taking control of one’s destiny. And in a time in which the best-selling self-help tome “The Secret” preaches projecting positive energy into the universe to achieve positive results, Sugarland’s success seems pretty much inevitable.

“It’s gonna happen to somebody—why not us?” Bush asks. “It’s a pretty fantastic, revolutionary question. It’s almost punk, in a way.”

STRIPPING DOWN

Much of Bush’s outsize optimism rests on “Love on the Inside.” To be sure, the album is a strong addition to the band’s catalog, with a handful of hit singles in waiting, including “Love,” which has already garnered comparisons to U2 for its anthemic reach; the tongue-in-cheek “It Happens,” which nicely showcases Nettles’ knack for relatable humor; and “Take Me As I Am,” sung from the point of view of a seen-it-all diner waitress and powered by an irresistible chorus, which Nettles belts out with all the authority of a Faith Hill or a Reba McEntire. (The deluxe fan edition includes three extra original songs and two covers: Matt Nathanson’s “Come On, Get Higher” and the Dream Academy’s ’80s hit “Life in a Northern Town,” with Little Big Town and Jake Owen.)

But it’s also something of a departure from Sugarland’s previous platters of solidly commercial, contemporary country. The hook for “All I Want To Do”—with Nettles dragging that last word out into “do-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooooh”—straddles the fence between sweet summer singalong and novelty song. “Love” unfolds at its own, slowly building pace, never crashing into easy, cathartic bombast; “Genevieve” is a disarmingly effective hill-country bluegrass pastiche, with Nettles’ character professing love for the woman of the title—a fact that might furrow a few brows among country’s traditional gun-rack target demographic.

Lyrically, “Love on the Inside” continues Sugarland’s penchant for penning odes to joy. Musically, however, the album is a stripped-down contrast to its slickly polished predecessors, lacking the high-gloss studio sheen of “Enjoy the Ride.”

“What we realized when we’re on tour is, there’s very large speakers in the [bigger] venues,” Bush says. “And the more you shove into them, the less you hear. It gets real muddy. So we tried to whittle what we’re doing … down to its pieces, to where you couldn’t do that any further. And to balance that with commercialism.”

Conversely, “Inside” lacks a song that duplicates the stripped-down punch of “Stay.” But, Bush says, its monster success did help to inform their approach to making the record.

“We didn’t anticipate that song being a single; it’s almost five minutes of a voice and a guitar,” Bush says. “But it really did kind of drill down to what a song is, which is melody, harmony and rhythm. And in that case, not even rhythm.”

If “Stay” was an unlikely choice for a single, it certainly made an impact. Propelled by a riveting video, in which Nettles sings straight into the camera, gradually breaking into tears, the song nestled into the No. 2 slot on the Hot Country Singles chart, and cracked the Top 40 of both Billboard’s Hot 100 and Pop 100 charts. It also garnered the Academy of Country Music’s award for Single Record of the Year and a CMT award for Duo Video of the Year.

Buoyed by the song’s long-shot success in an industry that usually prizes more up-tempo numbers and prefers its ballads a little more full-bodied, the pair decided to shake things up when the time came to write and record new material.

“We’d like to expand our own margins,” Nettles told the Lifetime network’s Web site last fall. “And in many ways, I think the way forward is the way back.”

 “WE COME FROM A DEEP ARTISTIC CULTURE”

The first item on the agenda was to record in Atlanta, and to record live. “Which is the way Jennifer and I had usually done it in Atlanta, but that’s not the way they do it in Nashville,” Bush says. 

Another break from tradition was the duo’s decision to apply a little more of the basic singer-songwriter approach both had cut their teeth on.

“I think naturally, the two of us have commercial instincts, which serves us really well,” Bush says. “That’s what we do for a living. But at the same time, we come from a very deep artistic culture, which is the Atlanta songwriter side.”

Oh, yeah. With Sugarland peering out at Wal-Mart shoppers from the covers of Country Weekly, People and other magazines, it can be easy to forget that both Bush and Nettles paid their dues as part of Atlanta’s guitar-strumming, soul-searching scene in the ’90s. “We’ve been the singer-songwriter in the coffee shop,” as Nettles told Entertainment Weekly.

Nettles batted around Atlanta, North Georgia and beyond, first with Soul Miner’s Daughter and then with her own Jennifer Nettles Band; Bush recorded two major-label albums for Atlantic as one half of Billy Pilgrim, which was often described as a male version of the Indigo Girls. And while Sugarland was born from an impulse to reach a larger audience than the singer-songwriter model usually commands, Bush says that grounding helped establish the honesty and authenticity for which the band has been hailed.

“We were raised to be unafraid of writing a song that either makes you think or challenges you,” he says. “We were raised in an environment, musically, where people would come out to Eddie’s Attic or wherever, to hear us play whatever the hell we wanted to write on our couch. It was very freeing and satisfying to have fans like that in your formative years as a songwriter, and I think it affected us so much so that when we came to this album … we started to spin around this idea of a much more raw approach to what we do. … I think it really reflects the community that we came from.”

But while “Love on the Inside” finds Bush, at least, looking back to his roots, he’s also got an eye fixed firmly on the future, and all the things he’s yet to cross off that list. 

“I want to play Wembley Stadium,” he continues. “I do see us [headlining] stadiums in two or three years. We’ve played some already, opening for Kenny Chesney. I know emotionally we can fill it up. Musically, we can do it. And physically, with Jennifer, I know we can channel it.”

And then, of course, there’s the dream of just about every musician.

“I really want to win a Grammy for this album,” he says. “We worked really hard on it, and it’s really, really good. It’s worth listening to, and it’s worth investing in as a fan.”

Six years ago, when all of Sugarland’s current success was just a handful of “What ifs,” a Grammy would have seemed outside the limits of even the most fantastic imagination. But when Bush starts enthusiastically pointing toward the arenas he and his musical partner have yet to conquer, you begin to wish Sugarland were a publicly traded company, and that you were a majority shareholder.

“It’s certainly a beautiful ride right now,” Bush says. “But I believe the best is yet to come.” Anyone want to bet against him? SP