Sugarland explores 'Love on the Inside'

By The Associated Press | Wednesday, July 23, 2008

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — After Sugarland’s first two albums, singer Jennifer Nettles kept hearing how their records were good and all but somehow ... not.

“They’d say, ‘You sound so much better live,’ ” she recalled.

So when she and musical partner Kristian Bush went to work on their third one, they had a mission: Capture the raw energy of their live shows.

The result: “Love On the Inside.” A deluxe fan edition with five extra songs, including a remake of the Dream Academy’s ’80s pop hit “Life in a Northern Town,” hit stores Tuesday. The standard 12-track version comes out next week.

With more grit and less polish than their first two, the disc has a loose, soulful groove to it. The first single, the playful “All I Want to Do,” was No. 5 on Billboard’s country chart.

The duo has gained a good bit of clout since their 2004 debut; selling more than 4 million albums will do that. This time around, they brought Nashville musicians down to their hometown of Atlanta to record. They also co-produced the record and had more time to put it together. And maybe most important to what they wanted to achieve, they recorded everything live instead of cutting each part individually.

“You’re hearing the songs in the moment with the energy of everyone playing together,” Nettles said.

The record is rooted in the Georgia music scene where Nettles and Bush cut their teeth in the wake of alt-rock heroes R.E.M., the Indigo Girls and the B-52s.

Sugarland has never claimed to be a traditional act. They have a pop and rock sensibility about them that fits well with contemporary country.

As with their last album, they wrote or co-wrote the songs. But this time the pace was more laid-back.

“We allowed ourselves the time to rewrite as we saw fit,” Bush said. “The sophomore album was written more or less in about two weeks if you added up all the days we actually wrote. This one we stretched over an entire year.”

The dozen tracks on the regular release deal mostly with love — from new (“We Run”) to tragic (“Joey”) to lost (“Genevieve”).

Bush, 38, said the idea wasn’t to make a “pansy Valentine album” but rather to explore the three-dimensional nature of how people experience love.

“It’s not just romantic love,” Nettles said, “not ‘Let me tell you about my boyfriend.’ It’s not puppy love, although there is some fun and levity on this record.”

That’s most obvious on “Steve Earle,” a clever salute to the colorful singer-songwriter and the women who have inspired him. Nettles, 33, sings, “Steve Earle, Steve Earle, please write a song for me.”

The two teamed with Country Music Hall of Famer Bill Anderson to write “Joey,” a modern take on early 1960s teen tragedy songs.

The album closes with “Very Last Country Song,” a ballad pondering the idea that if everything were perfect and lovers didn’t fall out of love, there would be no more country music.

If anyone is looking for hints of Nettles’ recent divorce, they can find them. She split with husband Todd Van Sickle, an Atlanta entrepreneur, this year.

“It’s in the understanding of loss and pain and in the stories and specific songs,” she said. “And at times it’s as a metaphor.”

Bush said a big part of Sugarland’s appeal is their songwriting.

“I believe that an artist has an ethos that attracts a fan. Ours is intricately woven into our need to express ourselves as songwriters,” he said. “I also think you try harder, connect deeper and play better when you wrote the song you are singing.”

Sugarland broke onto the charts as a trio, but Kristen Hall left the group before the second album, leaving Nettles and Bush to carry on as a duo.

Their last record, like their debut, sold more than 2 million copies.

“I think they have such a good sense of themselves,” said Anderson, the Grand Ole Opry star. “They know who they are and they have a good vision for where they want to go with their music. I think they’ve just made an awful lot of good moves in their career.”

Nettles said she and Bush are learning as they go. But she can see a clear evolution from their records.

“On the first one, we knew we were good songwriters, but we didn’t know we were good country songwriters. It was almost like a stab in the dark. With the second, it was ‘Can we keep this up or was it a fluke?’ With the third one, we’re saying, ‘Yes, we can, so let’s expand.’ ”