Sugarland - NY Times Feature

ON a blazing day in June the country duo Sugarland was holed up in a tour bus in the parking lot of the LP Field here, waiting, in icy air-conditioning, to headline the opening night of the Country Music Association Music Festival, the year’s biggest gathering of the genre’s fans. Barefoot and dressed in tank tops and shorts, Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush, both from Atlanta, mentioned numerous influences — R.E.M., Coldplay, Rod Stewart, Indigo Girls — but hardly anything you might expect from a country powerhouse.

The members of Sugarland covered Beyoncé and Def Leppard songs onstage, shared vocals on a hit with Bon Jovi and capped off a live show with a stunt stolen from the Flaming Lips, forcing listeners to rethink any lingering stereotype of country music as pop’s most conservative format. And “Love on the Inside” (Mercury Nashville), their third album, which is out on Tuesday, further confirms Sugarland’s eclectic sensibility and crossover ambitions. (The “Deluxe Fan Edition” of the album came out last week, with five extra tracks and access to additional material online, an inversion of a marketing scheme that usually forces an act’s biggest supporters to buy a second copy of the CD a few months after the initial release.)

“Jennifer and I are both people who had lots of different kinds of friends, ergo, the kind of person who listened to lots of different kinds of music,” said Mr. Bush, 38. “When we grew up, your music really defined your subculture, and we were lucky enough to be observers and cultural anthropologists at that time in our lives. That’s one reason we get along so well, because it doesn’t matter who walks in the door, we’re interested.” (Flaunting his credentials as a music geek, Mr. Bush pointed out a bus shelf packed full of books from the “33 1/3” series, in which writers tell the story of one classic album per volume.)

The music on “Love on the Inside” reflects these broad interests without ever leaving Sugarland’s country base. There’s the breezy, almost goofy first single, “All I Want to Do”; the power-ballad guitar solo on “What I’d Give”; the old-school country feel of “Genevieve,” which recalls the classic “Long Black Veil”; and the new-wave inflections of “It Happens” (“a nod to Katrina and the Waves,” Mr. Bush said).

To Sugarland this diversity gives the album its distinctive identity; too often, the members say, country songwriters tend to copy their hits and stick with what works. “Eventually what you get is: ‘I can’t figure out which George Strait record to buy because I don’t know which song is on which record. All 50 of them are great, but you can’t tell them apart,’ ” Mr. Bush said.

“Where we grew up,” he continued, “you really knew the difference between this Police record and that Police record, or this Madonna record and that Madonna record. When you’re 13, 14, 15 years old, you’re taught that as a listener, so you can’t help but try to do it yourself when it’s your turn to step up.”

The members of Sugarland never set out to be in a country band. Ms. Nettles, Mr. Bush and Kristen Hall, an original member, all started as staples of the Atlanta coffeehouse scene. Ms. Nettles had a group called Soul Miner’s Daughter and another called the Jennifer Nettles Band, which participated in the 1999 Lilith Fair tour. Mr. Bush was half of the folk-rock duo Billy Pilgrim, which released two albums on Atlantic Records in the mid-1990s.

When they joined forces as Sugarland in 2003, though, the country side of their music came to the foreground. “We thought we were good writers, and we knew that we knew country,” said Ms. Nettles, 33. Noting that Mr. Bush is from Tennessee, she said: “He knows Appalachian hillbilly. I’m from South Georgia. I know South Georgia swamp-redneck-whatever. We grew up hearing it all the time, so being able to put that out in our form wasn’t hard.”

For Mr. Bush the recalibration of style had more to do with the emotions of their songs. “One of the things that defines a country song for me is that it’s honest,” he said. “It’s not putting on a tuxedo to go eat at the Burger King. It’s about a song being emotionally true to itself.”

The band’s career exploded in 2004 with “Baby Girl,” the story of an aspiring singer told in letters to her parents. It spent almost a year on the country charts and was the first of four hit singles from its debut album, “Twice the Speed of Life.”

“They went from zero to 90 overnight,” said Brian Philips, executive vice president and general manager of the cable television network CMT. “It was the fastest, deepest embrace of a new artist I’ve ever seen.”

The band was nominated for a 2006 Grammy as best new artist, but Ms. Hall left, saying that she wanted to concentrate on her songwriting. In 2006 Sugarland, now a duo, released “Enjoy the Ride,” which, like its predecessor, has sold more than two million copies. The album produced two No. 1 country singles — “Want To” and “Settlin’ ” — and the spare, moving ballad “Stay,” which would win the 2007 Country Music Association Song of the Year award. The group also received the association’s prize for duo of the year over Brooks & Dunn, which had won the category in 14 of the previous 15 years.

The success of “Enjoy the Ride” — and the additional exposure when Ms. Nettles joined Bon Jovi in 2006 for the No. 1 country hit “Who Says You Can’t Go Home” — also established her as a different kind of female star in country music. Her wholesome blond looks and no-fuss style split the difference between the genre’s glamour girls (Carrie Underwood, Faith Hill) and its lady roughnecks (Miranda Lambert, Gretchen Wilson).

“In an un-self-conscious way she’s really carved out her own space,” said Mr. Philips, the CMT executive, who has known Ms. Nettles since her Atlanta club days. “She sings like she’s been some places and seen some things. She can sound like Tammy Wynette and then, on the next song, sound just like Janis Joplin.”

Karen Fairchild of the country band Little Big Town, which toured with Sugarland last year, said in an e-mail message that Ms. Nettles “makes us girls proud because she’s smart, beautiful and her spirit is infectious.” She said she also admires Ms. Nettles’s ability to let go fully onstage. (Ms. Nettles said with a laugh that she “can’t wear anything beyond an inch of a heel on a boot because I run and jump around too much.”)

The years Mr. Bush and Ms. Nettles spent playing clubs helped their transition to bigger stages, but the studio was a different story; the making of “Enjoy the Ride” had been a rough experience. Trying to capitalize quickly on the success of their debut, they recorded the follow-up while on tour, when Ms. Nettles’s voice was increasingly overworked. “We were miserable,” she said. “We were exhausted. We were emotionally spent.”

So when it came time to make “Love on the Inside,” the duo tried to be strategic. They set aside a month to work at the Southern Tracks Recording studio in Atlanta, planning to sleep at their own homes each night. That stability helped allow for greater experimentation; Ms. Nettles and Mr. Bush are co-writers of every song on “Love on the Inside” (except for two covers on the “Deluxe Edition”), exploring territory like a mysterious teenage tragedy in “Joey” or, with “Steve Earle,” the real life of the tortured, oft-married singer in a raucous country song.

The album’s scope is all the more impressive considering that it was recorded live in the studio. “Jennifer is singing while we’re playing, and that’s the take,” Mr. Bush said with pride. And maybe it is the ease of its creative interaction that keeps Sugarland in the country tradition.

“Right and left now, everybody is trying to be country,” Ms. Nettles said. “Obviously, they’re doing it from a business and career standpoint because it’s the place that is still selling records. But from an artistic standpoint it’s the place for the songwriter that has a little more depth. It talks about life, real life, in a different way. Luckily, country music is coming to a place where the songwriter is being heralded again. Look at Miranda Lambert, Dierks Bentley.”

Onstage at LP Field, Ms. Nettles and Mr. Bush demonstrated the line they walk between two worlds. They started by rolling off of the stage and into the crowd while encased in two giant, clear plastic bubbles. It’s a signature device for the alternative rock singer Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips that Sugarland gleefully acknowledges ripping off. Though the band had pointed out that stars like Garth Brooks and Kenny Chesney have raised the bar for country music spectacle, not everyone in Nashville was enthralled; the review on the CMT Web site, cmt.com, referred to Sugarland’s “offstage excesses,” saying “it made one wonder if next year they’ll have Dolly Parton on a pogo stick.”

But Ms. Nettles and Mr. Bush, like many of county music’s younger stars, is more interested in expanding Nashville’s reach than playing by its old rules. “It takes a couple of minutes, a couple of shows, to adjust to being in front of 80,000 people,” Mr. Bush said. “But you’ve got to upgrade your dreams every once in a while.”

Views: | Posted 7/28/2008 |