Little Big Town

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Little Big Town

Country Music Band

When it comes to country music bands, Little Big Town offered an innovative slant on a familiar form. Like the pop group Fleetwood Mac, two of the group's members were female, two male. Furthermore, each member served dual vocal roles, fully capable of handling the lead but also capable of creating rich harmony blends with one another. The road to success, however, proved to be a difficult one for Little Big Town. The band experienced a number of business crises with its first two labels, an artistically unsatisfying debut, and several personal issues that threatened to derail the group before its career had properly started. But Little Big Town persevered despite the odds, eventually recording an album that won both critical and popular acceptance, transforming the band into one of the hottest country acts of 2006.

Little Big Town built its sound from the roots of country music and enriched it with lush, four-part harmony. "Here's the best two-man, two-woman four-part harmony group in country music," wrote Howard Cohen in the Miami Herald.

Little Big Town formed in 1999 from the longtime friendship of Kimberly Roads, Karen Fairchild, and Jimi Westbrook. The group solidified when the three, after auditioning a number of candidates, sang with Phillip Sweet in Roads's living room. "We knew when we heard the blend of our voices," Fairchild told Brian Dugger in the Blade, "that it was the blend we were looking for. It's almost sibling harmony." In 1999 Little Big Town appeared on the Grand Ole Opry and signed with Mercury. The group entered the studio and worked on four songs over the next eight months, but despite the band's hard work, they were unhappy with the results. After Mercury agreed to release Little Big Town from its contract, the band signed to Sony Monument in 2001.

Little Big Town worked equally hard at Monument and issued its self-titled debut in 2002. But the fallout following the release of Little Big Town was immediate and devastating. Critics referred to the album as "countrified ABBA" and "blatantly bland." While Little Big Town was naturally less than happy about the reviews, the band was even unhappier with Sony's attempt to turn the group into another cookie-cutter version of a pretty-pop-country quartet. "Their sound was polished to a pop sheen," complained Little Big Town's official biography. "Their once-soulful vocals were reduced to vanilla pudding. Their visual image was so stylized that they looked like cast members from The Young and the Restless." Despite the critical drubbing, Little Big Town reached number 40 on the country music charts and spawned two minor hits, "Everything Changes" and "Don't Waste My Time." Topping off a year of bad breaks, Little Big Town was dropped when Monument downsized.

Many bands would have called it a day, but Little Big Town persisted after much soul searching. Fairchild and Sweet returned to part-time work (as a booking agent and telemarketer respectively) to help support themselves through this rough patch; Westbrook worked as a parking attendant. "You just kind of have to do what you have to do to keep the dream alive," Westbrook told Matt Elliott in Tulsa World. Little Big Town also experienced a number of personal crises. Both Fairchild and Sweet were divorced, and while the band was in the process of recording new material, Roads's husband died of a heart attack. "We just put our heads down, stayed focused," Fairchild told Janis Fontaine in the Palm Beach Post. "The music is a real healer for us, too. There was a lot of therapy in those writing sessions."

Little Big Town recorded most of the material for its second album, The Road to Here, without a record label. The band relied on the good graces of Wayne Kirkpatrick, a producer who allowed the group to use his studio for months as the members honed their sound. "It was his belief that really kept us going," Westbrook told Dugger. After recording seven or eight songs, they brought the finished material to Clint Black's new label, Equity Music Group, in 2005. Luckily for the band, Mike Kraski, who had worked at Sony and co-founded Equity, threw his support behind the band. "I think he felt like it was unfinished business," Fairchild told Fontaine, "like we didn't make the record we should have, and we needed a chance to really try, another shot."

Equity released The Road to Here in October of 2005, and the album's first single, "Boondocks," quickly rose on the Country and Hot 100 charts. "There's none of the endemic cutesiness all over mainstream country here," noted the Village Voice of "Boondocks." "It's a big, dusty, unpretentious provincial-pride jam, Southern rock as interpreted by an unnaturally fresh-faced, wholeheartedly Christian co-ed quartet." Other critics concurred. "The album is rich in the band's signature four-part harmony," wrote Cathalena E. Burch in the Arizona Daily Star, "with an overriding acoustic arch."

The Road to Here was soon certified gold, and two more singles, "Bring It on Home" and "Good as Gone," joined "Boondocks" on the charts. "A year and a few months ago the four of us were still in a van driving ourselves around and keeping part-time jobs to pay our bills," Fairchild recalled in 2006 to Marry Ellen Hopkins in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We've seen so much happen this year it's been really thrilling."

For the Record …

Members include Karen Fairchild , vocals; Kimberly Roads , vocals; Phillip Sweet , vocals; Jimi Westbrook , vocals.

Founded in 1999 and signed to Mercury; signed to Sony Monument, 2001; released Little Big Town, 2002; signed to Clint Black's Equity Music Group, released The Road to Here, 2005.

Addresses: Record company—Equity Group Records, P.O. Box 331666, Nashville, TN 37203. Website—Little Big Town Official Website: http://www.littlebigtown.com.

Little Big Town toured widely during 2006, playing dates with Keith Urban and Alan Jackson. "Keith Urban gave us the opportunity of a lifetime," Fairchild told Hopkins. "He put us in front of thousands of people every night and we had to go out there and earn the crowd, because they didn't know who we were." Near the end of 2006 Fairchild and Westbrook married. Little Big Town continued to work hard at the beginning of 2007, planning to build on its success from the previous year. The band had begun writing new material in December, and hoped to book studio time in the spring and release a new album in the fall of 2007. Little Big Town also remained in close contact with its fans, performing over 200 concerts a year and signing autographs after shows. "The studio is a fun, creative process," Sweet told Howard Cohen in the Miami Herald, "but then you get out and perform the songs live and get a true gauge of how someone will respond to them."