Little Big Town article-LB mention

[Livia]

Group savors highs after being low
By Walter Tunis
CONTRIBUTING MUSIC WRITER

If heights of success were measured by the depths of struggle, then Little Big Town would be a mighty city indeed. Shoot, the country-pop band would be an absolute metropolis.

Look at the group today, and you see four fresh-faced singers -- Kimberly Roads, Karen Fairchild, Phillip Sweet and Jimi Westbrook -- with a platinum album. But look back to when Little Big Town's 2002 self-titled debut crashed upon takeoff, and you would have found a band of like-minded artists who would do just about anything -- or, at least, any menial job -- to get its music onstage.

"After our first album tanked, we had to take some odd jobs because we weren't on the road -- stuff like telemarketing, working at a liquor store," Roads said. "Jimi parked cars for a valet company in Nashville. He was parking our agent's car. It was pretty humiliating.

"We wound up telling our agent if he could just get us some gas money, we'd drive ourselves anywhere in the country to play. And we did a lot of that. Once, we drove 24 hours to play a show in Maine for 500 bucks. That barely covered our van rental."

For Roads, those days were even darker. In early 2005, just as the band was signing with Nashville's indie Equity Music Group label, her husband died of a heart attack at age 41.

"We went through a very low point," Roads said. "Maybe you could call it a grieving process. We had worked so hard on the first record but wound up with very little creative control. Looking back, we lost some battles that maybe we should have fought harder to win. But we never thought about quitting. Nobody ever walked away."

Enter producer Wayne Kirkpatrick, a keyboardist and songwriter whose tunes have been covered by such diverse artists as Eric Clapton, Garth Brooks, Babyface, Bonnie Raitt, Joe Cocker, Faith Hill and Peter Frampton. In designing the band's second album, The Road to Here, Kirkpatrick and Little Big Town leaned less on the debut record's glossy pop and more on a mix of bluegrass- accented instrumentation and rockish, hook-heavy songs.

The sound clicked, resulting in a Top 20 country hit called Boondocks. A few months later the more affirming and anthemic Bring It on Home soared into the Top 5.

The renewed good fortune escalated in 2006. The grassy strut of Good as Gone kept the group on the charts. By May, The Road to Here went gold. During the summer, Fairchild and Westbrook got married -- to each other. The band then finished the year by taping a performance for CMT's country-pop summit series Crossroads with Lindsey Buckingham. The performance aired Dec. 2. Four days earlier, Roads remarried in a ceremony on a private island in the Caribbean.

"We made The Road to Here at a time when almost nobody wanted anything to do with us," Roads said. "So we didn't have much by way of confidence. Then last month, we found out it went platinum. So we've seen success from both sides."

While work with Kirkpatrick on a third Little Big Town album is still in the early stages, fans can check out some bright new music from the group on a decidedly non-country album. It provides backup vocals for much of John Mellencamp's new Freedom's Road, including its truck commercial hit, Our Country.

Roads said she is savoring the exposure the Mellencamp connection is affording Little Big Town. But if she had to pick a personal rock 'n' roll milestone, it would be getting to sing almost cheek to cheek with Buckingham during his landmark Fleetwood Mac hit Go Your Own Way on Crossroads.

"That was phenomenal. I mean, we grew up listening to Fleetwood Mac and adoring Lindsey from afar. Then we got to discover he's such a great and generous artist by working with him," she said. "It was the most exciting thing on stage I've ever been part of."


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Little Big Town

Opening acts: Carolina Rain, Floor'd.

When: 7:30 p.m. March 8.

Where: Singletary Center for the Arts, Rose St. and Euclid Ave.

Tickets: $20-$27.

Call: (859) 257-4929.

Online: www.littlebigtown, www.singletarytickets.com.






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