Music
Little Big Town
The Road to Here (Equity Music Group)According to the logic of the music business, Little Big Town’s second album shouldn’t even exist. After all, the two-man, two-woman quartet’s self-titled 2002 major-label debut was a critical and commercial bust. When that happens in the instant-gratification Nashville of today, where second chances have become extinct, the act in question is expected to break up, give up and go back home.
Instead, Little Big Town, who consist of Kimberly Roads, Phillip Sweet, Karen Fairchild and Jimi Westbrook, stuck together, and now reemerge with a luminous sophomore effort that’s one of the year’s most welcome surprises. The Road to Here learns from the mistakes of the glossy, overproduced Little Big Town, focusing on the bracing harmonies that are the group’s raison d’être. Ironically, by ditching the radio-friendly polish of the first album, they’ve finally been welcomed at country radio. Their current single, “Boondocks,” has entered the Billboard Top 30, a miraculous feat for an act on an independent label like Clint Black’s Equity Music Group.
The learning curve has been steep for the group, who formed six years ago and were snapped up by Sony at a moment when Nashville thought it might be able to duplicate pop harmony groups like *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys. Instead, they were derided by critics as a country ABBA, ignored at radio and dumped from their label.
They found a second chance on Equity only after hooking up with producer and songwriter Wayne Kirkpatrick, who demonstrates on The Road to Here just how the foursome ought to be recorded. The group’s multilayered harmonies are allowed plenty of space to interact, contrast and spark one another, finding a comfortable middle ground between the precision of the quartet’s obvious influences (Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles, Alabama) and a church-bred soulfulness that comes out when each member steps forward for a lead vocal. They’re accompanied only by the barest instrumentation necessary to keep the songs moving: a spare rhythm section, a touch of banjo, mandolin and Dobro, or occasionally just driving acoustic guitars.
The choice of material helps as well. Many of the songs were written by all four members in collaboration with Kirkpatrick—the kind of writing-by-committee that on paper is a recipe for lowest-common-denominator mediocrity. Instead, these songs are intimate and focused. The emotional gamut runs from the spunky opener “Good as Gone” and the sensual “Bring It on Home” to the devastated “Lost” and the corny ”Welcome to the Family,” which spikes its shopworn redneck jokes with Allman Brothers-style lead guitar.
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The swamp stomp “Boondocks” earns its hit status with an almost maddeningly indelible hook: “I feel no shame, I’m proud of where I came from / I was born and raised in the boondocks.” The song rides out a call-and-response coda working a variation on the traditional “Crawdad Hole,” demonstrating just how far Little Big Town have come from their city-slicker debut. You don’t have to know that all the members hail from tiny towns in Georgia, Alabama and Arkansas to know which incarnation is truer.
The high point of The Road to Here is “Bones,” which drags Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” from California to the deep South. It’s a goosebump-inducing wonder that shows how quickly the foursome’s vocal blend can transform from warm comfort to spectral spookiness. In the context of Little Big Town’s rocky history, “Bones” plays like a rebuke to the many and varied naysayers they’ve encountered over the last three years. “What goes around comes around,” the four sing in unison at the song’s chilling outset, and revenge has rarely sounded so sweet.