Lady Antebellum Gets Drunk On Success

By Paul Sexton from The Sunday Times

 

There’s always been something about telephone songs. It seems they never fail to make a connection, from Jim Reeves asking his beloved to put her sweet lips a little closer to that clunky old receiver, to Lady Gaga telling her persistent would-be interlocutor that she’s out in the club and sippin’ that bub.

 

The newest hit to conjure romance via telephony is a multimillion-seller in America, and the group behind it is the biggest news of the year there. The song is now in our charts, and if pop lyrics have to be relatable to win a wide audience, you couldn’t wish for a more widely identified sentiment than: “It’s a quarter after one, I’m a little drunk and I need you now.” At the last count, Need You Now, by the Grammy-winning Nashville-based trio Lady Antebellum, had American download sales of a stratospheric 3.2m. At a time when we’ve been taught to assume that nobody buys records any more, the album of the same name debuted at No 1 in America in February, shifted 1m copies in three weeks and has now sold 1.8m copies there. The album should be landing in the UK Top 20 today. Don’t dial drunk? I’m not so sure.

 

The track has the adhesive melodic quality of all anthemic singles, but the real ear-grabber is that notion of the slightly tipsy and desperate late-night call. Acutely aware of the ultra-conservative agenda that often determines the fortunes of music from Nashville’s Tin Pan Alley, the group nearly didn’t include the D-word in the song at all.

 

“The biggest moment, when we thought ‘Should we say this, or should we not?’, was ‘I’m a little drunk,’” admits Lady Antebellum’s Charles Kelley. “I didn’t want it to take away from the fact that these people truly miss each other. We wrote it with a great songwriter called Josh Kear, and we looked at it and thought, ‘What does that mean?’ Obviously, this person’s longing for someone they used to be with, and we went from there and told a story.

 

“It’s not like they’re calling because they’re hammered. It could also be that point of extreme desperation. They’re drinking, and that’s the time, for men especially, when they finally open up a little bit and let it all out.”

“We loved it,” adds Dave Haywood, the band’s keyboard player and guitarist, and Kelley’s pal since school. “But if you’d told us that day that this song would have totally flipped our career upside down, we’d have been like, ‘No way.’”

 

On their current American tour, they’re opening at huge arenas for the country superstar Tim McGraw. But in LA, the trio bit their label’s hand off for the opportunity of a headline show at the Wiltern Theatre. Lady A’s fans were out in force, and the show was a triumph of celebratory, unpretentious energy, from a stripped-down, old-time version of Hank Williams’s Lost Highway to a no-holds-barred cover of John Mellencamp’s ROCK in the USA.

 

Earlier that day, we chatted at the Sunset Marquis hotel, where, as ever, celebrity guests passed into view almost by the minute. Brandon Flowers walks by the pool just before one spots the improbable meeting of minds that is an impromptu conversation between the Specials and Slash.

 

Yet it’s not as if Lady Antebellum were greenhorns when this year’s bounty poured over them. The group’s first album, released in 2008, has sold 1.6m copies in America, and after winning the new artist trophy at the following Country Music Assocation Awards, they collected two more gongs there last autumn. Earlier this year, they won their first Grammy, for the song I Run to You.

 

“We’ve worked really hard for the past couple of years,” says Hillary Scott, who shares lead vocals with Kelley. “Now to be able to make my car payment, and Charles and his wife have just bought their first house... we’re starting to see the fruits of our labour.”

 

“Antebellum” means prewar, notably the American civil war. The band say they chose it mainly because they liked the ring of it, especially with “Lady” before it, even if it does sound to the uninitiated like some supporting character from Gone with the Wind.

 

They landed on the name after coming together with the random serendipity that the Nashville scene often affords. “Dave and I played in all these different garage bands at school,” Kelley says. “Then we moved to Nashville, we were writing, and we would ride anywhere. We drove to New York one time [800-odd miles each way] to get paid $100 at a coffee shop. You had to sing really loud so you could be heard over the cappuccino machine.”

 

“Hillary walked up to me in a bar one night,” Kelley continues, “which she shouldn’t have been in anyway, because she was 20 [‘Oops,’ she interjects], and said, ‘I know you from somewhere, are you Charles Kelley? I’ve heard your music on MySpace.’” (It’s poignant to think that the very downtown tourist area of Nashville where the band was born, where artists play for tips in the bars on Broadway, has been under water this week in the flood that has besieged the city.) “Nobody knew who I was,” Kelley says. “I had a couple of songs up there just to see if I could create some buzz. Lo and behold, she was so talented, and we struck up a conversation. We said, ‘Let’s get together and write songs. So it was just all these random things that have happened.”

 

Scott, whose mother, Linda Davis, had a decade of country chart singles from the late 1980s onwards, adds: “We really got along, and were really proud of these songs. We felt we were writing better than we ever had before individually.” Once they were a working unit, the pieces fell into place fairly quickly. “We were lucky enough to have the right people come and see us early on,” Kelley says. “It’s all about right place, right time.” “We just got so lucky,” Scott adds. “There’s no explanation, other than feeling it was fate.”

 

The night before their headline gig, the trio taped a performance of Need You Now for American Idol. It was a moment of vindication for Scott. “I auditioned twice,” she says, “once in Washington, once in San Francisco. I didn’t get past the first round either time.

“I think I sang Bonnie Raitt’s Something to Talk About, but I was nervous. I’d never done any type of cattle-call audition, so my voice was shaky. I didn’t perform as strongly as I could have, so they passed.” But there’s no “In your face, Idol” attitude or any trace of vaingloriousness about the group’s hard-won success. “I saw my mum’s career rise and fall,” Scott says, “so I had a realistic view of what this was, going in.”

 

In their salad days, the band acquiesced to a label request to dilute a lyric for the demands of country radio, in the song Lookin’ for a Good Time. A straight-up celebration of the one-night stand, the album version included the line: “Would you get the wrong impression if I called us a cab right now?”

“The country genre has got very driven by mothers, that’s kind of the target demographic,” Kelley says. “Early on, we were like, ‘We’re a new band, let’s be very wary of this’, so we just said we weren’t going to fight it. It didn’t feel like the biggest artistic thing — this wasn’t our Hey Jude.”

“But it’s funny now,” adds Scott, “having wondered if a girl saying ‘I’m a little drunk’ is going to offend these conservative moms. We look out in the audience every night and see people we would never imagine singing the song to us at the top of their lungs, people who look like my dad.” “Grizzly lumberjacks,” Kelley laughs.

 

In any case, genre descriptions are increasingly less relevant to Lady Antebellum. Their new album is less country than the first, on which the fiddle and Dobro factor was notably higher. The group’s catholic tastes are now much more prominent, and that will play well to listeners in the UK, where the detwanged country of Taylor Swift will always fit more easily in the mainstream than “hat acts” such as Kenny Chesney or Tim McGraw himself.

 

Kelley listens to the French indie band Phoenix and has a lyric from the Beatles’ Blackbird tattooed on his arm. He says all he wants is for people to concentrate on the contents, not the tin. “We took some more chances, production-wise, on this record. We spent a lot more time trying to find the right sound for each song, and it’s much more leaning on the pop side, for sure. We’ve been influenced by so many artists in many genres, and we hope people can see and hear that. I get exhausted with the whole genre thing.”

 

The album Need You Now is out now on Capitol/Parlophone