More energy, less polish
Sugarland’s live sound captured in new album

After Sugarland’s first two albums, singer Jennifer Nettles kept hearing how their records were good and all, but somehow … not.
“They’d say, ‘You sound so much better live,’ “ Nettles recalls.
So when she and musical partner Kristian Bush went to work on their third CD, they had a mission: Capture the raw energy of their live shows.
The result: “Love On the Inside.” A deluxe fan edition with five extra songs hit stores last week; the standard 12-track version comes out today.
With more grit and less polish than their first two, the disc has a loose, soulful groove to it. The first single, the playful “All I Want to Do,” is No. 3 on Billboard’s country chart.
The duo has gained a good bit of clout since their 2004 debut; selling more than 4 million albums will do that. This time around they brought Nashville musicians down to their hometown Atlanta to record. They also co-produced the record and had more time to put it together. And maybe most important to what they wanted to achieve, they recorded everything live instead of cutting each part individually.
“You’re hearing the songs in the moment, with the energy of everyone playing together,” Nettles says.
As with their last album, they wrote or co-wrote the songs. But this time the pace was more laid back.
“We allowed ourselves the time to rewrite as we saw fit,” Bush says. “The sophomore album was written more or less in about two weeks if you added up all the days we actually wrote. This one we stretched over an entire year.”
The dozen tracks on the regular release deal mostly with love – from new love (“We Run”) to tragic love (“Joey”) to lost love (“Genevieve”).
Bush, 38, says the idea wasn’t to make a “pansy Valentine album,” but to explore the three-dimensional nature of how people experience love.
“It’s not just romantic love,” adds Nettles, 33, “not, ‘Let me tell you about my boyfriend.’ It’s not puppy love, although there is some fun and levity on this record.”
The album closes with “Very Last Country Song,” a ballad that ponders if everything were perfect and lovers didn’t fall out of love, there’d be no more country music.
If anyone is looking for hints of Nettles’ recent divorce, they can find them. She split with husband Todd Van Sickle, an Atlanta entrepreneur, this year.
“It’s in the understanding of loss and pain and in the stories and specific songs,” she says. “And at times it’s as a metaphor.”
Sugarland broke onto the charts as a trio, but Kristen Hall left the group before the second album, leaving Nettles and Bush to carry on as a duo.
Nettles says she and Bush are learning as they go. But from their records, she can see a clear evolution.
“On the first one we knew we were good songwriters, but we didn’t know we were good country songwriters. It was almost like a stab in the dark,” she says.
“With the second it was, ‘Can we keep this up, or was it a fluke?’ With the third one we’re saying, ‘Yes, we can, so let’s expand.’ “