With the decade coming to a close, I thought about country acts that I've consistently enjoyed in the 2010s, and, Little Big Town quickly came to mind. They've got 8 albums at this point, so there's plenty to dig in to for a playlist, and there's a 9th, Nightfall, due out in January.

Vocal groups don't rule mainstream country quite like they once did, but they've still got a stronger presence than in other genres, and in particular I like that Little Big Town, a quartet of two men and two women, has kept the co-ed vocal group tradition alive. You can go back a few decades and find successful groups like ABBA and The Mamas And The Papas and Fleetwood Mac that had men and women harmonizing together (one of Little Big Town's live staples is a cover of "The Chain," which makes perfect sense). But since then, we've kinda fallen into the expectation that most vocal groups are all one or the other, boy bands or girl groups. And it's a shame, because there's a really rich kind of harmony that you only get with that range of male and female voices all together. But hey, if everyone wants to leave that lane open to Little Big Town, all the better for them. Karen Fairchild is easily the standout vocalist of the group, really one of the best voices in Nashville today, but what makes their records is the sound of their voices all blending together.

Little Big Town deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Turn The Lights On
2. Silver and Gold
3. Looking For A Reason
4. Front Porch Thing
5. Rain On A Tin Roof
6. Quit Breaking Up With Me
7. Pontiac
8. Night On Our Side
9. Evangeline
10. Leavin' In Your Eyes
11. Why, Oh Why
12. Mean Streak
13. Lost In California
14. Willpower
15. C'mon
16. Live With Lonesome
17. Self Made
18. The Breaker
19. Tumble And Fall
20. Stay
21. Life Rolls On

Tracks 7 and 20 from Little Big Town (2002)
Tracks 3, 12 and 21 from The Road To Here (2005)
Track 9 from A Place To Land (2007)
Tracks 5 and 11 from The Reason Why (2010)
Tracks 4, 10 and 17 from Tornado (2012)
Tracks 1, 2, 6 and 19 from Pain Killer (2014)
Tracks 14 and 15 from Wander Lust (2016)
Tracks 8, 13 and 18 from The Breaker (2017)

Little Big Town kind of kicked around for quite a while before becoming consistently successful. They signed with and were dropped from a major label before their first album, and released their first 3 albums on independent labels, with only one of them scoring hit singles and going platinum. It took them 6 years to top the success of "Boondocks," still kind of their signature song. But they finally became fixtures of country playlists and award shows with a trio of albums produced by Eric Church's right hand man Jay Joyce: Tornado, Pain Killer, and The Breaker. The Pain Killer opener "Quit Breaking Up With Me" might be my favorite song by the band, that vocal edit in the first verse cracks me up every time. I also enjoyed kicking the playlist with the one-two of the tempo shifting "Turn The Lights On" and "Silver And Gold."

As much as I stan for the sound of Jay Joyce production and like his Little Big Town albums best, I was pleasantly surprised by how good the earlier albums are, and how much they had their sound figured out from the jump. The first track on the first album, "Pontiac," is great and would easily sound at home on one of the more recent records. Little Big Town put the ballad "Stay" on both of their first two albums, with a full band arrangement on their debut and a spare acoustic version closing The Road To Here, but neither was ever released as a single (I went with the first full band version here).

Lori McKenna and Hillary Lindsay co-wrote "Girl Crush" and a few of Little Big Town's other biggest hits, but they've also penned some quality deep cuts like "Lost In California" and "Tumble And Fall." Little Big Town were one of the many acts who recorded songs written by Chris Stapleton before he became a major star in his own right. None of them were hits, but all three Stapleton songs they recorded in the early 2010s are pretty good -- "Front Porch Thing," "Rain On A Tin Roof" and "Why, Oh Why."

A few years ago Little Big Town recorded a little 25-minute mini-album, Wanderlust, produced and co-written by Pharrell Williams. I don't know if they had an eye on expanding on the crossover success they'd just had with "Girl Crush" or if it was just an experiment, but in any event, it came out with little promotion, charted far lower than any of their other records, and was followed 8 months later by a more traditional Little Big Town album. Like a lot of Pharrell's work outside of rap and R&B, it kind of feels like the group had to just kind of conform to his sound and he didn't change up his method at all. But it works a lot better than I expected it to, mostly because he knew when to get out of the way and let the group's harmonies take center stage, particularly on "C'mon," which Justin Timberlake co-wrote and sang on, and "Willpower."

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 03, 2019 at 5:09 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.