Sugarland’s Bigger album was released on Friday, June 8. The record, their first since The Incredible Machine was released in 2010, has an important message that both Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush are eager to share with their fans.
“This album is timely and we will not only, I think, be able to celebrate it and offer it as messages of hope and healing, of invitations to ask questions, of offerings and invitations to maybe see things differently,” Nettles says. “There’s a ton of messaging on this record that right now, I hope that it can achieve those sorts of very lofty goals within the hearts of people, and that later, I know we will look back and it will be clearly marked in terms of the times in which we have written it. I think the world right now is in such a place to need to hear certain messages and I hope that we have offered them the right ones.”
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Bigger, which includes the emotional “Tuesday’s Broken,” inspired by a recent school shooting, didn’t start out as a desire to make a statement.
“I think it snuck up on us,” says Bush. “But, as usual, when you feel something like that happen you kind of lean into it.”
“But we were just really very much in the moment of every song, because we didn’t know before going in every day what we were going to necessarily write about or what the other was going to bring,” Nettles adds. “We might have had feelings within ourselves but not only do we know what the other was going to bring, we didn’t know whether or not it was going to resonate with the other and how it was going to then translate in song or not. It was only through the action of creating and then completing that we started to see, oh this is a collection of messages. Each one was just its own song at the time of what we needed to say.”
Even with so much time apart, while both Nettles and Bush worked on their own projects, when they finally got together to write and record Bigger, it was like they had never been separated.
“This album seems really special,” says Bush. “You say that about all of them, but this one really, because of the speed at which we’ve written it and the speed at which we’ve recorded it, it’s really given us the opportunity to almost stop getting in the way of it. So it exists naturally based on our instincts more than anything else. And when you boil it down to what an artist is, it really is whatever their instincts are.”
Purchase Bigger at Sugarlandmusic.com.
Photo Credit: Instagram/sugarland
