Little Big Town just released their ninth studio album, Nightfall, where once again the band, made up of Kimberly Schlapman, Karen Fairchild, Jimi Westbrook and Phillip Sweet, take turns singing lead vocals on the songs. It’s a pattern they have maintained since their self-titled freshman album was released in 2002, but that decision didn’t come without a fight, and a pretty big one, from all four Little Big Town members.
“That was the plan, from the get-go,” Schlapman told Rolling Stone. “Our label was like, ‘You have to pick a lead singer,’ and we were pretty strong about, ‘No, we don’t. That’s not what we’re going to do.’”
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Still, most of Little Big Town’s recent hits have featured Fairchild as the lead vocalist, including two of their biggest No. 1 hits, “Girl Crush” and “Better Man.” With her rich alto voice taking on so many of the songs, it begs the question if anyone, maybe especially Fairchild, has ever considered a solo project –– a question Fairchild answers with ease.
“No, it hasn’t,” Fairchild insisted. “If somebody in the group ever wanted to, we’d all be supportive of it, but no, I just haven’t. What we have together, it feels very special. I have a lot of songs on the new album, and that’s just because I wrote a bunch of them, so I had sung the demos. Because my bandmates are amazing people, they were like, ‘We’re not taking your voice off of it, that would be weird.’
“That’s the good thing about the unit, we’re not like, ‘Everyone has to have 3.3 songs on the record,’” she continued. “It’s a great thing that we get to share the talents of the band, and the idea is to exploit those.”
Since the beginning, Little Big Town has focused on harmonies most of all, far more than who sings the lead part of the song.
“We have a traditional, traditional way within our band of how the harmony lays out,” Schlapman shared with PopCulture.com and other media. “Almost always, like 99 percent of the time Phillip’s on the bottom, I’m on the top, Karen, and Jimi in the middle. So a lot of times songs dictate, harmony dictates the lead singer of the song, because songs sound different. If the harmony is stacked differently, the song will sound different. If the harmonies are stacked this way and then you stack it differently, it sounds totally different.
“It’s important to us, the sound that the harmony makes and what the fans hear,” she continued. “And so, not always, but a lot of times the harmony dictates who’s going to sing the lead because of where the, you know, where the harmonies will fall, and that person seems the lead.”
“There’s never been a time where we said that, although it would be ideal, but that everyone would have 3.3 songs on a record or something,” Fairchild continued. “It just happens. And a lot of times now, when you write, you build a track right then and so you become accustomed to hearing someone’s voice on a song, that they wrote and then you fall in love with it.
“We’re not going to take your voice off of it to put someone else’s voice on it,” she continued. “In our very democratic band, we don’t, we wouldn’t do that. So some of it happens like that out of the writing process. And then sometimes we specifically say, we’re going to sit down to write this for so-and-so. It’s always different.”
Photo Credit: Getty / John Shearer
