When Sugarland released their last album, The Incredible Machine in 2010, they didn’t know what their future held as a band. But Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush, who took several years apart to work on their own projects, discovered in reuniting to write and record Bigger, that their chemistry was stronger than ever.
“We didn’t know when we first walked back in the room together for the first time to write, we didn’t know in terms of what that energy and what that flow was going to feel like,” Nettles shared with PopCulture.com and other reporters at a recent media event. “And luckily it was very much, especially in terms of the creative language that we have with each other, was very much right there. Which inspired ‘Still The Same,’ the song itself. It’s pretty similar.”
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Nettles and Bush might have taken a professional break, but the two stayed connected and remained friends over the years.
“We’d have to be worried about just going to a movie together. It’d be like, ‘They’re getting the band back together!’” said Bush. “But, things in your life, when you have a family member pass away or you fall off a stage, you call each other. You stay in touch that way, but part of this is you have to take the break … We’re like kids from the gifted class that just won’t give up. And that distance has made our communication a million times – we’re not tangled up.
“We’ve skipped Bro-country,” he continued. “There’s a whole lot of cool things that happened as a result, but you don’t really know it until after you’ve started doing and you look back. I mean, even when we were making this record, until we got to that song, ‘Bigger,’ I don’t think we knew what we were doing. I bet we were just writing.”
While on their hiatus, Nettles released two albums and starred in Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors and Christmas of Many Colors movies, and Bush produced a few acts, including Lindsay Ell.
“One of the beautiful things that we continue to learn, and I think one of the gifts of taking this space to do other things as artists individually, [is] we found in doing it, that there were things that we can do as Sugarland that we cannot do on our own and things that we can do on our own that we cannot do as Sugarland,” explained Nettles. “It is more than the sum of its parts. And I think that’s what’s the beautiful thing about creative energy and creative partnership is that if it is, I believe, in its highest form, it is bigger than, no pun intended, it is bigger than what it all adds up to be when you’ve got in on paper.”
While Nettles and Bush didn’t have a timeline for their return as a band, both singers agree that they believed it would happen some day.
“There was never a time when we thought, ‘Oh, maybe it’s just a thing of the past,” Nettles said. “We always said from the beginning that when and as the time – we’d left that door open. And I think everybody, in their love for the music that we created, and in their love for a melodrama or a scandal, might have wanted it to be a break-up, but we just continued to walk the truth that we knew and to do what we wanted to do and here we are doing that still.”
Sugarland just kicked off their Still the Same Tour. Dates can be found on their website. Bigger will be out on June 8. Download their current single, “Babe,” featuring Taylor Swift, on iTunes.
Photo Credit: Instagram/sugarland
