Little Big Town
The road leading up the Little Big Town’s latest release, “A Place To Land Expanded Edition”, has been an eventful one filled with both tragedy and triumph. Throughout it all, the band persevered and this latest album is the band’s finest work to date.
The country vocal quartet Little Big Town began with Kimberly Roads and Karen Fairchild in the early 90’s, who began singing together in college at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Both moved to Nashville in the mid-1990s, and invited old Alabama friend Jimi Westbrook to join them and make a trio. The group was completed in 1998 by Phil Sweet. The following year, Little Big Town made its first public debut at the Grand Ole Opry.
"There's a special connection between the four of us, for whatever reason," Westbrook says. "Who knows why that happens? You like to think that maybe it was meant to be, and I really do believe that. This group of people came together for a purpose."
The band’s uniqueness made it a hard sell at first in the ever-cautious country music field, but Little Big Town pushed forward with characteristic determination. Their patience paid off with The Road to Here, which has sold over a million copies and produced four Top 20 hits including the Top10 smash "Boondocks," the Top 5 "Bring It On Home," "Good As Gone" and "A Little More You," and earned them nominations at the Grammy Awards, the Country Music Association Awards, Academy of Country Music Awards and CMT Music Awards. They toured with superstars like George Strait, Kenny Chesney, Keith Urban and Martina McBride, and collaborated onstage with rock legend Lindsey Buckingham for an episode of CMT’s Crosssroads. Another musical luminary, John Mellencamp, invited them to sing on his Freedom’s Road album.
"All we ever wanted to do was to travel around and write songs and play them for people," Westbrook says. "There's great joy in that for all of us. We have a great life doing what we do, and we just want to keep doing it. We want to keep exploring, growing and finding new challenges. "
Little Big Town’s latest album "A Place To Land" was never short on inspiration. Recorded at longtime producer Wayne Kirkpatrick's studio outside Nashville, the follow-up to 2005's smash The Road to Here vividly reflects the emotional currents and concerns of the band right now. The group songwriting and complex vocal interplay on A Place to Land is the result of almost a decade of deep friendship and camaraderie among the members "We want the world to hear this music," Georgia native Schlapman says. "It's our heart and soul. It's who we are, and we put so much of ourselves into it. It's how we tell the story of our lives." But this isn’t the album plenty of Little Big Town fans already know and love—it’s much more.
