level balladry and high-octane, arena-ready rockers. Members of the trio co-wrote eight of the 11 tracks and were able to rely on a much tighter intra-band bond than they had when they were craſting the first album, which was recorded not that long aſter old pals Charles and Dave got together with new acquaintance Hillary to form the group back in 2006.
“Because of the success of the first record, we could get with some really great songwriters that’ll take an appointment with us now,” says Dave, the group’s guitarist and background vocalist. “But more importantly, the three of us are the closest we’ve ever been as friends. Out on the road, we’ve spent almost every single day together for the past three and a half years. So by the time we were writing songs for this record, I think we’d all learned how to interact with each other better. We can write songs individually, but we definitely have something special when we do it together, and that’s gotten elevated. I know what Hillary is thinking, I know what Charles is thinking, and I think we play off each other a lot better.”
“We would know if something personally was going on with Hillary,” says Charles. “We would say, ‘How about we tap into your personal hell for a little bit? Let’s bring that out in a song!’ When we’re all songwriting, we know what’s going on in everybody’s lives.” “When they let me talk about it!” laughs Hillary, suggesting that there might be a slight gender divide in the group when it comes to complete candor. “I could see their eyes
glaze over. But when we all get into talking about these things together, you get a song like ‘Ready to Love Again’ (the album’s closer) out of it.”
“Songwriting,” Charles asserts, “is almost kind of like our little group therapy.”
Any such therapeutic discussions don’t involve too many regrets about professional roads not taken. Least of all would they have any reason to regret having abandoned the option of solo careers to come together as a group, at a time when the conventional wisdom was that individuals usually work better than bands in marketing country music. Tere were a few
tentative moments during Lady Antebellum’s formation, though, as Charles and Dave danced around the idea of doing anything so brash as forming a band.
“When we met Hillary,” says Charles, “she had all these contacts in town and had some development deals—just basically really tied into the system.” She had a bit of a head start on understanding the business, too, being the daughter of the well-known singer Linda Davis. “We were like, “All right, she’s got one of the best voices. We’ve got to write for her project.’ So we got together with her and wrote ‘All We’d Ever Need’ and ‘Love Don’t Live Here,’ which ended up on the first record.
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