This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
We thought, ‘Wow, this is really great,’ but we didn’t want her to think we were little weasels trying to get in there and ride her coattails.” Hillary: “And I was sitting there thinking, ‘Tis takes so much of the pressure off!’ You could not pay me enough money to go back and NOT be in a band. Being a solo artist wasn’t for me. I wasn’t cut out for it. I didn’t handle the pressure at all.” Even now, she eagerly confesses, “I’m the baby of the group. But I’ve grown up!”


For the band itself, there was an element of growing up in public, a little. Te debut album was an


immediate smash, debuting at No. 1 on the country albums chart, an example of a rare phenomenon that is referred to in the arcane parlance of the music industry as… love at first sight. But their first real tour was an arena tour, opening for Martina McBride, and they acknowledge that, as a still fairly newly founded combo, there were rough patches in their performances. “It felt a little early, even though the crowds were really gracious and great to us,” remembers Charles. “Ten we said, ‘All right, this is what we need to improve on,’ and we went out to these fairs and festivals and made plenty of mistakes in a safer environment where it wasn’t


quite as big a deal if you were to mess up. We did close to 200 shows our first year. Lost a ton of money, because we were doing smaller shows that cost us twice as much as we were getting paid.”


Teir live performance chops finally properly in order, they planned to halt their rigorous touring schedule to concentrate on the second album, which they’d planned to put out in 2009. Tey wrapped up a tour supporting Kenny Chesney and had recorded much of the sophomore effort when the call came in to support Keith Urban on his tour. And faster than you can say “Who Wouldn’t Wanna to Be Me,” they took the offer, even while regretting delaying the new album. In hindsight, the postponement no longer felt like a mixed blessing, but a complete one.


“At the time we were bummed out, because we had just cut the first half of the record, and we had a big batch of songs and we were ready to go back in and finish,” explains Charles. “But because we didn’t, we had time to write three or four better songs, and then we found a couple of outside songs that we didn’t write that we just had to do”—namely, “American Honey” and “Hello World.” “It was the best thing that ever happened to us, having that gap of time before we came back in and finished the back half of the record. It totally in my mind took the record from here to here,” he says, placing his hand a few inches even higher than his 6-foot-6 frame. Tis time, the band nabbed co-producer credit for themselves, with Dave acknowledged by all as the member most comfortable with the ways of the studio.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90