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who produced smash albums by some of mainstream country’s biggest stars. “Paul trusts our gut instincts of where we think things should go, but there’s no substitute for his 30 years of experience,” Charles says. “Tere’s not anything he hasn’t tried on a record in the past, so he’s able to know why this wouldn’t work or this would. I was always the one to want him to stack guitars and thicken the damn thing up, and he was always like, ‘Man, let this thing lie back and live more organic and let every instrument shine through.’ Without someone like that keeping you down, you’d go in there and botch up what was beautiful about the thing in the first place. If I’d just known when I was listening to those first couple of Dixie Chicks records that I would be working with this guy and he would be a fan of what we’re doing, it would have been too wild to believe.”


Of course, Worley realizes that there’s no need to “stack” anything that would get in the way of those harmonies, or the group’s traded-off lead vocals. With male and female front-people, Hillary says, “I think we’re able to say so much more and reach so many more people. Because there’s no way that I could have been able to put my vocal on a song like ‘Hello World’ and make it believable like Charles did.” Te diffused focus also makes for a more dynamic live experience. “When it’s a song I’m singing lead on, Charles and Dave can go be buddy-buddy on stage. When Charles and I do a duet, we can, without being too theatrical, almost play out the songs and


tell the story a little bit more, whether we’re making it dramatic or fun and flirty.”


Charles agrees: “Having the two lead vocals there can take people into different journeys. And I think there are people who are just naturally gonna gravitate to her voice that aren’t gonna gravitate to mine, and vice versa. And then on top of it, you’ve got this harmony potential, with Dave. When we mix the record, we don’t even realize how important the three-part harmony is until it’s not there. In the mix, they sometimes tend to blend in together, these two men’s voices. But it warms it up so much. If there was one little piece of the puzzle that wasn’t there on anything, or if his voice was too high


or vice versa… We definitely feel very fortunate that we found each other and it all happened.”


Not every song on Need You Now is a heavy one. A tune like “Stars Tonight” is intended as “get up on your feet live song,” as Dave laughingly puts it, “there to remind our fans, ‘Hey, we’re the ones that sing ‘Lookin’ for a Good Time,’ too!’” But for every dose of sheer escapism on the album, there are two shots of unvarnished truth.


“I was up until 5 in the morning one night while we were making the album, writing Dave and Charles an email,” says Hillary. “I stepped back from it and just


looked at why we wrote or chose each song, and it hit me that all


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