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from Lime Wire on limewire.com
Spend any amount of time with Republic Nashville artist Sunny Sweeney, and you will be enchanted. Get this: a female country singer who loves traditional country music, has what she calls a “healthy obsession” with Merle Haggard, and unwinds by watching the Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miners’ Daughter. She even has a favorite line from the 1980 Oscar-winning film. “I love it where she says, ‘Doo, you sound like a big ol’ bear,’” she says.
Just like Lynn with her 1960 single “I’m A Honky Tonk Girl,” that she and husband Mooney travelled around the country promoting, Sweeney is on the singles chart for the first time with the compelling ballad “From A Table Away.” Despite releasing a fantastic album in 2007, Heartbreaker’s Hall of Fame, that contained three singles, this is her first time to make headway at radio.
“I’m so excited,” she says of the song. “It’s been an extremely long wait, but it’s going to be worth it. It’s really awesome to see people responding the way we want them to about this song.”
The song is the first track from her sophomore album, and she says that if you loved the twangy sound of the first, you’re in luck. “I’m super, super excited about the fact that I got to keep so much of the country side in it. It’s one of those things that I think will translate from the fans that loved my first record—they’re still going to love this record, and new fans will love it too, and they’ll go back and listen to the first one. I think they are very congruent. I am very proud of the new project.”
Her excitement stems in part from the fact that Republic Nashville CEO Scott Borchetta has taken a largely hands-off approach to her music. Borchetta signed Sweeney to Big Machine a few years ago, and actually sought her out for the label. “He actually found me on Facebook,” she says. “He had a copy of my CD on his desk, and he contacted me on MySpace. I thought, ‘Who is this guy? I don’t know him.” I had my manager call him, and he said, ‘I really love her record. I want to talk to her.’ Within three months, he had signed me to his label. It was the weirdest thing.
In just five years time, Borchetta has built up one of the strongest arsenals of talent in Music City—including Taylor Swift and Justin Moore, as well as signing veterans like Reba and Trisha Yearwood. In fact, while business at some companies has been sluggish, Borchetta has expanded in recent years, adding The Valory Music Group and Republic Nashville to the fold. Sweeney has nothing but the highest of praise about Borchetta. “He’s an amazing, brilliant person, and he emphasizes what is good, and the strong points of each artist, and lets them be themselves. Then he opens this new label, and Jimmy Harnen is the president. Scott is still the CEO. It’s cool to see them work together. We are all on the same page, and we have talks about how to keep it where I’m still going to go to bed every night and be proud of the country music that I am making, and they’re going to get it on the radio. It’s a cool process. I’ve obviously never been through this before. I’m really excited and really proud. Those are two words that keep coming up, because I really am.”
Music has always held a high spot in the Longview, Texas native’s heart, but at one point she thought of going into another vocation—comedy. “I did some improv and some stand-up,” she says. “I didn’t really want to do it for the rest of my life or anything, I just wanted to try it because I was good at it. But, from that stemmed the music, and people in the comedy troupe were really supportive. They would say ‘You need to start a band.’ I said I didn’t know how to, and they would say, ‘Just do it. You didn’t know how to do this either, so just go for it.”
She is doing just that, and fortunately, she’s getting to it her way. Part of that approach includes her bio—a crucial piece of information that managers and publicists like to have ready for the media, to let them know more about the artist. Rather than turn it over to someone else, Sweeney wrote it herself. It’s a little more conversational than most bios, and offers her take on everything from telecasters to salsa. “I was actually a public relations major in college, and I wrote bios for people, and they are just so boring. I was thinking, How can I make this funny or cool where people would actually get it? So, everything that came to mind—I just wrote it down. When I got done, I thought, That’s kind of a funny way to look at it. My manager fell in love with it, and I was like, Are you serious? We’re going to send this to radio stations? He said, ‘Well, yeah.’ I get bored by bios anyway, so I thought it was awesome they let me use that one.”
When it comes to the Telecaster, Sweeney definitely admits to having a soft spot for the instrument and the pickers. When asked about her favorites, she replied with a few. “I have so many, like Redd Volkaret, and many of Merle and Buck’s old guitar players, like Roy Nichols and Don Rich. There’s something about it that makes my hair stand up on my arms. I can’t explain it. I could pick the Telecaster out from when I was a kid. I could just tell.”
Carrying the love of the Bakersfield sound a bit further, she tells LimeWire Music Blog, “I’m getting to play at Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace in a couple of weeks, and we’re doing a two-hour show there. I never get to play that long anymore, because we’re opening for people. But, we’re doing a two-hour show in Bakersfield, and immediately when my manager told me about that, I said ‘We’re going to be adding a whole lot of Buck songs.’ He said that was cool. We have all these harmonies in our band, that’s the kind of music I grew up on. I think there’s something so different about it, and catchy. It’s cool music.” She makes no secrets about her love of the classic sounds from that era. “My iPod would probably bore most people, but I love country so much.”
As far as her main specialty goes, she is very upbeat about the release of her new album. “Brett Beavers is the producer on it. Luke Wooten was the engineer and associate producer. It’s got a lot of old country sound to it, which is freakin’ amazing! I’m so proud of it. It’s got some rockin’ stuff on it—a couple of really twangin’ songs. It’s so country, and I’m so proud of it. I cannot believe I get to say this is my record.”
It appears that Sunny Sweeney is headed exactly where she has always wanted to be. “We’re now just getting into the swing of things. So, we’re going to be really busy. We’ve got some dates with Randy Houser, and we’re playing the Opry, and we’re just trying to stay busy promoting this single by going out and playing live so they can hear it.”
