Lady Antebellum have everything they need just now.
“We couldn’t ask for anything more,” drawls singer Charles Kelley from his Nashville home. “It’s been a wild ride, for sure. I don’t think we could have scripted this if we tried. There’s definitely nothing to complain about.”
Indeed not. One week after its Jan. 26 release, the country trio’s second album Need You Now debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200 and Top Country charts, selling some 480,000 copies in the process. The single of the same name — a catchy little ditty about drunk-dialing — sits atop the U.S. and Canadian country charts. A week ago Sunday, they performed the tune at the 2010 Grammy Awards — where their previous hit I Run to You earned them their first award, for best country performance by a duo or group.
Not bad for a band that hasn’t even celebrated its fourth birthday — and three people who didn’t even plan to be in a band in the first place.
“When we met in the summer of ’06, we weren’t even looking to start a group,” says Kelley, whose bandmates are vocalist Hillary Scott and singer-guitarist Dave Haywood. “We were just trying to be songwriters. But after Hillary and I sang together on a couple of demos for the songs we’d written, I ended up singing below her and found this nice, low grit to my voice that ended up blending with hers. It sounded good.
“So then we thought we would play some shows just to see if we could get some interest and pitch the songs. But we did our first show — and the response was insane. We walked offstage and said, ‘We’ve got to pursue this.’ So we came up with that crazy name, and pretty much from that first night, it’s been our main focus, and we’ve never looked back.”
That might be because they’ve been too busy speeding forward. Their self-titled 2008 debut CD sold more than 1.1 million copies, shot to the top of the U.S. country charts and No. 4 on the Billboard Top 200, and roped them a passel of new-artist awards and other nominations.
Impressive as those achievements are, Kelley and co. are equally proud of the fact that they’ve co-written nearly every song in their catalog — a rarity in music these days, particularly in country circles.
“We were pretty headstrong about wanting to record the majority of our own music,” he says. “It was important to us. And we were really fortunate that our producers believed in the songs we had written just like we did. So we didn’t have too much resistance. That’s not to say we didn’t have songs pitched to us. And it’s not that our songs are always better, but they’re more us. They fit our voices perfectly, and we can sing them with more conviction because we wrote ’em.”
Their songs may be personal, but their themes are universal. The ballad-rich Need You Now is based around songs about love and the lack thereof, as seen from both sides of the romantic coin. That’s no accident, says the 28-year-old Georgia native.
“Well, I just got married, so there is a lot of that. I was definitely feeling in that romantic place. But people don’t want to hear a whole record about that. We don’t either. And at the same time, Hillary was going through a lot of stuff. That’s where Ready to Love Again and some of the other songs about having to pick yourself back up came from. So we ended up with a balanced record.”
This spring and summer, they’ll be balancing solo dates with a stint opening for Tim McGraw. But playing second fiddle doesn’t bother Kelley.
“We’re proud of where we are musically. And this will be a big building year for us. We’re going to take the production up a notch, and we’ll be playing twice as long — close to an hour. But I think we have a ways to go before we headline arenas. We’re still taking baby steps. Give us one more year and then we’ll be ready to give people their money’s worth.”
