Sugarland on Recording Taylor Swift Song: ‘We Didn’t Want to Mess It Up’
Taylor Swift is still keeping a connection to her country songwriting roots – she co-wrote Sugarland’s new song “Babe.”
The song, from the duo’s forthcoming album Bigger, follows Little Big Town’s Grammy-winning rendition of Swift’s “Better Man,” from their album The Breaker. The relationship between Sugarland and Swift actually goes back to the start of her spectacular career, when Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush were performing as a trio and just put out their first music.
“We had just had our first EP out called Premium Quality Tunes,” Nettles told reporters backstage at the 53rd ACM Awards on Sunday. “She still has a copy of it that we signed for her whenever we played a couple shows together.”
Similar to the way Little Big Town was presented with “Better Man,” Swift called Nettles and Bush to ask if they’d be interested in singing something she wrote.
“She was excited we were getting back together and reached out and said, ‘Hey, I have a song,'” Nettles said. “That is a short list, ladies and gentlemen, of people to whom she has said, ‘Hey I have a song, want to sing it?’ So we said yes.”
It was still an unusual arrangement for Sugarland, who through the course of four studio albums to date have only recorded their own material.
“We’ve never put a song by anybody else on any of our records,” said Bush. “So we weren’t really used to sorting through that and we didn’t want to mess it up. We didn’t tell anybody about it until we got finished and she liked it, thank God.”
Sugarland’s new album Bigger, their first since 2010’s The Incredible Machine, includes the lead single “Still the Same” and will be released June 8th.