Karen Fairchild

By Ryan Gueningsman

Each year, for the past 12 years, Little Big Town band member Karen Fairchild told her mother that it was going to be “the year” that she would be able to make a living in Nashville writing and singing.

This year finally appears to that year for Fairchild and Little Big Town.

In early March, the band learned it has been nominated for both top new duo or vocal group and top vocal group of the year by the Academy of Country Music. The award show will air Tuesday, May 23, just two weeks before the group’s debut at Winstock.

Success had come and gone for the band that has hit the charts like a bullet with its first single, “Boondocks,” off its new album “The Road To Here.”

The group had a self-titled debut album out in the early 2000s, was on a tour, and had a major label deal and a single – but things faltered, and before long, the two male/two female band was as good as written off the books.

While Fairchild went back to office work on Music Row, fellow band members Jimi Westbrook and Phillip Sweet took work parking cars and telemarketing, and Kimberly Roads suffered probably the biggest setback in her career – and her life – with the death of her 41-year-old husband, Steven Roads, in April 2005 from a heart attack.

Westbrook’s father also passed away last year, and Sweet and Fairchild both went through divorces.

But they never gave up.

“It turned around, didn’t it,” Fairchild said with a warm laugh. “We keep looking at each other and saying ‘How is this happening? What happened?’ It’s been a lot of shock and excitement. We really couldn’t be any happier.”

Fairchild has been living in Nashville for 12 years, and has been through several contract negotiations, failed record deals, triumphs, and tragedies, but is relieved that this year seems to be becoming “the year” for Little Big Town to make its breakthrough and do great things.

“This is actually going to be that year, and that is really exciting,” she said. “Just to know that the four of us have stuck together through a lot of hard times, and seen it through, it is really exciting to have the fans embrace the music.”

“We’re either stubborn or stupid – one of the two,” Fairchild added with a laugh.

Little Big Town is a culmination of different musical and personal influences, upbringings, and experiences – and equals the complete package.

“There are so many influences I think you might hear in individual voices and stylings when people sing lead,” Fairchild said. She noted Sweet and Westbrook have some of that southern rock group influence like The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Fairchild was excited to find out that Lynyrd Skynyrd is playing at Winstock the same day Little Big Town is.

“That’s going to make the guys really happy. I hope we can stick around and watch – we’ll have to try and ensure that’s in the travel plans,” she said with a laugh.

Roads grew up on the likes of Emmylou Harris, and brings a bluegrass background to the band, which is demonstrated in the song “Wounded.”

Fairchild grew up on traditional country music, citing artists Don Williams and Dolly Parton as a few of her favorites.

“I loved Dolly growing up. I don’t sound anything like her, but I adored her,” Fairchild said. She also said her family listened to a lot of Glen Campbell and Kenny Rogers. The two choices in her home, when it came to music, were gospel or country, she said.

The band got its start when Fairchild and Roads met while in college at Samford in Birmingham, Ala.

“We ended up doing a lot of choral singing together,” Fairchild said. “We ended up being friends and kept in touch after school. She moved to Knoxville and I went on to Nashville.”

They both began singing locally, and got together to brainstorm to try to find something they could try in order to make a living in country music.

Fairchild knew Westbrook from several corporate shows and events they had worked at, singing cover tunes, and said she called him “on a whim” to come meet with herself and Roads.

“It was one of those kind of cool destiny things, because he said he had just quit his job yesterday,” Fairchild said.

They began writing together, singing, and brainstorming about the next step. They decided to form a group unlike any in country music today – two males and two females. They just needed another male.

“We set out to find that fourth member, and that became kind of challenging,” she said. After some time went by, a friend of Fairchild’s told her about this “blue-eyed southern soul singer from Arkansas” and suggested that a meeting take place to determine if he was the “missing link.”

They met with the potential fourth member, Arkansas native Sweet, as they had done with other potential band members before. Sweet said he had been doing demos and other songwriting work in Nashville.

“We got in the car and were like ‘He makes a great first impression, he’s cool, but I bet he sucks,’” Fairchild said with a laugh. “It seemed like too good of a package to be true, but than we put his demo in, and there was that big husky voice that we’d always said would be ideal. We knew right then that would be the right thing to do.”

That was seven and one-half years ago.

More recently, Fairchild, Roads, Westbrook, and Sweet have found themselves opening for the likes of Keith Urban and John Mellencamp, and doing “all kinds of cool things,” Fairchild said.

She said one of the most surreal moments for the band came when Mellencamp invited the band on stage during his part of the show to sing “Pink Houses” with him.

“Kimberly, she’s had a rough year, losing her husband a year ago . . . to watch John (Mellencamp) put his arm around her neck like they were long lost pals from childhood and say ‘Why don’t you come sing the third verse with me, and I’ll help you . . . There she was, standing up there on the front of that stage, and all I could think of was our matching choir outfits, and all we had been through, and how cool is this? I almost wanted to start crying, I was thinking what a great moment this is,” Fairchild said.

While the band seems to be taking in every second of the success that has come along with “Boondocks,” Fairchild said there is a “really healthy fear of it going away,” as it did for them once before.

She said that, even though their first album was not very popular and there were disputes with their record label, it is still something they are proud of.

Even with the commercial failure of that album, the band stayed focused and “hellbent” on putting out a second record, even if it meant just selling it off its web site, Fairchild said. This band believes they have a gift to share, and fans are proving them right by embracing them and their music.

Their latest album, “The Road To Here,” was certified gold in March, which means it has sold more than 500,000 copies since its release. Their latest single, “Bring It On Home,” has also hit the top 40 and is making its way up the charts.

Everything indicates this is the year that Fairchild’s prediction to her mother will come true.

Little Big Town band member Karen Fairchild called April 7 while on the road in Kansas City, where the band was doing a show for a radio station there.

Fairchild and her bandmates will perform at the Winstock Country Music Festival in Winsted Saturday, June 10. The group is scheduled for two performances on the Emerging Artists stage at 2 p.m. and 4:05 p.m.

For more information on Winstock, visit www.winstockfestival.com, or call 1-888-946-7865.

For more information on Little Big Town, visit www.littlebigtown.com.