Little Big Town’s Schlapman on band’s journey: “The four of us are a little melting pot in the music that we love.”

As part of its 25th anniversary tour, the quartet hits the TD Garden on Halloween night, and they promise appropriate costumes for the occasion.

Oct 28, 2024 - 04:46
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Little Big Town’s Schlapman on band’s journey: “The four of us are a little melting pot in the music that we love.”

You don’t have to like country music to be a Little Big Town fan — though of course it helps. “We hear it all the time — ‘I don’t like country music but I love you guys,’ ” said Kimberly Schlapman, one of the group’s four singers. “I guess it’s the nostalgia of our harmonies that always reminds people of the Mamas & the Papas and Fleetwood Mac, they always like that sound. But what’s even better is when they say, ‘I didn’t know I liked country music until I listened to y’all’.”

As part of its 25th anniversary tour, the quartet hits the TD Garden on Halloween night, and they promise appropriate costumes for the occasion. The tour teams them with longtime friends and fellow female/male harmonizers Sugarland. Continuing to blur the country/pop division, they’ve dubbed this the “Take Me Home” tour, after the Phil Collins oldie that both groups just recorded together.

‘I remember seeing him at the Omni in Atlanta when I was in high school, and it had an incredible effect on me. Even though I was always in the nosebleeds when I went to a show, because I never had the money to buy a good ticket. The four of us are a little melting pot in the music that we love.”

The four members (Schlapman, Phillip Sweet, Karen Fairchild and Jimi Westbrook) began singing together soon afterward and have been together ever since; the latter two are a married couple.

“It started in my living room in Nashville, and from the first time it sounded like a family singing harmony, even though we weren’t a family. We all looked at each other and said ‘Holy cow.’ Mixed harmony goes back to the old bluegrass days, but it wasn’t being done in country at that time, and we didn’t want to do female harmonies like the Dixie Chicks. What we knew was that we didn’t want to pick a lead singer, we wanted the harmony to be the focus on every song. We had no idea of what a ragged road this would become, but the highs and lows of the journey have made us who we are.”

They’ve also tested the boundaries of what you can say in a hit country song— notably with the Grammy-winning “Girl Crush,” which initially proved too daring for radio. “(Controversy) wasn’t the point, but it became that because country radio made it the point. They really pushed back on it until our friends in the music business like Reba McEntire started saying, ‘Hey, this song isn’t as salacious as you’re making it out to be, it’s just an old tale of jealousy’. For me it’s right up there with ‘Boondocks,’ which was our breakthrough and our first born. Those songs never get old.”

Another of their hits, “Better Man,” was given to them by Taylor Swift. “Oh, that poor girl — bless her heart, we still hope she makes it someday. Seriously, we’ve known her since she was 15 years old and loved her forever. It wasn’t easy when we cut the record, because we wanted to turn it from a Taylor song to a Little Big Town song, I remember it taking some work when Karen sang the lead. And we thought ‘This is one of her children, we hope we raised it well.’ But that song has touched so many people who’ve been through hard times, whether with a husband or a father. We can see its in the crowd, the redemption it brings them.”

In December the group will host its first prime-time TV special with “Christmas at the Opry,” which ties in with their new seasonal album. For Schlapman it’s the perfect capper of their anniversary year.

“We all grew up watching those TV variety shows in the ’70s and we wanted to make it reminiscent of those, bringing in a lot of our friends and a lot of different stage productions. So it’s like all the incredible moments of the last 25 years are coming together, tied up with a big ol’ beautiful bow.”

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