Exclusives

After numerous US Country No.1s, Lady Antebellum disappeared in 2014… to the point where some fans thought they’d actually split up. But now they’re back with chart-topping album Heart Break and an updated Lady A sound that may surprise. Lady Antebellum have won five Grammys, six CMA awards, sold more than 18 million units, and notched up nine No.1 hits… Indeed, the trio seem such an all-powerful, unstoppable force bestriding the country music world, you’d think they would allow themselves to kick back and enjoy the ride. Yet singer Charles Kelley says they’re now back from a two-year hiatus with trepidation: as he puts it bluntly, “You always have a bit of that fear.” In the world that superstars such as Lady Antebellum orbit, stakes were high – after all, 2014’s 747 only made No.2. But now that their new album Heart Break is finally out, Kelley’s relief is palpable. “To me it’s all about the fans’ response,” he says. “You wonder if they’ll be excited and interested. And so far… the response seems to be great.” Scooting back to Lady Antebellum’s 2014 studio album, 747, you could be forgiven for thinking that their follow-up was actually called-‘Hiatus’. In fact, some doubters seemed convinced that Kelley and his Lady A bandmates Hillary Scott (vocals) and Dave Haywood (guitars, piano, mandolin), were splitting up when they announced they’d be taking some ‘down time’. In the music business, such statements about ‘time away and ‘working on other projects’ often really mean: ‘we’re done.’ Truth was, it was the truth. All three of Lady A decided they would continue, but it was time to temporarily turn off the spotlights. “We needed some time to step away and live some life,” smiles Kelley. “We always come right off the tour and make a record, then go out on tour again to promote the record. We didn’t want to jump right into the recording process this time.” Not only did they live their lives – Scott now has a daughter and both Haywood and Kelley have a son each – but they also scratched their other musical itches with solo projects. “Lady Antebellum is its own specific thing,” explains Kelley, “and with Lady A, we can’t go necessarily down whatever road that each of us wants to go down individually.” Their tastes are different too. Kelley says he wouldn’t want to make a religious album, but totally accepts that, “Hillary has always wanted to do a Christian record with her family, they’re very spiritual.” And Kelley in turn had always longed to do something that’s more of a throwback to Californian country or southern rock, which isn’t Scott’s kind of thing. Meanwhile, Haywood – as the muso of the band – went off and flexed his musician muscles by producing a new country trio, Post Monroe. Charles Kelley insist Lady A’s break has been a win-win situation. “It was a way for us to show a different side of ourselves artistically. You see a lot of rock groups who’ve done that, but for us it was a nice way to take a break, try something new, and get a little bit of this stuff out of our system.” The big bonus was that it made them eager to get back in the studio again and play together as Lady A. “All three of us talked about how much we’d missed the process. And I think the fans will see a change, and will wonder what we’re going to do next.” One thing that Kelley, Scott and Haywood all agreed on this time was that they wanted the new album, Heart Break, to be fresh and not repeat themselves. They themselves wrote 11 of the 13 songs, the most they’ve ever done for a record: “There’s a lot of our personal stories in this one,” he says. They’d previously felt pressure to make sure they’d got enough hits to keep their career going. But this time they asked themselves what they really loved, says Kelley, then let the hits come out of that. “We really didn’t know what was going to be a hit song, and we were writing from a very innocent standpoint. We weren’t trying to write hits – just songs that felt authentic to us.” Something in the Airbnb To help their creativity, the trio decamped to a beach house in Florida that they’d rented online from Airbnb. “We had this vision of going and maybe writing down on the beach,” laughs Kelley, “but we spent pretty much the entire week holed up inside. We liked it so much, and we were having so much fun, we’d start writing stuff from 10am, all the way up until 2am the next morning. We wrote something like nine songs in five days, it was just pouring out of us.” There were no rules in their writing sessions. Sometimes they’d start with a melody, as with the title track. “We had a melodic thing going, then Dave and Hillary came into the room and Dave said, ‘I’ve got this idea of giving your heart a break’. So a ‘heart break’ becomes two different words. And I was like: that’s brilliant, dude. All of a sudden we were throwing out lines onto this melody we’d created.” The final piece of the jigsaw was getting exactly the right producer and the trio turned to Busbee. “We knew he was a talented guy, but with that Maren Morris record [Hero, Morris’ breakthrough album of 2016 which Busbee helmed], we just felt it was so great, so edgy, but it still had this authentic, timeless feel in the way he was breaking tracks.” Crucially, as well as bringing fun and energy to the process, says Kelley, Busbee also brought some tough love. The three would play him a song and he’d say, it sounds like a hit, but it doesn’t sound like a Lady Antebellum hit. “He really pushed us to dig deep,” admits Kelley, “He wanted to make

Former Drive-By Trucker and Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Jason Isbell hooks up with The 400 Unit to bring us a fresh take on The Nashville Sound. In the spring, Jason Isbell marked an anniversary with a quietly contented post on social media. “This week marks 10 years since I parted ways with the Drive-By Truckers,” he wrote. “I weigh one pound less than I did then. Pretty proud of that.” As we meet in London, he laughs when I bring it up. “Yeah, at 38 I weigh less than I did at 28,” he says in his usual soft tones. “For an American, that’s tough, because we all just balloon. I guess the point of that is I’m in better shape than I was then, and I feel younger than I felt 10 years ago.” The statistic is a measure of how low Isbell’s life had dipped, during his days with the esteemed southern rockers of Athens, Georgia. But it also delineates his personal recovery and professional evolution ever since. His unceasingly admirable new album The Nashville Sound, the first since 2011 on which he shares the billing with his band the 400 Unit, comes shimmering into the long glow cast by two colossal predecessors, 2013’s Southeastern and the double Grammy-winning Something More Than Free in 2015. The Nashville Sound is produced, like those two forerunners, by the apparently omnipresent (and quite possibly omniscient) Dave Cobb. Just as he has done with Chris Stapleton, A Thousand Horses and others, he encouraged a vibe of spontaneity on what is at times a more muscular, yet still reflective, body of work. “A lot of this is live, even vocals,” confirms Isbell. “Dave’s got me doing that and I like it once it’s done. It’s kind of nerve-wracking as it’s going along, because I used to take two or three days to sing everything and try to get it perfect. I think that sucked some of the soul out of it. So Dave cajoled me into keeping some live vocals, and it works good, because then I don’t have to go back and sing a bunch of crap at the end of the sessions.” Isbell is on a roll, and he is cautiously but undeniably upbeat about it, acknowledging the accelerated awareness that now greets his excursions to the very core of modern-day Americana. “It started with Southeastern, and then Something More Than Free carried that forward,” he says. “That’s great, that’s what you want. It takes some adjusting, but all the problems are good ones. “The rooms got nicer, the audiences got bigger and I was able to buy better guitars and hear myself every night. All the things you dream about. Having a private bathroom before the show. You’d be amazed how far that goes towards your happiness on a day to day basis,” he adds drily. “So now, if I’ve got my family with me, I can tour. However long they want me to tour, I’ll tour, as long as my family’s around, and that’s a great thing.” It’s a Family Affair Isbell married fellow musician Amanda Shires in 2013, and their baby daughter Mercy Rose celebrates her second birthday in September. We’re speaking during a brief London sojourn to talk up his new album and, far more importantly, for him to meet up with Amanda as she opens on tour for John Prine. The year Shires was pregnant, and then gave birth to Mercy Rose, Jason stayed home all year. The work-life balance is in good order, which is way more than you could say about his hard-living past. Born in Green Hill, Alabama, to teenage parents, he emerged from a church-drilled upbringing to bust out of college and get a publishing deal at Muscle Shoals’ celebrated soul headquarters, FAME Studios. Having befriended its resident bass-playing figurehead David Hood, Isbell got to know his son Patterson, leading Jason to join the already-admired band that Hood Jr had co-founded, southern alt-rockers Drive-By Truckers. Isbell was with them between 2001 to 2007 and appeared on albums such as Decoration Day, The Dirty South and A Blessing And A Curse, he gradually established himself among their writing team, and as Hood’s co-vocalist, with songs of bloodied rawness that reflected his own increasing reliance on chemical and alcoholic recreation. Have a listen to Never Gonna Change, for example, on 2004’s The Dirty South, for a tale of black-eyed peas and shotgun shells that tastes like a mouthful of southern grit, and which reflected an unswerving hedonism. “You can throw me in the Colbert County jailhouse, you can throw me off the Wilson Dam,” he wrote. “But there ain’t much difference in the man I wanna be and the man I really am,” he added, with the confidence of Cash and the defiance of Haggard. “I’m really happy that I was in that band and I’m proud of the work that we did,” he says as he casts a thought on his old behaviour. “I have a really good memory, and I’ve recently discovered that it can be traced to certain traumatic events in my childhood. “I needed to remember very specific details, for reasons I won’t go into, but I trained myself to have a very strong memory. I’ve played those [Truckers] songs so much and toured so much, that the ones that I still perform, I try to put myself in that place every night, because I don’t ever want to go through the motions. “So I still remember what the whisky tasted like, I still remember the hangovers. They’re interesting to me now,” he says, with an almost scholarly diversion, “because if you’d never had anything to drink and you woke up feeling like that, you would think you were dying. You would go to the emergency room immediately. But when you’re hungover, you’re like ‘I deserve this.’ That’s pretty incredible.” Such is the learned reflectiveness of the older Isbell. “But I still remember all those things, and I’m glad that