Sunny side up
Country songwriter lures listeners to unvarnished, beautiful place
Country singer Sweeney lures listeners.
For the first time in a long time, Sunny Sweeney didn’t know what to say or how to say it.
She had a feeling about a specific empty space in her life and started to scribble down some thoughts on that feeling. In Sweeney’s line of work as a songwriter, feelings and thoughts typically serve as the fuel and fire that push songs from a collection of spare parts into vehicles that can transport people to some provocative emotional place.
But Sweeney, who has written about love and divorce with devastating frankness, was stumped by this particular feeling, which led her to a perfect country-music image: a bottle sitting by a bedside.
Sweeney talks about “Bottle by My Bed” at the Armadillo Palace prior to a January show. Before taking the stage in singer/ warrior mode, she fights a cold with a Diet Coke and an oversize sweater.
We discuss the role of singer as narrator, and Robert Earl Keen’s cover of James McMurtry’s “Out Here in the Middle” comes up. The song — specifically Keen’s sweetly melancholic reading of the refrain — had just been playing on the venue’s PA. Sweeney’s eyes — blue as the waters in Tulum — somehow brighten further. “I had the same thought about that song while I was peeing,” she says.
Sweeney’s not one to stifle words.
But “Bottle by My Bed,” despite its traditional-sounding country title, doesn’t traffic in country cliché. Wants and desires have informed country music for decades. In this case, the song’s narrator wants to be a mother. And the mental image spurred by the title transforms from glass to plastic as the song shifts from mournful to devastating.
“I’ve wanted to write that song for a long time, but I struggled with it,” Sweeney says. “It’s like anything else you don’t want to talk about. And here I am, somebody who wants to write songs that people relate to. So the truth of it is the song’s about where I am in my life.
“It’s like a journal entry. It was something I felt glad to get off my chest. But even when I wrote it, I thought, ‘Well, I’ll never sing that one.’ But instead, it felt good to sing it. It felt like therapy. It allowed me to talk about things I’d been through.”
She also had some assistance from Lori McKenna, a friend and mentor, as well as a brilliant songwriter.
“At first, I was stunned when Sunny pitched the idea,” says McKenna, who just earned her second Grammy for best country song. “Then I remembered I was staring at Sunny Sweeney, and she’s about as honest as honest gets. I didn’t know at the time that she was struggling with this — so we went through her story for a while. It was an emotional day. Sunny’s brave as hell — and I think she knew this song could help other people, and I think that’s important to her.”
Sweeney expected a strong response from women. “Just based on my girlfriends, who know everything about it. I mean, it’s a tough subject, and your friends sometimes tiptoe around the news when they’re going to have a baby. You’re happy for them. But it’s still something they know they have that I want.”
She’s also finding men responding to the song. “I didn’t expect it; it shocked me, to be honest. But sometimes that happens when you talk about something people don’t like to talk about.”
The song is a central piece of “Trophy,” Sweeney’s fourth album, which is out this week.
Having made an album focused tightly on a rough divorce and another largely informed by finding love after that divorce, Sweeney steps further back on “Trophy” for a wider view. The wonderfully nuanced set of songs are based on experience but influenced by time. As a writer and narrator, she’s acquired some wisdom and perspective on her past.
“Pass the Pain” fits into a long-running country tradition of translating a patron/bartender conversation into song. But Sweeney’s takes an interesting detour, dialing into a particularly bad time during her divorce.
“I was drinking more, probably because I felt like it would fix something,” she says. “Or everything. So I went to Loser’s in Nashville in the middle of the day. I was there probably for two pathetic hours. I wasn’t belligerent, but I was crying. And the bartender asked if I needed a cab. I’ve never been told to leave a bar before. But I guess I looked pretty bad. So I looked into that for a song.”
Nashville has treated Sweeney better lately, though, even if her route to success has been scattershot.
Sweeney was born in Houston and raised in Longview, where she remembers an array of roots music, depending on which parent she was with: hard bluegrass and classic country ranging toward rootsier classic rock such as Tom Petty.
Sweeney took a break from school and spent time living in New York — “I hated college … or wasn’t good at college, I guess” — waiting tables and hoping to find a break as an actor.
“Everybody would say, ‘Lose that accent,’ ” she says. “My mom always told me not to listen to them. She said, ‘In the future, that’ll be an asset.’ ”
She returned to Texas, finished school and started writing songs and playing them — first in Austin, gradually around the stage. Sweeney had a voice that leaned toward the soulful side of country.
“What struck me about her initially was the purity of her vocal style,” says Tommy Detamore, a veteran steel-guitar player and producer. “Nothing about it was contrived. It was just her, in much the same way Loretta Lynn has always seemed to be to me.”
And early songs such as “Ten Years Pass” suggested Sweeney’s writing stood up well to other greats she covered, including Jim Lauderdale.
Detamore helped her record an album’s worth of songs in 2005, and the following year, at age 30, Sweeney was a recording artist with “Heartbreaker’s Hall of Fame.” Sweeney caught a lot of ears with the debut, which in 2007 was re-released by Big Machine, a label with such bigname acts as Taylor Swift and Tim McGraw.
She endured some loving and some living, which poured into “Concrete” in 2011. Sweeney clearly identified as a writer at that point, with a hand in penning seven of the 10 songs, including the single “From a Table Away,” which also charted.
The album was a dark one, reflecting a marriage coming undone in songs “Staying’s Worse Than Leaving” and “Drink Myself Single.”
Her third album, “Provoked,” followed in 2014. It didn’t yield any charting singles, but Sweeney had found a comfortable place like McKenna had — a respected songwriter capable of having songs covered by very successful Nashville acts. And like McKenna with her song narratives, Sweeney is the best interpreter of her own work.
She’s made only four albums, but “Trophy” finds her writing with further depth and economy.
“The first record, the theme was, ‘I have no clue what any of this is about,’ ” she says. “The second record, the theme was getting a song on the radio. That and dealing with a tough time in my life with a (expletive) divorce. The last one was surviving divorce and finding love again. It was a more adult record. This one I just (expletive) put out there. Why bother with a back story?”
But push her on each song, and little thematic connections emerge, even if they weren’t intentional.
At 40, Sweeney writes with youthful energy and aged insight. So “Nothing Wrong With Texas” isn’t a young songwriter’s song, nor is it another example of the cheerleading that young songwriters from Texas often offer as easy crowd-pleasers. Instead, the track is written from the point of view of a person who, when young, couldn’t get out of town quickly enough, only to find some comfort in that place years later.
“Grow Old With Me” is among the best songs Sweeney has written. It is as unfussy as the title, just a simple request and declaration of commitment. And though it’s about the love Sweeney found after her divorce, her songs are open-ended enough to let all sorts of listeners through the door.
She can still drop the hammer with an uptempo song such as “Better Bad Idea.” But Sweeney shows mastery with her more introspective songs, the ones that linger after the album has run its course.
Detamore calls it “a brilliant piece of work.
“It is at times ‘edgy’ stylistically and thematically, yet somehow she manages to remain true to her natural vocal style, which is pretty much East Texas country. … There’s an honesty about it that is special.”
So “Grow Old With Me” is written for one person. But the song also feels like an invitation for listeners, who are invited to listen to Sweeney’s work taking real feelings and thoughts and turning them into little vessels to carry listeners to some familiar place.