At a glance

When Little Big Town’s sophomore album, “The Road to Here,” went platinum in 2007, a curly haired teenager bounded up to the band at a party to hand them a platinum-bound high-school paper she’d written.

The paper’s theme: the band’s perseverance.

The 17-year-old countrymusic singer: Taylor Swift.

“It was a really sweet gesture of her and flattering to think she would look at us in that way,” said Jimi Westbrook, who takes the tenor in the band’s airtight four-part harmonies.

More than a decade later, Swift is still writing to the Little Big Town Value City Arena, West Lane Avenue and Olentangy River Road 1-800-745-3000, www.ticketmaster.com 7:30 p.m. Thursday $24.50 to $78

band. But this time, she’s handing them Grammy Award-winning songs.

While compiling songs for their latest album, last year’s “The Breaker,” Westbrook and his bandmates Karen Fairchild (alto), Kimberly Schlapman (soprano) and Phillip Sweet (bass) received an email from the singer with song “Better Man” attached, a tune the band might perform during a concert tonight at Value City Arena.

She had never pitched a song to another artist, so the message came as something of a shock.

Her relationship with the group extends to her earliest days on tour, when she palled around with Westbrook and Sweet at the County Music Awards.

“We’ve known Taylor since she was a baby — literally almost,” Westbrook, 46, said. “We’ve known her since she was a little girl running into our dressing room playing video games with Phillip and I.”

Swift’s career took a turn from that of her idols — her transition to pop music made her the fifth-richest female musician in the world — but if Little Big Town’s rise has been slow, it’s been steady.

Fairchild met Schlapman while attending Samford University in the Birmingham, Alabama, suburb of Homewood during the late 1990s.

Westbrook knew Fairchild’s first husband, and the new trio added Sweet through a writer friend.

At the band’s inception, the members of Little Big Town knew that intricate harmonies would be their selling point.

“It started with the three of us searching for the fourth member,” Westbrook said. “In that process of trying to find the last piece of the puzzle was a focused search for the right vocal blend, as well as the chemistry. From the beginning, we felt like family.”