Lady Antebellum puts Wheels Up
Trio adds more energetic feel to set list, amps up visual effects for tour
Over the course of Lady Antebellum’s first four albums, the trio found a sweet spot in country music with ballads and mid-tempo tunes featuring rich vocal harmonies and in many cases, a rootsy acoustic-laced sound.
That musical combination gave the trio of singer Hillary Scott, guitarist/keyboardist Dave Haywood and singer/guitarist Charles Kelley a string of hits, including I Run To You, American Honey and especially Need You Now.
That aching ballad became a huge crossover hit, topping the country and adult contemporary and hot adult contemporary charts in Canada. To top things off, Need You Now earned the song the 2011 Grammy for Song of the Year and Record of the Year.
The soaring popularity of such hits took Lady Antebellum from being an opening act to arena headliner. It also created a bit of curse to go with the blessing of being one of continent’s most consistent hit- makers. As the trio has moved up to headlining to large outdoor amphitheatres and cavernous indoor arenas, they’ve found that ballads and mid-tempo songs, though, come with a drawback.
“Obviously, some of these songs are massive songs for us and they do so well and we love them,” Haywood said in a recent phone interview.
“But when you do get on a big stage, you kind of start to look at the set list over the past few years, and we’ve gone ‘Oh wow, there’s a ballad, now I guess we have to follow it with this ballad.’ You kind of start hitting that wall.”
Realizing that they needed to add some juice to the live show, Lady Antebellum set a specific objective for their latest album, 747 — write songs that would bring more energy of the live shows.
“We had to push ourselves, I think, out of our comfort zone a little bit more,” Haywood said.
“Writing a song like Bartender, I mean, we were on the tour bus, I remember, when we were writing that song in the middle of Missouri or Kansas and just working on that. And you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone.”
Lady Antebellum is following up tours of Europe and Australia with an extensive North American run in support of 747, including a stop at Big Valley Jamboree as Sunday night’s headliners. Hayward is already seeing the difference the new rockers are making from the stage on this Wheels Up tour.
Lady Antebellum is matching the more energetic feel of its set list with stage production that is meant to amp up the show visually.
“We really spent about six or seven months sketching out ideas ahead of the tour, and ways to really make this the most top-notch, high-energy show that we’ve had. I think we really tried to focus our efforts on making it look amazing no matter where you’re sitting in an arena or in an amphitheatre, even if you’re at the back of the amphitheatre, to have ways that the whole stage is lit up in a greatlooking fashion, great production, great video screens so people can really feel engaged.”
Of course, this still leaves the question of how the friskier songs from 747 would work in another forum, on radio.
So far the results are mixed. Bartender did well, topping the Canadian country chart, but Freestyle stalled out at No. 17. Long Stretch of Love is the current single.
Otherwise, Lady Antebellum has been one of the most consistent hitmakers in country music over the past seven years with multiple Top 20 country singles from each album and a healthy collection of No. 1 singles, beginning with I Run To You, off of the group’s 2008 selftitled debut album.
Lady Antebellum then did that song one better with the title track from its 2010 followup album, Need You Now. The third album, Own The Night, followed in fall 2011, and produced three more No. 1 country singles, Just a Kiss, Dancin’ Away with My Heart and We Owned The Night, before Golden (2013) delivered another No. 1 single with Downtown.
The deluxe edition of the Golden album gave the group another top 5 hit in Compass.
The latter song represented a bit of a departure for the group in that it was produced by Nathan Chapman (Taylor Swift) rather than Paul Worley, who had handled those duties on the first four albums.
Nathan is “just like a little kid in the candy store in the studio. He is so excitable, and it’s infectious. And that was fun. We really latched onto that and wanted to pursue that.”