Little Big Town scored a handful of CMA Awards nominations this year, including Vocal Group of the Year, Album of the Year for The Breaker, Single, Song and Music Video of the Year for “Better Man.” The Song of the Year award would go to Taylor Swift, who wrote the song and sent it to the band.
The band kept the fact that Taylor wrote “Better Man” a secret for a while, because they wanted people to hear the song on its own merits. “We just played it for her after we finished it, and she was really, really excited. We said, ‘Hey, you know we’re not just gonna blab this that you wrote this immediately.’ She said, ‘You know what? That’s the greatest honor as a songwriter you could ever give me is that you don’t want anybody to know that I wrote this.’ We knew we would tell eventually, but and it was a hard question to dodge for a while,” said LBT’s Karen Fairchild. “The only reason why we didn’t say is because we wanted you to hear the song for what it’s worth, and it’s a beautiful song. And at her heart, she is the biggest pop star in the world, but she’s a songwriter from Nashville, Tennessee, and she likes to tell a story, and we didn’t want you to have any subtext there, other than to hear this song.”
You can see Little Big Town during this year’s CMA Awards, which will air live from Nashville’s Bridgestone Area November 8th at 8pm ET on ABC.
The band is making their way up the country charts with their latest single, “When Someone Stops Loving You.”
Audio / EARLIER THIS YEAR, LITTLE BIG TOWN'S KAREN FAIRCHILD EXPLAINED WHY THEY KEPT SECRET THAT TAYLOR SWIFT WROTE THEIR NO. 1 SONG, "BETTER MAN."
DownloadLittle Big Town (Better Man-Taylor) OC: …wrote it. [laughs] 1:05
“We just played it for her after we finished it, and she was really, really excited. We said, ‘Hey, you know we’re not just gonna blab this that you wrote this immediately.’ She said, ‘You know what? That’s the greatest honor as a songwriter you could ever give me is that you don’t want anybody to know that I wrote this.’ We knew we would tell eventually, but and it was a hard question to dodge for a while. The only reason why we didn’t say is because we wanted you to hear the song for what it’s worth, and it’s a beautiful song. And at her heart, she is the biggest pop star in the world, but she’s a songwriter from Nashville, Tennessee, and she likes to tell a story, and we didn’t want you to have any subtext there, other than to hear this song. And we did that, and it had like the biggest add day in our history with the guys at Universal that we ever had, and so we were like, ‘Damn, we were right! This is a good song! You know? Nobody even knows!’ So, for all the people that we told little white lies to, we didn’t really lie. We said a young girl from Nashville, Tennessee wrote it.”
Audio / LITTLE BIG TOWN’S JIMI WESTBROOK TALKS ABOUT “BETTER MAN,” THE FIRST SINGLE FROM THEIR NEW ALBUM, THE BREAKER.
DownloadLBT (Better Man) OC: …beautifully. :46
“This song, first of all, I love the melody. The chorus just kind of soars when it comes in and it feels like one of those classic country melodies on a chorus that we just fell in love from the first time we heard it. The message, I think everybody can identify with the sentiment of this song. A lot of times in life, there’s a lot of things you have to walk away from that don’t necessarily feel like the greatest decision to have to make in your life, but sometimes you just know that it’s time to move on and no matter how hard that is, you just know that down in your heart that it’s time to do that. Those are very difficult decisions that we face sometimes in our lives, and I think this song talks about that beautifully.”
