Sunny Sweeney & Kelly Willis

Sunny Sweeney

A brassy country singer whose retro style garnered comparisons to singers like Natalie Maines and Kasey Chambers, Sunny Sweeney is a native Texan, possessed of an expressive reedy contralto; it is perfectly suited for everything from Honky Tonk to Country Rock to Bluegrass as evidenced by her 2006 debut, Heartbreaker’s Hall of Fame. 2011’s Concrete placed at 21 on the Top 200. 2014’s Provoked was a rootsier honky tonk set that cracked the top 200 and the country albums Top 20. 2017’s Trophy was more introspective and moody; it placed high on the folk and indie charts. In 2019, Bob Seger personally invited her to open his farewell tour.

The genre-bending, songwriting spitfire who has spent equal time in the rich musical traditions of Texas and Tennessee, returns with Married Alone, the celebrated singer-songwriter’s fifth studio album and the follow-up to 2017’s critically acclaimed Trophy. Co-produced by beloved Texas musician and larger-than-life personality Paul Cauthen and the Texas Gentlemen’s multi-hyphenate Beau Bedford, Married Alone is Sweeney’s finest work yet, bringing together confessional songwriting, image-rich narratives and no shortage of sonic surprises for a loosely conceptual album about loss and healing.

Married Alone began as most of Sweeney’s projects do: with a visit to her deep vault of unreleased songs. Since debuting with Heartbreaker’s Hall of Fame in 2006, Sweeney has been a prolific writer, writing whatever is on her heart rather than with a particular project in mind. That habit afforded her a rich well of material for Married Alone, some of which is over a decade old.

“I have a lot of older songs that still make the cut of like, ‘Am I gonna put this on a record?’ And I always start with those songs, songs that have been important to me for whatever reason. And then I try to build around that. It doesn’t necessarily have to be around a theme, but sometimes it turns out to be that there is one.”

Opener “Tie Me Up” declares that, despite its loose theme, Married Alone is not a somber record, with Sweeney in full spitfire mode and cheekily declaring to a would-be suitor, “You can tie me up, but baby you can’t tie me down.”

Cauthen joins Sweeney on “A Song Can’t Fix Everything,” one of the album’s rawer moments. “That song can’t bring my mother back to life,” Sweeney sings at the song’s start, before recounting the many ways that music may be able to transport us to the past but can never fix it. “Easy as Hello” is Sweeney’s writing at its finest, channeling the heartache that comes with the end of a treasured relationship, for a track that recalls — vocally and lyrically — the work of Stevie Nicks.

“Someday You’ll Call My Name” reads as a break-up kiss-off — and it’s a great one, at that — but the song, pulled from Sweeney’s vault, was originally inspired by her early days as a musician, longing to be recognized by major country institutions like the Grand Ole Opry. She and co-writer Brennen Leigh reworked their 10-year-old version of the track to better fit Married Alone, and that session helped set the tone for what would become the full album.

The full potential of the album really revealed itself, though, when a friend sent Sweeney a demo of what would become its title track, “Married Alone.” Though she wasn’t a co-writer on the track, Sweeney felt her own story reflected in its lyrics. The song, which features a particularly emotional guest vocal from living country legend Vince Gill, charts the painful moments sometimes experienced in marriages that have run their course.

“My jaw hit the floor when I heard that song, because I had just gone through my second divorce, which is also cliche of a country singer,” Sweeney says, with a laugh. “I was still pretty raw about my divorce, but also very candid and trying to find levity in the situation. You have to be able to laugh at yourself at some point and not let it just totally get you down.”

A few months after securing the song and mining her own vault for a track list, Sweeney traveled to Dallas, TX, to record — alongside Cauthen and Bedford — what would become Married Alone.

Sweeney and team planned for Jeff Saenz to mix the album, but in the summer of 2021 — a few days before mixing would start — the widely loved, Dallas-based producer was electrocuted in a freak accident that left him without use of his arms. The group put the album on hold until they had word Saenz would pull through. While Sweeney was anxious to get her new music out, Saenz’s accident shifted her priorities.

“Jeff lost his arms,” she says. “His arms. Jeff’s never going to hold his fiancée’s hand again, never going to hold his baby again. I had a major, major turning point with his accident, personally, as did most of our friends that know him.”

About eight months later, Bedford had a surprise for Sweeney. When she arrived at the studio for one of their final mixing sessions, Bedford had brought Saenz along. Saenz was able to help the group finish up the album, a full-circle moment that was especially emotional for Sweeney.

“It was exactly how it should have been,” she says. “And it was really, really emotional. Jeff definitely is a part of this album; I really wanted him to be a part of the album. And Beau knew that. So, Beau went and he made that happen.”

In addition to releasing Married Alone, Sweeney is marking a new chapter in her professional life with a brand-new team by her side, most of whom are women. While it wasn’t a conscious choice, Sweeney says, she feels like she’s surrounded by the right group of people, who just happen to be “badass women.”

Like the narrator of “Someday You’ll Call My Name,” Sweeney is not the kind of artist you come across then forget. With Married Alone, she further cements her status as one of country music’s finest storytellers.

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Kelly Willis

On some other plane out there in the great big multiverse, Kelly Willis could well be the biggest Nashville country music star of the last 35 years. But things panned out rather differently for her here on this Earth. The Oklahoma-born Army brat was barely into her early 20s and still cutting her teeth fronting a spunky rockabilly band in Austin when a “check-this-kid-out” tip from Texas songwriter Nanci Griffith landed her on the radar of producer Tony Brown, who promptly signed her to MCA Records. How exactly her auspicious fireball of a debut, 1990’s Well Travelled Love, and even a plumb spot on the soundtrack to the following year’s Thelma & Louise, somehow failed to burn Willis’ name and voice into the mainstream consciousness remains a bone of bumfuzzlement for many a fan and critic to this day, but suffice it to say — Willis was still in her early 20s when MCA dropped her just two albums later.

And that, perhaps goes the Kelly Willis story in yet another alternate universe, was that. But lucky again for all of us here in this reality, “our” Kelly Willis was just getting started. Liberated from the Nashville playbook and emboldened by a jolting shot of nothing-left-to-lose, she set about making her next record in Austin her way. The end result, 1999’s aptly-titled What I Deserve, changed everything. “A big part of making that record was me thinking, ‘I’ll probably never get to make another one after this, so if this has to be my swan song, I’m not going to compromise,’” she says today. “That was a really big sea change for me to take the reins like that, and it was incredibly satisfying and gratifying that it then found a home with [independent label] Ryko and did so well. It was a pivotal moment that fueled the rest of my career.”

A bracingly assertive showcase not just for Willis’ masterful control of her “enormous voice” (per noted “Consumer’s Guide” critic Robert Christgau) but also for her burgeoning songwriting chops (be it solo or collaborating with the likes of John Leventhal and the Jayhawks’ Gary Louris), What I Deserve may not have made Kelly a household name on the order of Shania, Faith, or Reba, but it clinched her standing as a bona fide darling of the national (and international) alt-country scene. Writers from No Depression to Rolling Stone cheered her “comeback,” and fans in her adopted hometown voted it “Album of the Year” in the Austin Music Awards. A decade later would find her inducted into the Austin Music Hall of Fame.

The six albums Willis has made since What I Deserve have only burnished her reputation as Austin’s reigning queen of Americana. Three of those albums, including 2019’s Beautiful Lie, were duo records made with her now ex-husband, fellow singer-songwriter Bruce Robison — who also produced Willis’ last solo album, 2018’s “richly satisfying” (NPR) Back Being Blue. The couple (who in addition to recording and touring together for years also raised four children together) announced their separation in early 2022, marking both the end of an era and the beginning of yet another “big sea change” for Willis. Looking ahead to the next stage of her life and career, she admits that the whole business of “starting over” — especially musically — can be scary, but she’s starting to get the hang of it

“I’m usually a few-and-far-between kind of person when it comes to writing, but I’ve been writing a lot,” she says with a laugh. “So I’m in the creative phase of figuring out a new album, which of course is going to be a ‘divorce record,’ because there’s no getting around those things. But I think there’s a lot of hopeful stuff in there, too, and there’s the potential there for it to be really good. So, I do feel like I’m going to be ok.”

Willis says she hopes to have that new record out sometime next year, along with another project she’s been teasing of late: A 25th (!) anniversary re-release of What I Deserve, expanded with bonus demo tracks and maybe even a vintage live show — along with the album’s first-ever pressing on vinyl. But in the mean time, she’s happy just to be playing shows again post pandemic shutdown, connecting with fans old and new both as a full-time “solo” artist again for the first time in years, and as one-third of her favorite new joyride — a not-just-a-song-swap trio with her sister soulmates Brennen Leigh and Melissa Carper.

“We started that a year ago, thinking we were just going to do a small run of shows together, but the shows went over so well that we just kept going,” she enthuses. “We’ve already played a few places outside of Texas, and this year we’re going all the way up to the North East together and then out West. And we’ve even talked about writing together. The whole thing has just been amazing and super fun. I’m loving it!”

And deservedly so.

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