Little Big Town likes to do things in fours, as the ensemble’s vocal-quartet configuration would indicate. So the country-pop group wasn’t about to let its 25th anniversary pass with just one commemoration when four would do: a national tour with their longtime friends in Sugarland; a greatest hits album; a Christmas record; and the quartet’s first two-hour prime-time special, “Little Big Town’s Christmas at the Opry,” airing tonight on NBC. They couldn’t have picked better ways to celebrate one-fourth of a century together.
As a cherry on top, members Karen Fairchild, Kimberly Schlapman, Phillip Sweet and Jimi Westbrook get to revel in this milestone while most would agree they’re looking and sounding pretty much as they did at their inception point at the end of the 1990s. Their secret? “Smoke and mirrors,” says Westbrook. “I was gonna lie and say we get into cryogenic chambers every night after the show and they just get us back to normal. No, I don’t know — we just keep scrapping and striving. And we’re having fun, which is the best part,” as it turns out the family that works out complicated four-part harmonies together stays together.
Here is another key to their endurance: the lack of competition. Not that they don’t have to fight for the same chart spots as everyone else, but there is no other group in the country space that is truly horning in on their lane, as a harmony-based group without a singular frontperson stepping out in front of the other. Fairchild does get more lead vocals than the others, so there’s no forced equalization there, but it’s not as if they’ve spent the last 25 years resisting constant pressure for someone to embark on a solo career; fans truly love the fact that it takes all four villagers to make this Town.
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“People — and when I say people, I mean gatekeepers — always want to really define things with one singer or one sound,” says Fairchild. “And I mean, thank God the Beatles and Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles didn’t do that, you know? What a crime it would’ve been to not hear George Harrison sing. Those were the days, when there weren’t as many limits put on people, so I am proud of us for sticking to that path.”
“What kind of blocked us from some success in the earlier days was that we were different,” says Westbrook, “and they were like, ‘You guys need to pick one lead singer and stick with that.’ We always said, ‘No, the harmony is the lead singer.’”
Their manager of the last 12 years of those years, Sandbox Entertainment’s Jason Owen, doesn’t shy away from the Fleetwood Mac comparisons. At a few TV appearances or concert spots in their career, they covered Mac’s slow-burning rocker “The Chain,” and Owen is the one who convinced them to finally make it a nightly staple on tour this year. “It leans that way because you’ve got Karen and Jimi that are married, so you have sort of the relationship balance of what Fleetwood Mac is, in a way,” he points out — albeit without the poor domestic results that awaited Buckingham & Nicks or the two McVies. “And the Eagles — I think they fall into that world a little bit more than, let’s say, Alabama and some of the bigger groups of country past.”
LITTLE BIG TOWN’S CHRISTMAS AT THE OPRY (Photo by: Ralph Bavaro/NBC)
Ralph Bavaro/NBC
As we speak, the group has just arrived in Boston for a headlining show after a very bumpy bus ride into town. It wasn’t their first experience with potholes — they had a few, career-wise, in the early years. “It certainly has not been a straight line, that’s for sure,” says Fairchild. “It was more like the Rocky Mountains.”
Their double-platinum country hit “Boondocks” put them on the map in 2005, but their first four albums were on three different labels, which didn’t augur well for stability. Then Owen took on their management in 2011, a year after founding Sandbox, and brought in producer Jay Joyce to shake up their sound a bit. The result was their first No. 1 smash, the quintuple-platinum “Pontoon,” a year later. Further No. 1s in the form of “Girl Crush” and the Taylor Swift-penned “Better Man” helped assure that a “Greatest Hits” collection would be well-justified long before Year 25 rolled around for them.
In the meantime, they’re about in their 25th year of being No. 1 on the best-liked-act-in-the-business chart. (That’s unofficial, by the way, but take our word for it.) Says Westbrook, “You have your ups and downs in this business, and in the beginning for us it was a lot of downs. But we learned early on in that process that if we’re gonna be in this business for a long time, you’re gonna see these people and they’re gonna move around and change positions and we’ll be somewhere else, and it’s important to be respectful of people. I think we were all raised that way, too, just to be kind to people, and it’s definitely something that means something to us and means something to the people that we have around us on the road that care about others. That’s just who we are, and who our families are, and it’s nice to hear that people appreciate that. We just love people, I think.”
It’s been easy to associate Little Big Town with Christmas, even without a holiday release, just because they’ve participated in and even hosted “CMA Christmas” specials in the past. It’s been personal, too. Says Owen, “For 15 years, there’s been a charity event that they do every December at Blackberry Farm that raises money for education in Tennessee, and it’s been a tradition that we don’t do anything past that, even for New Year’s Eve. We spend four or five days celebrating and recapping and enjoying each other. And every year for 15 years, I’m sitting in that audience and getting teary-eyed by the Christmas songs they sing and how they sing them, and then I think, ‘God, we have got to make this Christmas record!’ And now we’ve actually done it, but at a time when I felt we could set it up properly. So I went and sold the NBC special to have that platform, and it’s a very ‘70s-feeling, old Johnny-and-June vibe for it.”
The NBC special, filmed at the Grand Ole Opry, has a guest list that includes Josh Groban, Sheryl Crow, Kelsea Ballerini and Kate Hudson. Says Fairchild, “It just kind of hearkens back to those old variety shows, or the days of the Barbara Mandrell shows and Sonny and Cher and the Johnny Cash show — it gave me all those vibes, plus the holiday vibes.”
The Christmas album, “Glow,” was produced by Dave Cobb in Savannah at the end of 2023. “We went down to Savannah, Georgia to do that record at his studio,” says Schlapman, “and when we got there, he had the whole place decorated for Christmas and had Santa hats out everywhere and twinkling lights inside” — with the palm trees swaying outside. “We’ve never made a record out of town — except for the Pharrell (Williams-produced) record, which we made part of in L.A. — but for the most part, we’ve never gone to a destination. And it was wonderful to step out of the regular daily chaos and step into a place where we were just focused on making that music. We loved it. And Dave’s such a genius.”
Included among the tracks is a cover of Merle Haggard’s downbeat “If We Make It Through December,” which Cobb insisted upon. “It truly is one of my favorite things we’ve done in a long time,” says Fairchild. “In its most pure form from Merle, it would feel like a little bit of a reach for us on a Christmas record, but Dave was like, ‘What if you wrote that yourselves?’ And we just sat and came up with those melodies and phrasings that are very different than Merle. I really hope Merle’s not turning over in his grave. I hope he’s looking down from heaven and going, ‘That’s kind of cool, those kids.’”