Dan Rather doesn’t mess around.
In his new The Big Interview, he sat down with Little Big Town, and he got right to the point. What’s it like to have a married couple in the band? How do they balanced their personal and professional lives?
And the group’s Jimi Westbrook and Karen Fairchild — married since 2006 — talked openly about how it takes work, but that’s part of what makes it work.
“It’s a challenge. We were in the band for seven years before we were every in a relationship together,” Westbrook said. The band officially formed in 1998. “As we approached (this), we were like, ’Are we really gonna do this?’ There’s a lot of layers to that when your in a band together. It was important for us to not make them feel like it was ever a couple against them. You don’t want that dynamic to change. You have to think about all those things. The thing that we figured out is that we still function in the band like we always have.”
“We’re still the ones who butt heads,” he laughed.
You can almost see the sparks flying in their first big hit, “Boondocks,” released about a year before their wedding.
When Rather asked the band’s Kimberly Schlapman what she thought having a married couple in the mix, she had only good things to say. “I never had the forethought that that was a possibility,” she admitted, “but I did notice the sparks when they started happening, for sure. We knew what was just getting started.”
And hopeless romantic Phillip Sweet echoed that sentiment. “When happiness is there for you to go get,” he said, “you must seize the day. I was like, ’Go get her, man.’”
