Sugarland scales down for "raw" sound on third album

NASHVILLE (Billboard) - "Exactly!" Sugarland lead singer Jennifer Nettles exclaims when asked if "Beyonce to Bill Anderson" is a fair assessment of the duo's music.

Not only have she and guitarist Kristian Bush performed Beyonce's "Irreplaceable" in concert (a YouTube favorite), but the pair co-wrote with country legend Anderson for their third Mercury Nashville album, "Love on the Inside," due July 22 (deluxe edition) and July 29 (regular).

The duo has enjoyed as much country success as one can hope for if your name isn't Carrie Underwood. The act's 2005 debut, "Twice the Speed of Life," has tallied sales of 2.5 million copies and spawned three top 10 Hot Country Songs hits. Second album "Enjoy the Ride" has sold 2.3 million copies and produced four top 10s, including the No. 1s "Want To" and "Settlin'."

"Love on the Inside" may be the purest Sugarland album yet, according to Nettles.

"We're getting experience and we are also getting more comfortable in our own skin as writers, so musically on this record we went in and we really wanted to scale down," she says. "We didn't want everything to be super-slick. We wanted it to be raw. We also had the luxury, because I was rested, of tracking everything live."

"They wanted to cut as much of this record as we could with less musicians and try to capture the magic in kind of a one-take performance, and that's pretty much what we did," producer Byron Gallimore says.

Co-writers on the album include Bobby Pinson, who was responsible for "Want To," and Tim Owens, who co-wrote "Settlin'." Kenny Chesney guitarist Clayton Mitchell co-wrote the sultry "What I'd Give," and Anderson collaborated on the teen-angst tune "Joey." There's also a witty ode to oft-married singer-songwriter Steve Earle.

First single "All I Want to Do," which is No. 7 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart, is the duo's fastest-climbing single yet.

After opening for the likes of Chesney and headlining the CMT trek last fall, Sugarland will take labelmate Ashton Shepherd and rising star Kellie Pickler out this fall for a 25-city eastern U.S. tour.

Nettles says that her and Bush's prowess as singer-songwriters doesn't preclude them from being entertainers as well.

"We really do try to explore the different elements of entertaining, of how you set a mood and capture an emotion with other elements besides the music, be it the exact lighting element for a song or taking a hard left and doing something ridiculous and crazy, like getting in a ball and crowd surfing," she says. "Why should you not be able to? I like to be able to add theater to the show."