With the upcoming release this Tuesday (Jan. 14) of That Girl, her debut solo album, Jennifer Nettles is our Impact artist this week.
Best known as one half (with Kristian Bush) of GRAMMY-winning country duo Sugarland, Nettles announced last year that she was recording her first-ever solo album–and doing so with producer Rick Rubin, who’s worked with a wide range of artists, from the Beastie Boys and Slayer to the Dixie Chicks, the Avett Brothers and Johnny Cash.
“I’m super-respectful of his pedigree,” Nettles has said of Rubin. “I still get nervous around him, in a kind of a music-crush way.”
Nettles called her new solo album “a celebration of my roots, and where I am today.” She previewed the material during special acoustic shows in select markets, which gave fans a taste of what to expect. And she released one song, the title track, to country radio, where it’s been steadily climbing the charts over the last few months.
“I wrote [‘That Girl’] with Butch Walker, he brought the idea over,” Nettles explained to Radio.com.
The basic idea of the song, she continued, is of a woman “who had been tricked, bamboozled if you will” by a man she had been seeing, who didn’t let on that “he had someone else in the picture. But when she finds that out, she says, ‘Oh no, I’m gonna call her and tell her that you’re being that guy, because I don’t want to be that girl with that stigma.’”
The album also includes “Fallen,” a song she explained (during a live show in Chicago) was “inspired by a photograph,” the slow country ballad “Me Without You” and the upbeat, somewhat silly “Know You Wanna Know,” a twang-infused song about celebrity obsession (“Everybody wants to know everybody’s business”) that she wrote with songwriter (and ’80s/’90s pop artist) Richard Marx.
She also wrote “This One’s for You” with Sara Bareilles and “Thank You” with Phillip Sweet of Little Big Town. Concluding the album is a cover of Bob Seger’s “Like a Rock.”
“I love what I do with Sugarland,” Nettles told CBS Charlotte’s The New 103.7 (a Radio.com station) last year during a backstage interview after her acoustic performance there. “But I’ve been wanting to do this project for a long time and [I] have been writing for it for three years.”
That Girl track list:
1. ‘Falling’
2. ‘Me Without You’
3. ‘Moneyball’
4. ‘That Girl’
5. ‘This Angel’
6. ‘Jealousy’
7. ‘This One’s for You’
8. ‘Know You Wanna Know’
9. ‘Thank You’
10. ‘Good Time to Cry”
11. ‘Like a Rock’
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