Jennifer Nettles on New Album: ‘It’s Important to Rewrite the Script’
There’s a quote that Jennifer Nettles references in the title track of her second solo album, Playing With Fire: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Over the years, it’s been attributed to everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Eleanor Roosevelt (even though it really belongs to historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich), and can now be purchased in handy wall decal form, should your defiance only be limited to interior decorating. In Nettles’ version, she tweaks it to be even more direct. “Good girls rarely make history,” she lobs in the song co-written with Brandy Clark, transitioning her belt into a spitfire sing-talk.
“For me, that specific lyric and that song is all about transformation,” Nettles tells Rolling Stone Country. “And taking the risks to become your best self, and sometimes shake it up. People aren’t always going to like it. They don’t have to.”
Playing With Fire is Nettles’ first LP for her new label, Big Machine Records, and also her first since her bandmate in Sugarland, Kristian Bush, released his own solo effort, Southern Gravity. And as its title might indicate, it’s meant to be an album about the transformations in life that happen when you take risks – when you play with fire, really, and get up close and personal with the flames. For Nettles, that’s the rewards that come with having a child as a working woman, or stepping out from the comfort of a Grammy-winning duo. It’s also about being brave enough to honestly discuss the realities of these transitions – Nettles has been open about the challenges of motherhood and the roadblocks women often encounter in the country music sphere. She’s not the celebrity to turn to if you want a pristine Instagram image (and song to match) of idyllic parenthood, well-balanced with a quiet, compliant lady who is happy to take “no” for an answer.
“Jennifer is not only one of the best entertainers and singers I’ve ever worked with,” says Clark, who contributed to seven songs on Playing With Fire, “but also a tremendously talented songwriter who is fearless in the places she is willing to go in a song.”
“Entertainer” is indeed an appropriate description for Nettles: since the last Sugarland LP, she’s starred on Broadway, played the role of Dolly Parton’s mother in the hugely successful television adaptation of Coat of Many Colors and appeared in the WGN series Underground. Playing With Fire is also her second solo effort, after 2014’s That Girl.
Both Nettles and Bush have said that Sugarland is not done for good, but Playing With Fire doesn’t exactly sound like a side project. Whereas That Girl rang like a softer snap in time, this is a stern proclamation of how Nettles defines herself as both a woman and an artist, from the power balladry of the single “Unlove You,” to the sassy twang of “Drunk in Heels” that spells out the dirty reality of being both a mother and a breadwinner (“If bring home the bacon, I have to fry it up in a pan”), or the raw peek into her subconscious on “Stupid Girl,” which exposes the self-doubt women aren’t even supposed to admit that they have.
And then there’s “Sugar,” a barn-gospel swinger loaded with sassy sexual innuendo (“they’re beggin’ for a taste of my cherry pie,” she fires) that can easily be read as a sly message to anyone curious how Nettles feels about having to sound one way or be a certain thing – and, intentional or not, it’s hard to ignore the allusion to her duo. It’s not called “Candy,” after all; it’s called “Sugar,” sung by one-half of Sugarland. “Little pink package you put me in/Servin’ it up like saccharine/Always had a bitter taste to me,” she belts. A little dangerous, maybe, but Playing With Fire doesn’t exactly make a case for living by anyone else’s rules. Rolling Stone Country sat down with Nettles to talk about expectations, evolution and having to do it all in heels.