She grew up listening to Merle Haggard and Loretta Lynn but spent years drifting in the big city. Alex Macpherson meets Sunny Sweeney, a woman singing from experience
"I do not cook," the country singer Sunny Sweeney says, firmly. "People come up after shows to say: 'I'll teach you how to cook!' I'm like: I don't have any desire to learn how to cook. 'But you need to cook! But your man needs you to cook!' No. My man cooks for me." Then a full, infectious laugh peals down the phoneline.
Sweeney is a self-described small-town Texas girl with a keen sense of her genre's conventions, who rhapsodises about growing up listening to Merle Haggard and Loretta Lynn and describes her own narratives as "a tribute to traditional country music, though it doesn't go over so well on radio at the moment". But she's also a bit of a nonconformist, a woman who has determinedly taken her own singular path in both her life and her songs. Last June saw the release of what was to become her breakthrough hit, From a Table Away, which spent the entire second half of 2010 inching its way up the US charts before finally hitting the Billboard top 100 and country top 10 this year.
That seven-month climb pales next to the seven years Sweeney spent grafting away after she began singing for a living ? a decision taken only after years drifting in New York, rather than a lifelong ambition. Clearing up a Wikipedia "fact" that has taken on a life of its own, Sweeney says: "The only reason I went to New York was because I hated school. Not to be in a comedy troupe ? to screw around and to wait tables. It was just to be a timewaster."
Sweeney's adulthood may have started out directionless, but she agrees that the experience of simply living from odd job to odd job is one that sharpened her observational faculties, and shaped the acuity and empathy that are the crucial hallmarks of her songwriting. So, too, did a traumatic divorce as she was writing her latest material: "I tried to turn it into something positive ? and the only way I know how to do that is to write a song about it. It's not easy going through a divorce, but no matter how ready you are to get out of a marriage, it's still a very tough situation that I would not wish on my worst enemy."
From a Table Away is one of those songs that captures a moment of emotional cognisance with unflinching accuracy. Sweeney sings from the perspective of a mistress who catches sight of her lover and his wife at a romantic dinner. Without judgment, Sweeney draws us to her, fleshing out the character of a woman who is still generous to her ostensible rival ? "I thought she was pretty, she's nothing like the things you said" ? and resigned, rather than angry. This is what makes it such a devastating song. When Sweeney sings: "The two of you looked lost inside a world all your own," what hits hardest is the realisation that she is destined to remain on the outside gazing in.
It's not a perspective that has gone down well with everyone: even as we talk, Sweeney is fending off the moral outrage of a woman on her Facebook page, who has posted: "To SUPPORT adultry and write a song about it? really REALLY??!!? Way to show your fans that it's ok to cheat." Sweeney sighs. "A woman once told me that she couldn't listen to it because her husband had cheated on her. You know, that sucks, it doesn't make it suck any less, but life is like that. I write about stuff that really happens. People need that ? I don't have any songs, and I wouldn't sing any songs, that are just, oh, happy-go-lucky and everything's terrific. Because it's not. Really, truly not. At least, not in my world it's not. Every way you can screw up, I've screwed up. Am I proud of that? No. Did I learn from it? Yes. Would I do it again? Probably not."
From a Table Away appears on the Sunny Sweeney EP released on Universal/Island, available from download stores.
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