Texas Hot Country September : Page 5

Sunny Sweeney ‘JUST A TABLE AWAY’ ★ TEXAS HOT COUNTRY MAGAZINE, SEPTEMBER 2011, PAGE 5 LIVE AT THE FORT BEND COUNTY FAIR SEPT. 30 PHOTO BY BARY SIGMAN E BY LEON BECK verything you could possibly want to know about Sunny Sweeney you can find in her bio. Maybe more than you want or need to know. Sunny is one of country music’s hottest new female artists, thanks to her scorcher “From A Table Away,” which is the highest charting debut single for a female country artist since Taylor Swft released “Tim McGraw” in ‘07. Sunny, who was signed to Big Machine Records in ‘06, the same label that struck platinum with Taylor, is currently with Big Machine’s affiliated label, Republic Nashville. Some notable facts in her bio about the Hous-ton-born country music singer who was raised in Longview: she says she’s “a pretty low-key person when I’m off the road, and my idea of fun is to sit on the couch with all three of my dogs beside me, a cold beer in my hand watching trash TV.” (Could she possibly be talking Jerry Springer here?) She “loves the twang of telecaster guitars,” and “watching guitar-playin’ fools that sweat when they play.” She has over “2000 pig things” and she likes to collect “truck stop spoons.” High on her list of fun things to do is “prank calling people.” She “loves the smell of cigarette smoke and gasoline because it reminds me of my grandpa. I paint my dogs’ toenails, and I brush their teeth, too.” Sunny says she eats “Luden’s cough drops as candy” and she reveals “I wanna swim in a pool of chocolate someday.” And, she adds, “I’m attached at the knuckles to my phone.” This is where I came into the picture. She’s sitting in some Texas parking lot on her cell phone racking up a series of interviews to promote her new CD, Con -crete , and her current single, “Staying’s Worse Than Leaving.” “I’ve got interviews like every 15 minutes,” she says, when she kicks off this interview. “I’m driving down the road dialing this number, hoping that I don’t crash.” But all is well. “I’m in a parking lot now --so all is good.” During the interview you kind of forget that she likes to paint her dogs’ toenails, and her desire to swim in a pool of chocolate. Sunny’s talkin’ about her music now. And that can be a serious subject. Her music, she states, is “traditionally influenced. There are a lot of stories in country music --and that’s the kind of music that I grew up on. That’s what I know how to do --tell stories with music.” She writes and sings about relationships, she says. About “love and love lost. Those are easy for me to write about. Then there are other songs --drinkin’ songs and cheatin’ songs.” Sunny released her first CD in ‘06 --“Heartbreak-ers Hall Of Fame.” Has anyone ever broke her heart. “A million times.” Which is hard for this writer to believe. Her follow-up single to “From A Table Away,” which is moving up the charts, is “Staying’s Worse Than Leaving,” the second single from her Concrete CD. This song, which she co-wrote with Radney Foster and Jay Clementi, “is a very personal song to me,” she says. “It’s about my marriage falling apart. “When two people try to make it work, and try to make it work, and then it just doesn’t work, you have to sometimes just kind of throw in the towel and know that something more positive will come out of it if you can just go ahead and make the decision to end it. “And personally, I’m in a much better place, and he’s in a much better place, so we’re both happy for each other. We wouldn’t take back the time that we spent together, that sort of thing.” It is, she notes, a “positive song because it’s showing that you can come out on the flip side of everything after a relationship does end.” Sunny was inspired to write “From A Table Away” after witnessing an incident at The Longhorn Steak-house in Nashville. “I saw a situation happening next to me,” she recalls, “and I was listening and eaves-drop-ping, and texting myself ideas the whole time. You could just tell there was something not right --and I was just watching it.” When Sunny hooked up with songwriters Bob DiPiero and Karyn Rochelle, she told them what she saw at the steakhouse. “I told them, ‘I saw it from a table away.’ We all agreed this was a good title for a song. There were three people that wrote the song, so we all added different storylines to it. But the inspiration came from just something that I saw.” Growing up in Longview, Sunny listened to the likes of Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings and Vern Gosdin. She liked to listen to traditional country music, but she had no desire to become a singer. That came after she received a degree in public relations from Southwest Texas.State University. “I just kind of woke up one day and was like, ‘Ok, I want to do something in entertainment. I’m going to learn to play guitar and I’m going to write songs and I’m going to sing --and I did.”

Sunny Sweeney

Leon Beck

'Just A Table Away' Live At The Fort Bend County Fair Sept. 30 Everything you could possibly want to know about Sunny Sweeney you can find in her bio. Maybe more than you want or need to know. Sunny is one of country music’s hottest new female artists, thanks to her scorcher “From A Table Away,” which is the highest charting debut single for a female country artist since Taylor Swft released “Tim McGraw” in ‘07. Sunny, who was signed to Big Machine Records in ‘06, the same label that struck platinum with Taylor, is currently with Big Machine’s affiliated label, Republic Nashville. Some notable facts in her bio about the Houston- born country music singer who was raised in Longview: she says she’s “a pretty low-key person when I’m off the road, and my idea of fun is to sit on the couch with all three of my dogs beside me, a cold beer in my hand watching trash TV.” (Could she possibly be talking Jerry Springer here?) She “loves the twang of telecaster guitars,” and “watching guitarplayin’ fools that sweat when they play.” She has over “2000 pig things” and she likes to collect “truck stop spoons.” High on her list of fun things to do is “prank calling people.” She “loves the smell of cigarette smoke and gasoline because it reminds me of my grandpa. I paint my dogs’ toenails, and I brush their teeth, too.” Sunny says she eats “Luden’s cough drops as candy” and she reveals “I wanna swim in a pool of chocolate someday.” And, she adds, “I’m attached at the knuckles to my phone.” This is where I came into the picture. She’s sitting in some Texas parking lot on her cell phone racking up a series of interviews to promote her new CD, Concrete, and her current single, “Staying’s Worse Than Leaving.” “I’ve got interviews like every 15 minutes,” she says, when she kicks off this interview. “I’m driving down the road dialing this number, hoping that I don’t crash.” But all is well. “I’m in a parking lot now -- so all is good.” During the interview you kind of forget that she likes to paint her dogs’ toenails, and her desire to swim in a pool of chocolate. Sunny’s talkin’ about her music now. And that can be a serious subject. Her music, she states, is “traditionally influenced.There are a lot of stories in country music -- and that’s the kind of music that I grew up on. That’s what I know how to do -- tell stories with music.” She writes and sings about relationships, she says. About “love and love lost. Those are easy for me to write about. Then there are other songs -- drinkin’ songs and cheatin’ songs.” Sunny released her first CD in ‘06 -- “Heartbreakers Hall Of Fame.” Has anyone ever broke her heart.“A million times.” Which is hard for this writer to believe. Her follow-up single to “From A Table Away,” which is moving up the charts, is “Staying’s Worse Than Leaving,” the second single from her Concrete CD. This song, which she co-wrote with Radney Foster and Jay Clementi, “is a very personal song to me,” she says. “It’s about my marriage falling apart. “When two people try to make it work, and try to make it work, and then it just doesn’t work, you have to sometimes just kind of throw in the towel and know that something more positive will come out of it if you can just go ahead and make the decision to end it. “And personally, I’m in a much better place, and he’s in a much better place, so we’re both happy for each other. We wouldn’t take back the time that we spent together, that sort of thing.” It is, she notes, a “positive song because it’s showing that you can come out on the flip side of everything after a relationship does end.” Sunny was inspired to write “From A Table Away” after witnessing an incident at The Longhorn Steakhouse in Nashville. “I saw a situation happening next to me,” she recalls, “and I was listening and eaves-dropping, and texting myself ideas the whole time. You could just tell there was something not right -- and I was just watching it.” When Sunny hooked up with songwriters Bob DiPiero and Karyn Rochelle, she told them what she saw at the steakhouse. “I told them, ‘I saw it from a table away.’ We all agreed this was a good title for a song.There were three people that wrote the song, so we all added different storylines to it. But the inspiration came from just something that I saw.” Growing up in Longview, Sunny listened to the likes of Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings and Vern Gosdin. She liked to listen to traditional country music, but she had no desire to become a singer. That came after she received a degree in public relations from Southwest Texas.State University. “I just kind of woke up one day and was like, ‘Ok, I want to do something in entertainment. I’m going to learn to play guitar and I’m going to write songs and I’m going to sing -- and I did.”

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