Sunny Sweeney Talks Breaking Into The Texas & Red Dirt Music Scene

Sunny Sweeney, an East Texas native, has been busy. Most recently she was nominated in the Academy of Country Music Award's Top New Female Artist and in 2006 the Americana Music Association’s New and Emerging Artist.

Her newest single, Bad Girl Phase (which you can listed to above), off her album Provoked is currently sitting at 17th on the Texas Music Chart.

No Depression just wrote a great article on her rise to fame, but we loved the focus on how she broke through the 'guys-guys' world of Texas & Red Dirt music,

“There it is,” she declares. The photo shows a black tee screen-printed with the cartoon image of a smiling, blond waitress brandishing a sizable red tube of meat above the text “Sunny Sweeney: Breaking Up the Sausage Party,” exactly as she’d described.

It's all in good fun though. She understands that this genre is primarily male dominated, but that doesn't stop her from making waves with her music, taking a rather unconvential stance of certain issues, like infidelity,

Sweeney dares inhabit the vantage point of the other woman. The revelation of infidelity in her rip-roaring album opener “You Don’t Know Your Husband” initially comes off as flaunting. That’s before the mistress indicates her deeper motivation for running her mouth: she’s grown repulsed by the way the man in the middle is playing them both. “From a Table Away,” the most successful single from Sweeney’s previous album, Concrete, cast her as a girlfriend blindsided in a restaurant by the discovery that her married man’s been leading her on. And in the stone-country ballad “Amy,” she was the woman on the side, compelled to clear the air with the wife.

Sunny then discusses her influences in country music, and why she fell in love with Americana,

“Country music is my first love,” she emphasizes, “straight from the beginning of time — from the beginning of my time. Country music was all I knew, basically. I would hear [other] stuff from my dad, like Neil Young, Tom Petty, and those things. But hell, those are country now. Then as a 20-something, I started getting into Americana hardcore: ‘Wow, this is serious music.’”