Little Big Town Dishes on the Unexpected ‘Gift’ They Received From Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift poses with musicians Phillip Sweet, Kimberly Roads, Jimi Westbrook and Karen Fairchild of Little Big Town.

Little Big Town revealed the behind-the-scenes story of the “gift” they received from Taylor Swift while speaking with Country Music Television (CMT) ahead of this year’s CMT Music Awards.

The country music group—including Karen Fairchild, Kimberly Schlapman, Philip Sweet and Jimi Westbrook—will perform with Sugarland at the awards show on Sunday, April 7. Ahead of that anticipated performance, CMT asked the quartet to share how their hit song “Better Man” came to be. The band's response was later shared in a video clip on X.

Westbrook kicked off the story by explaining, “That was a gift from Miss Swift.”

Sweet picked up the thread to divulge that the “All Too Well” singer had reached out to the band with an intriguing offering.

“I got an email that she’d just sent a song,” Sweet recalled. “She was like, ‘I just heard you guys singing harmonies on this song.’”

Fairchild then suggested that the “Cruel Summer” songstress was likely going through her back catalog when she discovered a song that "would really connect with a country audience.” While Swift started as a country musician herself, her 2014 album 1989 marked a turn into pop that transformed her identity as an artist and catapulted her to a new level of stardom.

The tough part for Little Big Town, Fairchild explained, was figuring out how to make the song their own.

“She’s such an iconic voice that we had to just flip it around,” she said. “There was so much joy in that whole thing of just seeing us put it out, it having commercial success, and then us saying, ‘Oh by the way, Taylor Swift wrote it.’”

After releasing “Better Man” in 2016, Little Big Town won a Grammy for the song in the Best Country Duo/Group Performance category at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards.

A few years later, Swift released her version as a “From the Vault” track on her re-recorded Red (Taylor’s Version) album. These days, Little Big Town said they can tell when the pop star dusts the song off for a live performance.

“Every once in a while she’ll sing it on the Eras Tour, and our socials will blow up,” Fairchild said.

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