Jennifer Nettles on Why She Really Took That Sugarland Hiatus
Over a decade ago, and perhaps without even knowing, Jennifer Nettles crooned the very lyrics that would define her entire career. “There’s gotta be something more,” she sang in one of Sugarland’s most popular hits. Now, she has exactly that.
Though the 45-year-old country star has had a deep-seated love of the arts since she was young, she’s only recently started taking risks in the music, theater, film, and TV worlds.
This required a few big shifts on her end, the most famous being her hiatus from the Grammy-winning Sugarland to focus on her solo career. (Don't worry, they have since reunited.)
“I used to love VH1 Behind the Music, but they made everything a soap opera, you know what I’m saying?” she says, referencing the reaction she and bandmate Kristian Bush received when they briefly split. “But that’s really not the case. I was ready for something different, and ready to make brave new steps in my life and my career and so I did. It’s pretty simple.”
The changes she made were far from subtle. “I decided I was going to explore in a lot of ways,” she says. “I’m going to have a baby, I’m going to start doing solo records, I’m going to get back into theater, I’m going to open myself up to TV and film.”
All of the above has paid off in spades. She’s now a proud mom of her and husband Justin Miller’s 6-year-old son, Magnus. She did a stint as Chicago’s Roxie Hart on Broadway. She landed a role as Aimee-Leigh Gemstone on HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones. And, in the latest addition to her resume, she plays Eliza in the highly anticipated Harriet Tubman biopic, Harriet.
In theaters now, Harriet is the most ambitious project to date, in part because of her “dark and dangerous” character who was clearly “on the wrong side of history.” Despite the challenges of not relating to Eliza, Jennifer still felt so passionate about the film that she wrote a letter to producer Debra Martin Chase.
“I felt that my involvement in the film might be a contribution to bring interest to people who may not normally be interested,” she says. “The majority of the country demographic is not the African American community. So I thought, this will be an opportunity to possibly introduce this wonderful story; this heart-changing, empowering story; this cautionary story to the demographic that knows my music.”
But it isn’t just about recounting the life of one of America’s most influential heroes. It’s the film's relevancy to today’s current climate that spoke to her as well.
“One of the things that I learned, something I had known but it didn’t sink in with me like it did until I did this movie, was the atrocity of family separation,” she says. “That is happening right now in this country. Family separation is happening right now, and we should be ashamed, and we should be aghast because there’s a better way and why we didn’t learn that lesson is beyond me.”
“It is important to then showcase these other dark mistakes we’ve made so that we don’t repeat them," she adds.
Jennifer’s only become more “fiery, compassionate, and fierce” since starting her own family, as she exhibits when talking about Harriet.
“I’ve brought another human being into this world, I’ll try anything,” she says. “Nothing can be harder than this. Or scarier than this.”
That bravery makes her apt to speak out for even more causes, and one topic she’s not at a loss for opinions on is the lack of female representation in country music radio.
In case you aren’t caught up, 2019 research conducted by Dr. Stacy L. Smith and the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative reported only 16% of artists were women across 500 top country songs from 2014-2018. Also, the average age of male top artists was 42 versus the female average age of 29. (This data was collected by analyzing the year-end Billboard Hot Country charts from 2014-2018, and four categories of the ACM Awards during that same time period.)
To put it plainly, these stats won’t stand with Jennifer.
“People make up stories according to data,” she says. “Let me tell you what data is, let me tell you what algorithms are. They use things called predictive analytics. Do you know what they’re predicting on? The past. What they use this data for continues to get more and more derivative of itself until it’s not even what it was at the beginning. So what they’re looking at is what might have had success in the last 5 to 10 years which was bro country.”
And when a woman has a baby, Jennifer feels the reasonings for excluding female artists only get worse.
“They make stupid excuses like, ‘Well when women have children they really want to slow down and so they to choose to stay home,’” she says. “No they don’t. I’ll tell you what, if that woman’s rich enough she will bring a nanny because she will go on tour. I can testify to this, she will still work. So you need to help her be successful so when she does have a child, she can afford to do what she does. No one wants to choose between their child and their passion.”
Jennifer has a few ideas in mind to help close the gap. For one, she hopes men can become “significant allies” by taking ladies out on tour with them. Symbols—such as the CMA Awards choosing Carrie Underwood, Dolly Parton, and Reba McEntire as hosts for this year’s show—can also push the conversation forward. But the easiest solution is to “simply play the music.”
“There's something called the bias of familiarity. If you play it enough times, people will like it,” she says. “No one cares if it’s really good. Look at the 'Macarena.' I mean, I’m not saying the 'Macarena' isn't good, but the truth is if you play something over and over again people have a bias toward it just because they’ve heard it numerous times. So just hit the button.”
By taking on pretty much any challenge that comes her way, it’s hard to imagine Jennifer fearing anything at this point. However, she claims that's not entirely true.
“The phone calls that you get in the middle of the night that you can’t do anything about, losing a loved one,” she lists. “What kind of world my son is going to grow up in, what I’m going to be able to leave for him, and what we’re going to leave for his generation. Those are the things that really scare me.”
But when it comes to taking personal or professional risks that will propel her career or her community forward in some small way, she’s all in.
“I’m terrified every day of my life but I’ve never let it stop me,” she says. “I want to do it all, you know. And I can.”
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