How Little Big Town's Karen Fairchild Found Love With Her Bandmate After a Divorce
Little Big Town singer Karen Fairchild is married to the group's guitar player, Jimi Westbrook.
The band members got together after Karen's divorce and have been married since 2006.
Karen and Jimi have a thirteen-year-old son, Elijah.
All four members of Little Big Town are close. In fact, the country group consisting of Karen Fairchild and Kimberly Schlapman on vocals and Philip Sweet and Jimi Westbrook on guitar has described their band as "one big marriage." For two of its members, though, that's literally the case: Karen Fairchild, 53, and Jimi Westbrook, 51, said "I do" more than a decade ago.
The married members of the band are now an iconic couple in country music. But things weren't always that way.
Karen found love with Jimi after her divorce.
When the group first formed in 1998, Karen was still married to her first husband. A few years later, in 2002, they divorced—and eventually, Karen and Jimi were drawn to one another.
"I think there was always something underlying there that we were trying to ignore," Jimi said in an interview with Great American Country.
"Then when the opportunity came, when all of us ended up single at the same time—a very strange turn of events for the band in a lot of different ways—those feelings, you were able to come out with them finally," he continued. "It was like, 'We're single. Let's get together.' She has a beautiful heart and she's absolutely gorgeous and I just love her dearly."
The musical couple got married in Nashville.
The couple complemented one another just as well as their musical talents do, and Karen and Jimi secretly married in a Nashville wedding on May 31, 2006—the same year their bandmate Kimberly remarried following her first husband's tragic death.
"I think Jimi and I had a special friendship and connection that blossomed when we were both single," Karen said in a 2010 interview with Us Weekly. "Sometimes you just have to cross that line and take a chance and when we had that opportunity we did. Of course we didn't want to mess up the band but we decided it was worth the risk."
Karen and Jimi welcomed their first child together in 2010.
Four years later, on March 5, 2010, their first and only child, Elijah Dylan Westbrook, was born.
"Jimi is my soulmate," Karen told the publication. "I knew there was a deep connection there but once you decide to be together, you find even more, and then to have a child together is a beautiful, beautiful thing for us to share and a dream come true." Now 13 years old, Elijah is a perfect combination of both his parents.
After 17 years together, they still have a deep connection.
Karen and Jimi's chemistry has served them well on stage and in the studio, too. Little Big Town's song "Your Side of the Bed" features an incredible duet by the duo—and the music video is pretty hot, too.
That's not to say it's always easy, though. "It's challenging," Karen said to Us Weekly. "We are together 24 hours a day, so that is a very good thing and a very bad thing. If you need a break, there is nowhere to go, but the great thing about it is we get to enjoy this incredible journey with the band together."
"The band is like one big marriage," she continued. "You have to really be family and love each other to be in a band this long or you would have gone your separate ways. Kimberly and Philip both have their spouses out here with us a lot. They travel with us as much as they can. We keep the families on the road. Everyone has a child as well, so family is super important to the band."
A little big family, indeed.
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