After the success of her fourteen date UK and Ireland tour in 2023, the delightful Sunny Sweeney is coming back to see us in November for ten more shows. When we last spoke to Sunny, she didn’t hide the fact that she would be celebrating the 10th anniversary of her acclaimed ‘Provoked’ record and that she wanted to do things differently rather than just be a remaster which is clear to see with the release of ‘Still Provoked’ which is out now and available HERE. The reimagined project features versions of all 13 tracks on the original album plus 2 new, previously unheard songs: ‘My Own Lane’ and a cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘To Be Alone With You’ where the 15-track release is available on digital, CD and for the first time on vinyl, as a limited-edition double LP.
With the UK tour starting on November 5th in Southampton on the way, we recently caught up with Sunny to talk about the tour, ‘Still Provoked’ and what is likely to be coming next. Hey Sunny “Hey, how’s it going?”
I’m doing good girl! Great to see you, how was Americana? It looked wild. “Oh God, are you kidding me? It was so fun! We’re coming out of it this week plus I’m on tour right now and I’m beyond tired right now but it’s fun and we’re having a great time.”
It’s going to be a great time next month when you get over here. We went quite a long time waiting for you to come back and play over here but over the last couple of years, heading to the UK regularly appears to be a really big part of what you’re are doing. “It’s because I freaking love the Brits, I love y’all so much. Me and Harley, who is my guitar player and also my boyfriend, we use that time to have some time by ourselves too as we are with our band all of the time so, when we get over there it’s like we are getting a vacation but also getting to see old friends. We have come over there so much that we now have actual friends that we know there. It’s really great and the food that y’all have is so freaking good.”
Well, we are very excited that you are coming back but you mentioned some new stuff, so let’s go there as it sounds like we have got something on the way. Are we talking about an EP or a new full-length maybe? “We’ve already recorded a brand new record and sit back because it is COUNTRY my friend! I just got off the phone with my label: Thirty Tigers and we at least have a single by late spring to early summer next year but the album is a full-length one! We will be doing some of the new songs on this tour, so you’ll get to hear some a bit sooner and I think people will like it. People liked ‘Heartbreaker’s Hall of Fame’ and this is like a twenty year gap between Heartbreaker’s and this new record but it is the same kind of music although like a more mature version of Heartbreaker’s and it’s recorded with pretty much the same staff so it’s going to be really cool. I’m very excited about it.”
I remember you saying last time that the new stuff were working on was country as shit so, people better be ready for it which is really cool to hear what we have to look forward to. Coming on to the anniversary record, something else that you said last time was that you didn’t just want to re-record or remaster ‘Provoked’ where you basically put the same record out again. We’ve got two tracks on ‘Still Provoked’ that have been added to the original set of songs which we will come onto in a minute but you completely pulled the rest of it apart and rearranged the placement of the songs in a very different way. “I feel like ‘Provoked’ was my first record after my major record label deal and I was in such a weird spot emotionally after that because getting dropped from a record label screws your mind up. You go through am I not good enough and why did I get dropped but in reality the reason I got dropped was because my music was too country for country radio, which to actually I take that as a feather in my cap you know. It took me a while to get into a spot emotionally where I could digest that I guess and when I decided to re-release this as a ten-year anniversary record, I looked back at all of those songs and thought man, there are some songs on here that did not get the love that they needed. I put those songs at the top, like I feel that ‘Second Guessing’ is such a cool song that says so much about a relationship that a slot of people really don’t talk about so I thought that would be a really good way to start. Then ‘My Own Lane’ is ultimately about that time in my life where so much went wrong and I thought ok I just need to figure out my own path here. I just kind of made a new story with the same songs and then added another love song with the Bob Dylan song because I love that song. As far as the arranging of the songs, that’s why I did that but the actual arrangement of each song and the reason that we broke it down was because I wanted the songs to speak instead of the production. A lot of that was a little too much production for me when I was looking back so, now I feel that this was the record that I should have recorded and I like letting the songs talk for themselves.” You mentioned ‘My Own Lane’ which is the original song which wasn’t on the album when you first put it out, is this song almost a Taylor Swift style from the vault track which you and Natalie had wrote back then or just simply a track you wrote recently and thought would have fitted in perfectly with ‘Provoked’ at the time? “No, we wrote that in the last year. That was on the list of songs that I wanted to record on this new record but I though as we had been playing it acoustic, man this would sound so cool mixed in with these songs and it also adds to the story of why I wanted to record it anyway. We added an upright to it and our bass player plays an upright so we started playing it live with an upright and it just fit for me. I just really wanted to add it in and have a different perspective I guess, my brain is so much different now to what it was a couple of years ago. The way that I look at things and my priorities are so much more in check now so, I wanted people to hear that and people are really liking it live.”
Then lastly, you have the Bob Dylan cover on the album and I know you said that you felt like you needed another love song but what was it about ‘To Be Alone With You’ that you thought was what was needed as another piece for the project? “Everybody laughs because I only have one love song which is ‘Grow Old with Me’ and my joke about the whole thing is that I really am bad with relationships, I mean I really am so, I don’t have a lot of love songs and I don’t like them really, I feel like they are too sappy and it’s too cliché like having a girl singing a love song. I figured that if there is a badass song that is a love song, that’s the kind of love song that I would like sung to me. I didn’t know if a lot of people knew it because I love the ‘Nashville Skyline’ record and I just love that song so much. We had been doing it live and thought this would be a great addition plus I guess now, I can say that I have another love song.” Tues Nov 5 Southampton 1865 Weds Nov 6 Stowmarket John Peel Arts Centre Fri Nov 8 Shrewsbury St Marys Sat Nov 9 Leek Foxlowe Arts Centre Mon Nov 11 Edinburgh Voodoo Rooms Tues Nov 12 Glasgow Slay Weds Nov 13 Lincoln The Drill Thurs Nov 14 Birmingham Kitchen Garden Café