Last year Little Big Town made waves for their Taylor Swift-penned, Grammy-nominated track “Better Man” — which they even performed at the award show itself. In short, the song got the already acclaimed country group a ton of attention and reminded Swift diehards just how great she is in the country genre. Well, today another country group has released a track featuring Swift’s signature touches and vocal flourishes.
The duo Sugarland — who are very familiar to pop country fans — have released a song called “Babe” that, like “Better Man,” is a moratorium on a relationship gone wrong. Essentially, the loving nickname that titles the song and makes up its chorus is being used for the last time, as a not so subtle allusion to cheating and its destructive power emerge over the course of the track. Swift shows up initially as a background vocalist on the earworm chorus, and then at the end of the track. Swift co-wrote the song with Train’s frontman Pat Monahan and offered it to the country duo last fall for their new album, Bigger.
“We’ve never put someone else’s song on a Sugarland record, but we were immediately interested in ‘Babe’ the first time we heard it!” said Sugarland’s vocalist Jennifer Nettles in a press release. “This one really felt like it belonged so we saved it for the final afternoon of our recording session; a special time for us.”
Listen to the collab above and look for Sugarland’s new album Bigger out 6/8 via Big Machine Records.
