From the very first notes of “Drink Myself Single,” it is plainly obvious that we are listening to a Country music album.  And when I say country music, I do not mean the mainstream crossover stuff favored by most radio dials.  This here, folks is the ‘real deal,’ the cat’s pajamas or whatever euphemism you can think of to describe what is honest and real.  “Drink Myself Single” finds Sunny Sweeney singing about needing to get past the pain of a stale relationship and the cure for getting’ over that pain? Drinking of course! 

“Amy” is a karmic sister to “From A Table Away,” in that it finds Sunny once again placing herself in the role of the other woman.  Vocally, Sunny sounds like a younger Loretta Lynn throughout the song and she painfully admits to the woman that she is sorry for cheating with Amy’s husband and in the end; she says “I’ll let him go for good, if you just’ll love him like you should but if you don’t love him, Amy, let him leave.”  It’s a song that is, once again – obviously a country song but one that could make its way up the charts somewhere down the road.   If Sunny’s going to get another single up the charts I’d expect it to be the progressive and melodic mid-tempo ballad “Staying’s Worse Than Leaving.” The production is more ‘contemporary’ yet it still is a country song, particularly with Sunny Sweeney’s voice, which sounds more like Natalie Maines here than it did on “Amy.” 

“Helluva Heart” has some of the attitude from Miranda Lambert and that helps give the song the kind of progressive, radio-ready sound that is needed in today’s market yet like everything else on the record, it’s still a country song and in many ways has a ‘feel’ that feels similar to Dierks Bentley’s early albums (which makes sense given they share the same producer in Brett Beavers).   The EP closes out with the fantastic Top 20 single “From A Table Away.”  It has interesting mandolins, steel guitars and a heart-wrenching lyric that finds the ‘other woman’ realizing that she’s never going to get him to leave his wife and the chorus lays the pain all out for us to hear.  It feels like a heart-breaking confessional. 

With these strong five songs serving as a preview, I’m going to bet that the full-length Republic Nashville debut album from Sunny Sweeney is going to give fans more of the same here, songs about real, live people and unapologetically country music.  Traditionalists, you have yourself a brand new female star to fall in love with (and hopefully everyone else will too).

You can support Sunny Sweeney by purchasing this EP at Amazon | iTunes.

From A Table Away Video

From A Table Away Lyrics