Sunny Sweeney’s ‘Landman’ Hit Song, SiriusXM Gig, and New Album

If you want to know how an artist really feels about an album, catch them after they’ve begun playing it live for their fans. “I don’t know if it’s the songs or what, but the fans are singing along before we even get through the first couple,” Sunny Sweeney tells me, thrilled by the response to tracks like “Find It Where I Can” and “Diamonds and Divorce Decrees.”

This was late summer, a little more than a month after Sweeney released Rhinestone Requiem, her sixth studio album and first since 2022. We were in a lounge on the edge of downtown Nashville — not far from Sweeney’s home in neighboring Hendersonville. On a slow afternoon, before the happy hour crowd strolled in, Sweeney felt like talking. She does that a lot these days, as part of her second-act side gig as a country music deejay.

But 15 years ago, she was a country singer and songwriter, one being hailed as the genre’s next savior. That may have been a heavy expectation, but she’s clearly evolved into one of its vanguards. This is obvious even to casual listeners to Sweeney’s Sunny Side Up, the SiriusXM show she hosts weekdays from 6 a.m. to noon on Willie’s Roadhouse channel. The high-profile job constantly exposes her to the tiresome, never-ending debate over “authenticity” in country music, and the Texas native can’t help but weigh in.

“Right now, the conversation everybody is having is ‘What’s country? What’s not country?’ I am supportive of creative people, and any artist that wants to put out a record and call it whatever the hell they want to call it, I want them to succeed at it,” she says. “Who am I to tell someone what something is? My response to that is, this is my take on what I think country music should be.”

Specifically, she’s talking about Rhinestone Requiem, an album influenced by her musical heroes, among them Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, and Waylon Jennings. “I hope and pray that my people that have pblocked on, they’re looking down on me smiling, saying, ‘Carry that torch, girl. Keep that steel guitar in your music,’” she says.

The album isn’t just Sweeney’s take on country music, however. It’s also her declaration of freedom. Her last release, 2022’s Married Alone, was a divorce album. This one is a snapshot of Sweeney’s life now, with eight of the 10 tracks written or co-written by her. Only the Ben Chapman and Erin Enderlin composition “Is Tonight the Night (I Make You a Memory)” and Sweeney’s version of Kasey Chambers’ “Last Hard Bible” qualify as covers on Rhinestone Requiem. The rest of the songs started as notes in Sweeney’s phone, which she was determine to keep universal.

“This is just, like, from a piece in time,” she says of the songs’ themes. “It could have been way long ago or it could be 50 years from now. There’s nothing dated in it, intentionally. That’s what I love about old country records. There’s nothing like email or cell phones in there, nothing that would date the song.”

Sweeney filled the album with slices of life, both good and bad. The most striking example came a few years ago, when she found herself moving a safe out of her parents’ house in Texas after a post-divorce stretch of living at home. She realized the only things in the safe were her grandmother’s diamonds and her two divorce decrees. Sweeney sat down and wrote “Diamonds and Divorce Decrees” immediately.

She extended that free-flowing, let-it-come-to-you approach to the recording process too. Setting up shop at Tommy Detamore’s Cherry Ridge Studio in Floresville, Texas (Detamore contributed steel guitar to the record), she produced Rhinestone Requiem with her guitarist, Harley Husbands, rather than give a producer the keys to the project.

“I was so tired of having a producer and having to butt heads with them. I know what I am as an artist. I know that I’m opinionated,” she says. “I know that I have really good ideas, and I want to make sure that those ideas go forward without having to fight for those ideas.”

She’d been fighting for those ideas since her 2011 breakthrough album Concrete spawned three Top 40 singles, including the heartbreaking “From a Table Away.” But a decade later, the fight had worn on Sweeney. She was jaded over the music industry and considering calling it a career. In the soul searching and praying that ensued, Sweeney asked for a sign. She got two. One of them was a call from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum asking her to be a part of their 2023 “American Currents” exhibit. The other was a text from the late Jeremy Tepper, the longtime format manager of Outlaw Country on SiriusXM. In early 2022, Tepper sent Sweeney a message asking her if she’d ever consider working in radio. “Your name’s been getting tossed around in every meeting that we’re in,” she recalls Tepper texting.

Sweeney jumped at the chance. More than three years later, she’s one of the leading voices for country music on SiriusXM, and arguably one of the most prominent figures in modern country radio.

“This business has made me skeptical of people — the music part of this business,” Sweeney says of her radio gig. “But that side of my career, which is a whole separate side, I feel like it’s opened me up to a whole lot of criticism. People are like, ‘Why are you in radio? You don’t know anything about radio.’ Well, I don’t, but if you were given that opportunity, you would take it as well. And I’m, according to my bosses, doing well. But I’ve also made a lot of friends, and a lot of new artist friends.”

The endorsement of Tepper, who died in 2024, is still motivating her. “I feel like it’s a very important job for me to not ever mess up. Tepper told me multiple times, ‘I want this to help your career. I don’t want you to just do radio. I’m such a fan, and I want to see you succeed.’”