LIVE FROM THE DIVIDE is a radio broadcast created simply as a "A Celebration of the American Songwriter". The 60 minute show features regionally established & legendary songwriters alike. Based out of an intimate 50 person venue and recording facility in Bozeman, Montana.
Artists vary their interactions with the crowd, sometimes poking fun at a live audience member or by taking time to explain the origin of the song they are about to perform. The program provides listeners with an unparalleled opportunity to hear songwriters in a natural stripped down and raw setting.
True to her Texas honky-tonk roots, Sunny Sweeney has never been a singer of what you’d call “soft” country songs — the kind you might turn to for easy comfort and or quiet Sunday afternoons with the family. Hell, you can tell just by the titles of her first two albums — Heartbreaker’s Hall of Fame and Concrete — that she reaches straight for the hard stuff. So when this woman sees fit to name her third album Provoked, you better believe she’s not about to start playing coy now. No, this is where the real hurtin’ starts, and Sweeney’s showing no mercy … least of all to herself.
“I’ve been through a lot in the last few years, good and bad, and this record is me for the first time actually coming to grips with the mistakes that I’ve made,” says Sweeney. “And I have made a lot of mistakes. I was hell-bent that this album was going to tell that story.”
The recurring themes in that story should be familiar to anyone well versed in the classic country cannon: temptation, cheating, adultery, divorce, broken hearts, and — sometimes — carrying on despite all of the above. On Provoked—produced by Luke Wooten—Sweeney’s singing it all from first-hand experience, and she’s not always singing from the perspective of an innocent victim, either. But as her song “Second Guessing” makes clear early on in the album’s storyline, she’s done making excuses, both for the damage done and for holding herself back from embracing a second chance at love and happiness. The end result may surprise listeners as much as it did Sweeney herself.
“I went from being in such a dark place, feeling like nothing positive could ever happen again, to being in an incredibly positive place,” marvels Sweeney, who has not only moved on but also re-married. “I was so happy that I even wrote a love song, ‘Used Cars,’ which I’d never actually done before.”
The uncompromising and seemingly fearless creative spirit that drives Provoked has been a constant throughout Sunny Sweeney’s musical life. The Houston-born, Longview-raised Texas native may not have always known she wanted to sing and write country music for a living, but she grew up listening to it with her parents, and, throughout her college years, she began mixing her serious Merle Haggard addiction with a keen awareness of the booming regional Texas music scene. She graduated with a degree in public relations and spent the first few years of early adulthood trying to find her place in the “regular” working world, only to one day chuck caution to the wind, pick up her first guitar and decide — literally as over-night as one can commit to such life-changing personal dares — to try her hand at performing and songwriting. From that fateful moment, it was just a quick hop, skip and 10 years of busting her ass before she found herself in the Top 10 on the national country music charts and nominated for Best New Female Vocalist at the 2013 Academy of Country Music Awards.