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.”
Watch Sunny Sweeney’s Emotional ‘Bottle by My Bed’ Video
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…