Sister Sadie performs at Bartlett Arboretum in Belle Plaine on Sunday, June 22.
The quintet will release its latest album, “All Will Be Well,” on June 27. The record arrives some 13 years after the group made its debut in Nashville. Having weathered lineup changes and the challenges that come with being in a growing band -- but not one that achieved superstar status overnight -- the outfit has settled comfortably into what is perhaps its most accomplished configuration yet, as demonstrated across the material on “All Will Be Well.”
With a growing number of award nominations and wins, the group seems poised to claim 2025 as its biggest year yet.
Banjoist and vocalist Gena Britt and fiddle player Deanie Richardson recently discussed the new album, the band’s staying power and the continued appeal of 1990s country.
The following interview has been edited for length and for clarity.
This new album is really great. It’s wall-to-wall A-game songs.
Deanie Richardson: When we go to record a record, we have a Dropbox that we put all the songs in. Anybody can pitch in anything they think might be appropriate to record. It’s a big conglomerate of all sorts of things. We didn’t really have any ideas or themes or anything, but the previous record was “No Fear.” It was Grammy-nominated. It did well, and we felt a lot of pressure to do a record that did as well or better than that. We get the songs together, start recording and decide, “Maybe a steel guitar sounds good on this,” or “Maybe an electric guitar might sound good on this or a B3 organ.” The song will kind of produce itself if you let it, and these songs did that. We came out with a ’90s country meets bluegrass record. I feel like ‘90s country is sort of having a resurgence.
There’s something funny about records, which is that you can’t really predict what’s going to connect. I hear great records all the time that don’t sell or the artist’s fanbase rejects it. So, you ultimately have to make the music you want to hear.
DR: If you go in making a record for someone or for radio or for a particular audience, I think that’s just not true to your creative self, which is not true art.
There’s something interesting to me about this band, too, in that your origins … you got together for a jam session and things clicked. I think that demonstrates the peculiar nature of musical chemistry. You really don’t know when it’s going to work and when it’s not.
DR: I think what’s great about this band, even with the personnel changes we’ve had, is that we’re just us. We’re honest. We are who we are. I think people are starving for that authenticity, and that we’re not trying to latch on to whatever’s the current thing.
We started as five friends who didn’t know each other that well. Some of us had played together but not in that configuration. We got together one night on a whim at the Station Inn as a one-off. It went really well. We had a blast from the first note we hit. I’ll never forget that very first note. When we locked into that groove, we all looked at each other and went, “Whoa! What?” It felt so good. It felt like we had played together our whole lives. We knew instantly that there was something special there. Even through the different configurations, we still have that same feeling when we hit that first downbeat, wherever and whenever that is.
It seems that sometimes a band becomes a larger entity than the members themselves. The musicians might not want to let go of the band, but it’s almost like the band won’t let go of them.
DR: That is so funny; I just had that conversation a little while ago. You’ve created a brand and now it’s not even about you really.
Gena Britt: We are trying to grow this brand, and I think with every lineup change that we’ve had we’ve grown in different ways. We’ve grown as businesswomen. We’ve grown as friends and encouragers to each other and to everybody in the band. With each change that we’ve had, we’ve grown stronger. We’ve developed so many aspects that we need to have in this business and a lot patience.
DR: From the beginning we’ve said that Sister Sadie is its own entity.
GB: Yes.
DR: It’s a person, it’s a thing, whatever you want to call it, and we work for her. She’s running the show. We always get that person that comes up and says, “Which one of you is Sadie?”
GB: [Laughs.] All the time! There is no Sadie!
DR: Sadie’s the boss. That’s who she is.
[Laughs.] You mentioned ’90s country earlier. That was its own animal. What was appealing about that music for you?
DR: I worked with Patty Loveless during that time period. I was with Patty Loveless for 20 years, and then I did a few years with Vince Gill. That was all in the ’90s, early 2000s, so that was my world. I was obsessed with country music when I was growing up. I know Dani [Flowers] and Jaelee [Roberts] were as well. They’re from a younger generation, but they know any song ever written and sung by any ’90s country artist. That time period in country music is just very personal for all of us. We’ve all got our favorite ’90s country artists.
GB: I graduated high school in 1990, and that’s when I started my musical career. I moved to Nashville instead of going to the beach. Moving there and discovering the country music that was popular [was important]. I feel like that music was more married to acoustic bluegrass than country is now. It’s more rock ‘n’ roll country. Even the banjo influences back in the ’90s, there was a lot that appealed to me, and it was correlated very tightly to acoustic and bluegrass music. It appeals to me for that reason, and like I said, I had just graduated from high school and there are lots of good memories. It was a good time in my life, when things were simpler, and we didn’t have social media. I loved it so much. [Laughs.]
DR: You can tell we’re old!
[Laughs.] I graduated high school in 1991 and that was an interesting moment in music. I had friends who suddenly had Garth Brooks and Nirvana in their record collections, and a few years before I felt like I had to hide my Randy Travis records from my punk rock and heavy metal friends.
DR: That’s a great point. It’s true. It was just good music. Great writing. The writers in this town in the ’90s were off the hook. Matraca Berg, Gary Nicholson, all the Garys [Gary Stewart, Gary Allan, et al.], Tony Arata, Paul Overstreet, Don Schlitz, all these amazing writers writing great tunes that you just don’t have today. It felt very simple. Us going in to cut a record now feels like what ’90s country was. It’s very lyric-driven, very musical. I love Patty Loveless with everything in me. She’s like family to me, so spending that amount of time with her in that timeframe was just gold, and I’ll never regret or forget any moment I had with her on stage.
