Little Big Town – Pontoon

Their First No.1 Took Fourteen Years And Began With Somebody Mishearing Another Song’s Title

On the Billboard chart dated September 15, 2012, Little Big Town had a No.1 country single for the first time. It had taken fourteen years, four record labels and a string of near misses to get there. The song that finally did it was Pontoon, a slow, sly number about drifting around a lake on a flat-bottomed party boat, and its title began as a mistake. Nothing about it resembled the earnest harmony singles the group had built its name on. That turned out to be why it worked.

Keep watching: Little Big Town – Boondocks · explore more →

The mistake belonged to someone else’s song. Natalie Hemby and Luke Laird had written Fine Tune, which Miranda Lambert recorded, and Hemby’s publisher misheard the title as “pontoon.” She told the story at a writing session with Laird and Barry Dean, the first time the three had worked together, and the wrong word sounded better than a joke. Dean checked whether anyone in country music had already written a pontoon song and came back with a two-word report: “We’re clear.” They started in a Universal Music writing room, where Laird built the groove and Hemby sang the opening line from a couch into a handheld microphone. They finished it months later in Laird’s office.

A finished demo still needed a singer, and this one took a while to find its home. Creative Nation, the company co-owned by Beth Laird, pitched it around Nashville. Dierks Bentley put it on hold. Kix Brooks turned it down. Little Big Town said yes, though Karen Fairchild’s first reaction was a fair one: “Who’s ever written a song about a pontoon?” The group could afford a gamble. Fairchild, Kimberly Schlapman, Phillip Sweet and Jimi Westbrook had formed in Nashville in 1998 and had gone through deals with Mercury, Monument and Equity before landing at Capitol Nashville. Boondocks had reached No.9 on the country chart in 2006 and Little White Church No.6 in 2010. The top spot had stayed out of reach.

The lick that wasn’t on the demo

What the song lacked on the writers’ tape, producer Jay Joyce supplied. He kept Laird’s lazy groove and added the figure everyone remembers, the mandolin lick that opens the record. Jedd Hughes played it, and Joyce doubled it with a Mellotron mandolin sample to give it that slightly warped sound. Fairchild took the lead vocal low and unhurried while the other three answered her, a different arrangement from the four-way blend of the group’s earlier singles. The writers also cleaned up an expletive in the opening line so radio could play it.

Radio played it all summer. Capitol Nashville released the single on April 30, 2012, ahead of the album Tornado. Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart entered it at No.51 on May 19 and ranked it No.1 on September 15, the same week the album reached stores. The Hot 100 took it to No.22. Tornado peaked at No.2 on the Billboard 200 and No.1 on Top Country Albums. The Country Music Association named the song Single of the Year that November, and the Recording Academy gave it the Grammy for Best Country Duo/Group Performance in 2013.

A lake, a cove and a songwriter in a boat

The video took the lyric at its word. Declan Whitebloom filmed it on Percy Priest Lake outside Nashville, in the stretch known as party cove, and it premiered in May 2012. Hemby came to the shoot by boat to watch her mistake being acted out on the water. She said afterward that it was “so awesome to see the thing take off.” The image traveled less well than the tune did. Schlapman recalled that audiences in London had no real idea what a pontoon was.

That gap between the song’s success and its subject is the point. Little Big Town had spent more than a decade making careful records about home, faith and heartbreak, and those records earned respect and top tens. The one that went all the way was a misheard word turned into a boat ride, cut with a producer who cared more about feel than polish and sung mostly by one voice. Nobody involved treated it as important, which let the group sound relaxed for the first time. Fourteen years of trying hard ended with the song they tried least on.