Sunny Sweeney’s Rhinestone Requiem
Photo by Nash Nouveau.
On the cover of her new album Rhinestone Requiem, Sunny Sweeney is wearing pajamas underneath her jacket. Her longtime guitarist and now boyfriend, Harley Husbands, snapped the shot of Sweeney in the entranceway of their home on his iPhone. She’s not wearing makeup, either. “I left one eyelash sticking out,” Sweeney tells me, laughing. Somehow, it’s perfect. The artwork feels vintage and effortless in the best way and, most of all, honest, just like the songs on the record. Rhinestone Requiem is a love letter to country music, heartbreak, healing, and every messy, magical thing in between.
“I kinda wanted to make a record that I feel like when someone hears it, they’ll hear the authenticity of it, you know?” Sweeney shares. That authenticity carries through every track on the album, which Sweeney co-produced with Husbands. It’s her most self-assured work to date, rooted in the kind of lived-in confidence that only comes from falling down, getting back up, and learning not to apologize for either.
The title Rhinestone Requiem is a nod to country music’s glitzy past (think Nudie and Manuel suits at the Grand Ole Opry), but also something more layered. “I just felt like paying homage to country music by calling it a “rhinestone requiem” would be cool, and I’m not like a rhinestone person,” Sweeney admits. “I don’t wear rhinestones, but I saw this thing the other day that said, ‘Country music isn’t a costume,’ and, to me, that said so much. It’s more about the substance than the style, but, that being said, our past does come from so many sparkly things, so I just thought it would be like just a nice homage to where we came from.”
The album’s cover also features a custom hat by Standard Hat Works with a beaded phoenix designed by Trish Wescoat Pound stitched onto the back. Sweeney, an avid DIY-er, pulled the phoenix from a jacket that she accidentally tore on a fence post. It’s a kind of symbolism so real that it can’t be planned.
And Sweeney doesn’t do anything that isn’t real. She’s been divorced twice, but she’s come through it with the kind of perspective that gives her songs spunk. Even a track like the album’s “Diamonds and Divorce Decrees,” with its cheeky title and lighthearted delivery, offers something much deeper. “It’s basically about just finding out that you can still live after you’ve been divorced,” Sweeney shares of the song. “A lot of people start feeling sorry for themselves. You do go through a period of mourning, obviously, because you feel like you failed, but, at the same time, it’s okay, like it’s fine, and you can totally go out and start over, no matter what age you are. It really is not an ideal situation, but you can totally make the best of it.”
The Rhinestone Requiem album cover.
Rhinestone Requiem marks the first time that Sweeney has made a record without relationship chaos looming in the background. She and Husbands, who have been playing together for ten years, began dating during the pandemic. “We were like, ‘Oh, this could go really poorly or not,’” Sweeney says, laughing. “But we feel really grateful that we get to do this together. There’s days where we want to kill each other, but there’s times where we’ve been standing on the top of a mountain in Switzerland, going like, ‘We get to do this together?’ Like even if all of it falls apart tomorrow, we can still move to some Scottish mountainside and still play music together.”
Sweeney is in a good place, and she sounds like it – grounded, unhurried, and totally in control of her narrative. The album was made without any sense of pretense. It’s the work of two people who know each other inside and out, doing what they love in their own way and on their own terms. The result is a project that pays tribute to the classics without feeling stuck in the past. It’s a mix of honky tonk and heartbreak, of raw vulnerability and sharp wit. It’s Sweeney, through and through.
Sweeney is also not afraid to fangirl. One of the record’s most powerful moments is Sweeney’s cover of Australian singer-songwriter Kasey Chambers’s “Last Hard Bible,” a song she first heard on Chambers’s The Captain when she was still in college. “I was just like, ‘I need more of this in my life. What is this?’ So, I started doin’ some research, found her family band that came before that, The Dead Ringer Band, and then followed her career since then. I just love her.” Prior to touring with Chambers earlier this year, Sweeney asked Chambers and her brother, Nash, to lend their vocals for the cover, which they did. “It’s pretty surreal because I’ve loved that song for so long, and then to have her voice on it and his voice on it, which were on the original, I’m giddy about it,” Sweeney gushes.
Between recording new music and playing shows of her own, Sweeney hosts two SiriusXM radio shows – Sunny Side Up on Willie’s Roadhouse and Sunny Side of Life on Outlaw Country.
“I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly,” Sweeney reflects. “Interviewing people from your angle is definitely something that I’ve had to adjust to because I’m used to doing it for twenty years from this side,” she says, gesturing to her side of the Zoom call. “It is very cool though, and I’ve gotten to have a lot of my friends in, and I don’t have any format, like I don’t even know what that means, but like we just talk and they’ll end up pulling stuff out of it for an interview.”
Admittedly, Sweeney isn’t one to follow a script. At forty-seven, the Texas-born singer-songwriter has spent her life carving her own path – first as a comedian, then as a major label country artist, and now as an independent powerhouse based just outside of Nashville.
Sweeney’s Rhinestone Requiem, her seventh record, doesn’t just mark a chapter. It closes a book. It’s an unflinching look back at her past, a time marked by good times, heartbreak, and a hard-won peace that only comes from walking through fire and coming out on the other side shining like the diamonds that she sings about on the album.
