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On the Taylor Swift-ish “Wanted You More”, both Scott and Kelly diagnose the problem of a relationship with the same words: “I guess I wanted you more.” Can it be true for both? On “When You Were Mine”, Scott sings of looking back, trying to understand why things turned out differently from how she imagined they would. In all of these songs, it seems like the lovers were on a different page, and still are. There are seven songs where a couple has split or is about to split though two of the relationships were brief, the others were apparently not. The duet form is used to present two perspectives on what happened, especially in the goodbye songs. Throughout Own the Night, perspective is the subject. Is he describing a one-night-stand, or his imagined vision of one? The perspective makes the potential for something more seem like it might never have really been there, which perhaps makes the song seem even sadder, one of human misperception. The way Charles Kelly sings about the night as a dream, after asking us, “Have you ever wanted someone so much it hurts / Your lips try to speak / But you just can’t find the words,” makes you wonder if it really happened at all, if what he’s describing isn’t just what he wanted to happen. While the album title reads like encouragement to listeners to “own the night” or (if you read the band name and album title together as a sentence) like a statement of accomplishment that alludes either to the success of the band or their current bleak-as-night approach, the song title is “We Owned the Night”, and it’s a lament, a look backward at a fleeting relationship to ponder what could have been. While their songs are conventional love ballads, their stories of love and its loss familiar ones, there is a palpable sense of foreboding throughout the album, starting with the first track.
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Its mission seems to be to expand upon the melancholy demeanor of that song to take the waiting-room soft-country ballad and make it gloomier to make sadness stylish, like on the album cover, where they’re at a beach dressed in black, Hillary Scott’s dress billowing like a harbinger of death. Their third album, Own the Night, takes its cues from that song more than their others, perhaps wisely. Their biggest hit so far, though, was the moody drunk-dialing ballad “Need You Now”, the title track of their second album. They’ve built their success - and they have been hugely successful, more so with each album - on a good-natured, “universal” appeal. Think of the video for last year’s hit “Our Kind of Love”, with them joking around on playground equipment, or past songs like “Lookin’ for a Good Time”. In appearance, the Grammy-winning, millions-selling country-pop trio Lady Antebellum can seem perennially fun-loving, even goofy.