Sunny Sweeney is as adept at scuffed toe-to-bootheel honky tonk as she is at rib-crushing balladry. And on her latest full-length effort, “Married Alone,” the Texas native does what she does best by defying category and resisting cliche.

“I always feel like the artist should be in charge of all things creative, and I was at a company where that was not the M.O. It was just like pulling teeth trying to figure out who was going to produce my record, and it was the first person that we could all agree on. Long story short, we agreed on Paul (Cauthen), and he did a great job,” Sweeney said.

Sweeney will perform Saturday at Lulu’s Downtown in Colorado Springs.

Even before the pandemic (“stupid COVID,” Sweeney calls it), “Married Alone” had been in the works, with Sweeney writing and assembling songs from some of Music City’s finest tunesmiths, including Kendall Marvel and Waylon Payne (“Fool Like Me”) as well as Hannah Blaylock, Autumn McEntire and Josh Morningstar, the trio behind the title track, which also features Vince Gill on vocals. For Sweeney, that song came along at a particularly notable time.

“It was perfect! I was coming out of my second divorce and my friend Arthur sent it to me and he was like, ‘OK, you need to listen to this song, but make sure you’re by yourself because you’re probably gonna lose your (mind)!’ I got through one verse and one chorus and was sobbing, and I called him and was like, ‘Uhh, whose song is this and how do I get to record it?’ And he’s like, ‘It’s yours if you want it.’”

An album highlight is the painfully inventorial “How’d I End Up Lonely Again” that Sweeney co-wrote with Josh Morningstar and Channing Wilson.

“We were all just talking about like, ‘I’m getting divorced twice before the age of 40. How does that happen?’” Sweeney said. “They’re both just such good writers and friends so it’s easy to be vulnerable and talk about crap with them.”

And does that potential for domestic bliss maintain a hold in Sweeney’s thoughts?

“No. Not anymore,” she said. “I kind of came and went with all that. I’m very, very happy with my dog as my child, and he’s a handful enough. He’s very, very small and he travels well and he doesn’t talk back and he doesn’t eat a lot and he doesn’t need me to cook and he doesn’t need me to do laundry. He’s just a great little roommate and a great little boyfriend. Five pounds of fury!”

Singer-songwriter Sunny Sweeney will perform her latest full-length album “Married Alone” on Saturday at Lulu’s Downtown in Colorado Springs. (Courtesy of

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