An important lesson Lady Antebellum‘s Dave Haywood, Charles Kelley and Hillary learned in their first years as a band is to never record music that they don’t feel 100% about. If they aren’t into it, their fans won’t be feeling it either.

“Be true to yourself,” Kelley said during an interview. “Sometimes when we’ve put out a single that didn’t quite feel like us, it usually didn’t work. I won’t name the songs, but there are definitely some that we kind of talked ourselves into putting out because we thought they were hits, and fans can see right through it. I think it’s very important for us an an artist now looking back, if we don’t love it, they’re going to be able to tell.”“There might be some hits out there that get pitched to us that could be hits,” he added. “But does it really make us feel anything? Does it make us want to get out of bed? And we’ve just got to be true to ourselves, and anytime we ever have, those have been our biggest songs. It’s the ones we force that aren’t.”,

The new album Heart Break is going to be like the first two albums by the band.

“The Stars” and “Home” is inspired by the love that they share with their respective families, while they get nostalgic about first loves in “Big Love in a Small Town” and “Teenage Heart.”

“There is a lot of self-awareness on this record and us trying to be very transparent with where we’ve been, where we are and where we want to go,” Scott said. “And this is the most co-written songs by us on an album in our entire career. And I think it’s because we allowed some time to kind of have normalcy at home with our families and then we had a lot of inspiration to pull from coming back in.”

“Our goal is to be here for a long time,” Haywood said. “So I think we learned a lot about how to be here by watching people that have come before us. You’ve just got to just focus on the music, focus on us as a trio, and make sure everybody’s having a great time doing it. That’s been nice to kind of get back to that and reconnect in that way.”