While a student at Agnes Scott College, she began making original music with her first band, Soul Miner's Daughter. The group released two acoustic folk albums beginning in 1994. In 1998, she formed the Jennifer Nettles Band, with which she produced three studio and two live albums. She and her band were invited to perform at Lillith Fair in 1999 and received the 2000 "Independent Musician of the Year" award from Musician's Atlas.
She moved away from the introspective and sometimes dark themes of her solo work when she teamed up with Kristen Hall and Kristian Bush in 2003 to form Sugarland (Hall has since left the group). On her Web site, she says the following of the transition:
"Sugarland's music tells a story that people can relate to on a really human day-to-day level. But they're fun stories. They're light stories. It's music that's not taking itself too seriously. "In my own singer/songwriter work, I did more of that kind of self-exploration, a little bit more processing of life on a heavier scale. Sugarland is more for the sake of fun, and people relate to our energy on stage. Everybody has a collective good time."
Sugarland was nominated for a Grammy award in the Best New Artist category. They did not win the award, but Nettles and Bush performed on the nationally televised awards show in February 2006, and Nettles presented a Lifetime Achievement Award to Merle Haggard and presented the award for Best Country Group.
Nettles also is seeing success outside of Sugarland. A duet performance with Jon Bon Jovi, "Who Says You Can't Go Home?", has reached No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart. The video for the song won a CMT Music Award in 2006 for "Collaborative Video Of The Year".
--Wikipedia
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