Lady Antebellum photo courtesy of Capitol Nashville.

NEED YOU NOW is the title of Lady Antebellum’s second album, lifted from its leadoff track, which explores the desperate longings that make separated lovers yearn to reconnect in the wee small hours of the morning. But that "need you now" mantra isn’t just a refrain that exes leave on each other’s answering machines in the middle of the night. That message could just as easily serve as an SOS sent out to the group from fans and the music industry. The band’s first album, from 2007, was the very rare freshman effort to debut at No. 1 and/or go Platinum these days, and the emotional connection that was forged with audiences over the short course of several hit singles and high-profile tours clearly left ‘em wanting—no, needing—more.

Thankfully, unlike in the song, we won’t even have to do any drunk-dialing to get what we’ve craved. Less than two years after the trio’s debut first hit stores with a splash, NEED YOU NOW is at hand to satisfy the hunger. There’s been no lull in the roll Lady Antebellum is on. They’ve had back-to-back chart-topping singles, proceeding directly from the previous effort’s "I Run to You" hitting the top spot in July to their "Need You Now" single enjoying a multi-week run at No. 1 just prior to the new album’s release. Even without any pop radio play, "Need You Now" cracked the top 10 of Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100, and the tune went to No. 1 on the iTunes all-genre singles chart.

NEED YOU NOW comes right on the heels of a couple of prominent Grammy nominations and two key wins at November’s CMA Awards - Single of the Year ("I Run to You") and Vocal Group of the Year.

The CMAs recognition did bring about a fairly urgent sense of ante-upping. "It puts expectations on us," says Charles Kelley, who shares lead vocal duties with Hillary Scott. "We already felt like there was a lot to prove after winning Best New Artist the year before—like people are invested in us and saying ‘All right, go get ‘em.’ Which is why we’re excited to get this album out."

"I’ll be honest," says Hillary. "Somebody asked me if I was on such a high about the awards, and I said ‘Absolutely,’ But I was thinking to myself, ‘I’m also a little terrified.’ Because you hit a point like that and you really can’t go backwards?"

"Well, we can go backwards," chimes in Charles, the pragmatist, laughing nervously.

"If anything, though, it makes us want to work harder and record even better songs and continue to grow as performers and prove that we’re deserving of it," says Hillary.

You can hear that burning flame throughout NEED YOU NOW, which continues their delicate—or delicately rowdy—balance of emotional, gut-level balladry and high-octane, arena-ready rockers. Members of the trio co-wrote eight of the 11 tracks and were able to rely on a much tighter intra-band bond than they had when they were crafting the first album, which was recorded not that long after old pals Charles and Dave got together with new acquaintance Hillary to form the group back in 2006.

"Because of the success of the first record, we could get with some really great songwriters that’ll take an appointment with us now," says Dave, the group’s guitarist and background vocalist. "But more importantly, the three of us are the closest we’ve ever been as friends. Out on the road, we’ve spent almost every single day together for the past three and a half years. So by the time we were writing songs for this record, I think we’d all learned how to interact with each other better. We can write songs individually, but we definitely have something special when we do it together, and that’s gotten elevated. I know what Hillary is thinking, I know what Charles is thinking, and I think we play off each other a lot better."

"We would know if something personally was going on with Hillary," says Charles. "We would say, ‘How about we tap into your personal ... for a little bit? Let’s bring that out in a song!’ When we’re all songwriting, we know what’s going on in everybody’s lives."

"When they let me talk about it!" laughs Hillary, suggesting that there might be a slight gender divide in the group when it comes to complete candor. "I could see their eyes glaze over. But when we all get into talking about these things together, you get a song like ‘Ready to Love Again’ (the album’s closer) out of it."

"Songwriting," Charles asserts, "is almost kind of like our little group therapy."

Any such therapeutic discussions don’t involve too many regrets about professional roads not taken. Least of all would they have any reason to regret having abandoned the option of solo careers to come together as a group, at a time when the conventional wisdom was that individuals usually work better than bands in marketing country music. There were a few tentative moments during Lady Antebellum’s formation, though, as Charles and Dave danced around the idea of doing anything so brash as forming a band.

"When met Hillary," says Charles, "she had all these contacts in town and had some development deals—just basically really tied into the system." She had a bit of a head start on understanding the business, too, being the daughter of the well-known singer Linda Davis. "We were like, "All right, she’s got one of the best voices. We’ve got to write for her project.’ So we got together with her and wrote ‘All We’d Ever Need’ and ‘Love Don’t Live Here Anymore,’ which ended up on the first record. We thought, ‘Wow, this is really great,’ but we didn’t want her to think we were little weasels trying to get in there and ride her coattails."

Hillary: "And I was sitting there thinking, ‘This takes so much of the pressure off!’ You could not pay me enough money to go back and NOT be in a band. Being a solo artist wasn’t for me. I wasn’t cut out for it. I didn’t handle the pressure at all." Even now, she eagerly confesses, "I’m the baby of the group. But I’ve grown up!"

For the band itself, there was an element of growing up in public, a little. The debut album itself was an immediate smash, debuting at No. 1 on the country albums chart, an example of a rare phenomenon that is referred to in the arcane parlance of the music industry as? love at first sight. But their first real tour was an arena tour, opening for Martina McBride, and they acknowledge that, as a still fairly newly founded combo, there were rough patches in their performances. "It felt a little early, even though the crowds were really gracious and great to us," remembers Charles. "Then we said, ‘All right, this is what we need to improve on,’ and we went out to these fairs and festivals and made plenty of mistakes in a safer environment where it wasn’t quite as big a deal if you were to mess up. We did close to 200 shows our first year. Lost a ton of money, because we were doing smaller shows that cost us twice as much as we were getting paid."