‘Need You Now’ allows Lady Antebellum time to plan what they need next

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Going into Sunday night’s Grammy show, Lady Antebellum’s camp took a sanguine approach to the awards themselves.

‘We’re just focusing on the performance,’ group manager Gary Borman said during rehearsals last week. ‘That’s the one thing we have some control over.’

Even before the Recording Academy heaped five Grammys on the trio’s “Need You Now” album and single on Sunday, the monster success of both was fully being relished by band members Hillary Scott, Charles Kelley and Dave Haywood.

“We spent 300 days on the road last year,” Scott noted of their nonstop efforts supporting their second album. The Grammys constitute the last, albeit must delicious, icing on a cake made up of multiplatinum sales -- the album was the second biggest seller of 2010, with 3.1 million copies, behind only Eminem’s 3.42 million-selling “Recovery” -- it’s been honored by the Country Music Assn., the Academy of Country Music and other bodies.

They’ve still got one more round of “Need You Now”-related award competition ahead with the 2011 ACM Awards in April, but they’re now starting to turn their attention ahead to work on their third album.

“We’re starting to come up with some new things now,” Haywood told me last week after they’d wrapped up their rehearsal run-through.

For Scott, all the success brings with it a less-tangible reward. “In the songwriting, it’s really important for us to take more time, and this is giving us a chance to rest up and then really take our time with this next record.”

-- Randy Lewis