Dave Haywood is the kind of guy who apologizes profusely for missing a phone interview by nine minutes.
“I don’t want people to think we’re that kind of band!” Hill said, noting that as a former accountant he prides himself on his punctuality. “We’re really not the type to show up three hours late and not care.”
Haywood needn’t worry. His band, , has amassed so much good will over its eight years and four full-length albums that short of a tabloid-style drug meltdown, he could miss a dozen interviews in a row and not feel any blowback.
Haywood, whose moppy hair and quick smile belie his precise instrumental attack, is one-third of the megastar pop-country act, which includes fellow Nashville residents Hillary Scott and Charles Kelley.
And on the eve of his band’s headlining tour, which stops at the on Jan. 23, Haywood was taking nothing for granted.
“During rehearsals we spent an entire day watching our (backing) band from the audience with the lighting director so we could make any changes needed,” he said. “We want to have a role in every part of the night, from the lighting to the music you hear when you’re walking in.”
After Lady Antebellum’s 2008 self-titled debut went platinum and earned a Grammy nomination, the slick, easy-on-the-eyes group had its pick of opening gigs for pop-country’s biggest names — including Tim McGraw, Martina McBride and Keith Urban — further cementing it as a major Nashville player.
But it wasn’t until the band’s first arena headlining tour for 2011’s “Own the Night” that it learned a 90-minute show is a lot harder to sustain than an opening slot.
“On our last tour we really felt like were missing a couple big, up-tempo moments in the show,” Haywood, 31, said. “Some of our ballads and mid-tempo songs like ‘Need You Now’ and ‘Just a Kiss’ have been hits, but we still needed a big song. And what was that going to be?”
In that spirit, Haywood and his band mates wrote a couple “big, up-tempo” songs for 2013’s “Golden,” an album that also exhibits more of the band’s overall safe, mellow crossover vibe while still managing to slide in an upbeat track here and there (“Compass,” “Goodbye Town”) .
“I told Hillary, ‘If you can do these big, super-funky moments in the show we’ll be set.’ So it was an ongoing process of finding songs that spoke to us and that felt great live.”
Crafting a 90-minute arena show requires a firm grasp of theatrical fundamentals, but more so than most bands, in Lady Antbellum, the songs tend to outshine the individual personalities.
“I love three-part harmonies and wish there was more of it on the radio,” Haywood said of his band’s signature sound. “That family group-harmony sound is something I grew up being obsessed with. The Eagles, the Allman Brothers, and the Doobie Brothers used to blow my mind.”
Fortunately, Lady Antebellum is in a position to spread that love of harmony to millions of its own fans — thanks to its years of road and studio work.
“With a lot the people we used to open for, we’d only have one or two songs under our belt and were just trying to fill some time, playing half covers and a few of our own songs,” Haywood said.“Now we’re lucky that we have four albums of material to pull from and a whole evening to really make our own.”
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John Wenzel is an A&E reporter and critic for . Follow him .
