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"    Photo: David McClister   Tennessee group The Band Perry recently released their second album, Pioneer, and have been traveling all over the country appearing at awards shows like the Billboard Music Awards and the ACM Awards, as well as on the season finale of American Idol. The band, comprised of siblings Kimberly, Neil, and Reid Perry, is now preparing to tour in support of the disc and will spend the summer opening for Rascal Flatts as well as performing their own headlining shows. ELLE.com spoke with Kimberly about the making of Pioneer, what it means to be a country act with mass appeal, and the group&amp;#039;s stage ensembles.    Did you go into making your new album with a specific goal? We definitely had a unified goal among the three of us. That tie that bound us all together was that we refused to be a one-hit wonder. Coming off of the heels of a song like &amp;quot;If I Die Young&amp;quot; and gratefully having success on the first album, we were really thrilled to have the opportunity to record again. When we did the first one we were kids, we were new to this business. Reid and Neil were still in Superman pajamas! We were studying the music business and the one feared phrase we always heard was &amp;quot;sophomore slump.&amp;quot; It was almost like a horror film in our household so we really dug hard both in the songwriting phase and in the recording phase to make sure we were truly marching forward as a band. When you&amp;#039;re making a song, how do you know it&amp;#039;s moving you forward? I feel like it&amp;#039;s always an innate sense. We probably wrote 50 songs around Pioneer and then ended up culling all of that down into 12 tracks. The first song that we wrote for the record was called &amp;quot;Back To Me Without You.&amp;quot; When we wrote that song, I remember we were all like &amp;quot;Okay, now we&amp;#039;re writing the second album.&amp;quot; There was something about the growth of the sense of melody about it and also the transparency and vulnerability we were writing with on that particular lyric. It just felt like it was the next level. A lot of times too we&amp;#039;ll road test a song. We continued touring all during the making of the record and so we would try out a song live and see if there was an immediate reaction from the crowd. Is important for the songs to tell a story? Yes and no. Country music by nature is a storytelling genre and certainly as the lead singer in the family and the band, I do my job as the key storyteller. No matter what the emotion of the song is, it&amp;#039;s my job to tell that through my voice and my countenance. But for instance, a song &amp;quot;Done&amp;quot; was written more about a circumstance and a particular relationship so I feel like we wrote the lyrics in a way that we didn&amp;#039;t give up the ghost of the story but we allowed it to be vague. We wanted to find the sentiment more than the story. Does it seem like The Band Perry appeals to people who might not necessarily be into country music? You know we&amp;#039;ve certainly found that, which is definitely an interesting thing. If you come to see us live you will see about half of the crowd which you would imagine are your traditional country music listeners but frankly the other half is a mixed bag. We have sometimes three generations at our shows. There seems to thankfully be something about our band that has connected on different levels with different people, which we love. Does it seem like people expect you to dress like a country artist? We&amp;#039;ve never really felt that pressure. In one sense the three of us just keep our heads down and do our own thing. We like to bring fashion to the forefront as we feel like it holds hands with our music. We grew up listening to country for sure but we also grew up on rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll so I&amp;#039;ve looked a lot to Stevie Nicks, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and those sorts of style icons to wrap into what we do. How would you describe your own style? I think it changes from musical era to musical era for us. I am definitely at a very different style place right now than perhaps on our first record. Right now I am definitely into monochromatic simplicity when it comes to color palette, but I&amp;#039;m way into textures. We just played the Billboard Music Awards, and I wore this black suede dress that was really fitted but had all this crazy fringe. I feel like I&amp;#039;m simple in one aspect, but I love pops of drama. A bit of a contradiction. I think my hair is my favorite accessory, and I always say &amp;quot;There are so many gorgeous girls in this business, so I just want to be the funky one.&amp;quot; I wear that idea mostly in my hair. Who are your favorite designers right now? I love Dior, especially for red carpet stuff. I wore Dior to the ACM Awards, and it was amazing. It&amp;#039;s comfortable, young, clean, and chic. For live performances and a lot of shoots right now we&amp;#039;re wearing a lot of Balmain.  Is it important that you coordinate your outfits with your band mates? Yeah, we don&amp;#039;t want to look like triplets and we don&amp;#039;t want to look uniform, but we certainly try to have a defining texture. We&amp;#039;re into black leather and gold, so we&amp;#039;ll wear that with different aspects. So we try to have a texture that weaves through or a color that weaves through but not in an obvious way. It&amp;#039;s a real art to have the perception of unity in the group but not looking overly matching. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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