Nashville is the last place where anybody over 18 is trying to make music for the masses, and Sugarland fits right in. Jennifer Nettles has a twang she turns up or down depending on the song, and Kristian Bush’s mandolin and acoustic guitar give the songs a suggestion of country roots, but you don’t have to get to the live version of “Life in a Northern Town” on the “deluxe fan edition” of Love on the Inside to know Nettles sang along to every Bangles song on MTV when she was growing up.

There are times when the album’s calculations show—the bluegrass song to show they’re down home, the ballad to show that she can sing, “Steve Earle” to show that they have Americana cred—but they’re most convincing at their most broadly poppy, when they evoke a working class moment of clarity as they do in “All I Want to Do” and “Take Me As I Am.”

New Orleanians Annie Clements and Travis McNabb are Sugarland’s rhythm section on the road these days, and they appear briefly on the album, Clements singing some backing vocals and McNabb on the live “Life in a Northern Town.” Even if they were on every track, though, we wouldn’t know because mass music is about stars, and Love on the Inside is no different. The songs are all about them and the image of them as people who live in the same sort of town that John Mellencamp suggested he grew up in. Not a small small town—not something hickish or backwards—but not the big city either. The sort of town Bobbie Ann Mason started her career writing about, a Hammond or some place like that. Sugarland celebrates that place, just as many country artists do, nostalgic for the authentic American place so many people like to they come from. They don’t, of course, and their Hammond wasn’t like they depict it, but for 45 or so minutes, it’s a place we’d all like to think we came from, and that’s a testament to the strength of Sugarland’s persona.