Why Are Little Big Town's Kids Up Way Past Their Bedtime?

Little Big Town at Nashville's War Memorial Auditorium, Oct. 2

Becky Fluke

By Eileen Finan

updated 10/03/2014 AT 06:00 PM EDT

•originally published 10/03/2014 AT 08:00 PM EDT

Little Big Town wowed Nashville music insiders Thursday night with a performance of new music from their upcoming album Pain Killer, due Oct. 21. But the country quartet shared the spotlight with a few equally popular, pint-sized guests: their kids.

Toward the end of their set at Nashville's War Memorial Auditorium, in which they played Pain Killer in its entirety, Karen Fairchild asked the house to point the lights toward the balcony, where 7-year-old Daisy (daughter of Kimberly Schlapman) and 6½-year-old Penelopi (daughter of Phillip Sweet) smiled and waved from where they sat with Fairchild and Jimi Westbrook's son Elijah, 4½.

"They are super cute," Fairchild said of the trio, but, she added, "they are up too late!"

While many of the band's new songs are up-tempo, rock-influenced numbers (which the kids "know all the words to," the singer said), Fairchild told the crowd that the three kids were an inspiration for the sweet ballad "Silver and Gold," which ends the album.

With lyrics like "Baby when you're down, baby when you're way down/Lost your shine and your feet are cold/ You don't have to stay down, you don't have to stay down/ You're like silver, you're like gold," the song is about times "when you're feeling used, when you don't feel so good," said Fairchild. "And we were thinking about what we'd want to say to our children at those times."