Girl Power: Trisha Yearwood remains a force in country music
8/20/2019 12AM
With an inspiring new album, Trisha Yearwood returns
to the Palladium on her first solo tour in five years
By Scott Hall
Embarking on her first country album project since 2007, Trisha Yearwood didn’t set out to make a statement about women’s empowerment, and she sure didn’t expect a hit single right out of the gate.
That’s what happened, however, with “Every Girl in This Town,” the lead track from her new collection, Every Girl. Accompanied by a video celebrating women of all ages and backgrounds, the sunny anthem was picked up immediately by 84 radio stations upon its June release, becoming Billboard’s Highest Female Debut of 2019 on the Country Airplay Chart and the No. 4 Highest Billboard Country Radio Debut of the year.
No one was more surprised than Yearwood.
“Having not made a record in a while, and also I’m a 54-year-old female, my prospects of getting put on the radio – I was not really thinking about that at all,” she says, calling from her Nashville home.
“I told my producer, ‘I don’t want to think about anything except let’s find songs we like. We don’t have anybody to answer to, we don’t have to worry about radio, let’s just have fun.’ And then this song, so far, has been the highest-debuting single of my career. So now we have a song going up the chart, and now I’m all nervous again.”
Prominent on the new album are some of country’s top female songwriters, which was not a calculated move on Yearwood’s part but seems to suit the spirit of the times.
“It would be cool for me to say, ‘I had this girl-power idea, and I wanted to do all these things,’ but honestly, I was just looking for good songs,” says the singer whose No. 1 hits include “She’s in Love with the Boy” and “Thinkin’ About You.” “I think the timing was good. It seems like now we’re having this conversation about women in country music, and all of the women in country music are kind of a club, and there’s this real strong support that we’re giving one another. So ‘Every Girl in This Town’ sort of has become this raise-your-hands-in-the-air anthem for girls, and it’s been fun to be a part of it.”
The album also features collaborations with American Idol Kelly Clarkson, Eagles co-founder Don Henley and Yearwood’s hubby, a guy named Garth Brooks, with whom she spent three years on the road since her last Palladium visit in 2014.
Brooks’ coming-out-of-retirement world tour from 2014 to 2017 eventually totaled a record-setting 390 shows and grossed over $360 million, making it the most lucrative road trip in country music history and the 11th highest-grossing concert tour of all time.
Notwithstanding the runaway success, Yearwood acknowledges that marriage poses unique challenges when both partners are in show business.
“We are similar in that we are kind of overachievers and we like to do a lot and we like to be busy, but we understand – because we’ve both been married before – that the priority has to be each other,” she says. “We try not to spend too much time apart, and it works.”
Singing the Songbook
Surprisingly, Yearwood’s first solo recording project after the joint tour was 2018’s Let’s Be Frank, a tribute to Frank Sinatra and the Great American Songbook. She has loved pop standards since childhood, when she and her mother watched classic Hollywood musicals together.
“I was probably the only kid in second grade who knew who Judy Garland was, and I just really fell in love with this music,” she says. “I’d been talking about making a standards record for 20 years.”
She and producer Don Was booked the Capitol Records studio in Los Angeles where Sinatra recorded some of his greatest work, even using his favorite microphone. Singing live with a 55-piece orchestra, she managed to cut the 12 songs in just four days.
“It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life,” she says. “I hope I get another chance to shine a light on this music, because when you sing it, as a singer, you get it. You understand why it is timeless. It is so well written. It is so clever. It’s everything in one package.”
Aside from music, Yearwood has developed a separate fan base and a number of successful side ventures as a celebrity cook and homemaker. That process began when a New York publisher pitched her the idea of writing an autobiography.
“I was probably 40, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to write an autobiography, and if I did, I probably wouldn’t want to write it for 40 more years,” she recalls. “And they said, ‘Well, what would you want to write about?’ And I said, ‘Well, I like to cook.’”
Her first two cookbooks, co-written with her mother and sister and featuring family recipes, both hit No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list. That led to TV offers, and again, Yearwood was initially skeptical, but eventually was convinced she could approach the show like her books, with friends and family at the forefront. Trisha’s Southern Kitchen premiered on Food Network in 2012, won a Daytime Emmy Award the next year, and soon will begin shooting its 15th season.
And then came the housewares.
“When you have a successful cooking show, people go, ‘Well, why can’t the furniture on the show be yours, and how about the home accessories, how about the lamp in there?” she says, having just finished shooting a commercial for her furniture line.
“I basically say yes to things that I think I will enjoy, and I’m at a place in my life where I’m just not going to do it if it’s not going to be fun,” she says. “The hard part now is that I’m probably busier than I’ve ever been, and I want to not be as busy, but at the same time, I want to keep saying yes to stuff, because it’s really fun.”
Trisha Yearwood: Every Girl on Tour
7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 24
The Palladium
Info and tickets: (317) 843-3800 or TheCenterPresents.org
