For every 75 stories about girls who came to Nashville looking for country music stardom, and ended up going home in tears on the Greyhound red-eye, there's one about a girl who got precisely what she was after.
Business acumen, timing and the manipulation of good contacts helped levitate Trisha Yearwood to her current status as country's Number One female vocalist. She is, to put it simply, no dummy.
But Trisha Yearwood's voice—a powerful, emotionally charged instrument with all the hues of a finely-tuned rainbow—would probably have opened doors in Los Angeles, had she set her sights on a career in pop music. She could have just as easily gone to Broadway.
Nashville, however, was where this yellow-haired Georgian wanted to go from the very beginning. A child of the '70s, her musical appetites had developed around Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris and the Eagles, but she knew the old country stuff from her parents' record collection, and she loved a lot of it, too.
More importantly, Yearwood knew the strengths and weaknesses of her own voice; she knew she wasn't a rock singer. From the first time she stood with her sister in front of the bedroom mirror back home, singing "I Can't Help it If I'm Still in Love With You," she felt good with the emotional language of country music.
Today, six of Yearwood's singles have reached Number One, and five of her albums are platinum. She's just had the biggest year ever: She performed a duet with Luciano Pavarotti in Italy, sang on the Academy Awards telecast, and she sold out a string of huge American shows with her buddy, Garth Brooks.
In September, Yearwood was named Female Vocalist of the Year by the Country Music Association for the second consecutive year.
A lot of it, she says, has to do with confidence—the same kind of confidence she had to muster in order to tell her parents, back in Georgia, she was going to Nashville in the first place.
"There's something inside you that says yes, I can do this," Yearwood explains. "Because you know, deep down, that you can do it. But to say that I wasn't incredibly nervous to walk on stage and sing with Pavarotti would be a lie.
"I mean, the Oscars? That's pretty intimidating."
Always a little shy, a little self-conscious and intimidated by crowds, Trisha just closed her eyes, tapped her heels together and went for it.
"You have to somehow inside you believe that you belong there," she explains. "If you don't believe it, you're not gonna be there. Always, since I was a little kid, I've been a visual person. I always saw myself singing onstage. I saw myself at the CMA Awards, winning Female Vocalist. OK, so it took me seven years to win it, but I finally did! I've always seen those things.
"So you're your biggest cheerleader. You have to believe you can do it.
"Of all the things about myself that I'm not confident about, the one thing I know that I can do is sing. I know that it's there. I know that my voice is the way I want it to be. So I trust that."
Monticello, Ga. is one of the oldest cities in the red-clay area southeast of Atlanta, a tiny dogwood-and-peachtree town with historic, white antebellum-style houses, big porches and big backyards, where families sip iced tea at sundown and listen to the cicadas begin to hum.
The population of Monticello has stayed at just around 2,000 for 30 years, or maybe more. The town traces its distinguished history back to the War Between the States; in fact, one of the first things they tell you, with pride, is that Monticello was one of the very few towns spared by General William Tecumseh Sherman as his army swept eastward toward the Atlantic, burning just about everything Georgians held dear.
Jack and Gwen Yearwood brought up two daughters in Monticello—the second, Patricia Lynn, was born on September 19, 1964. Jack headed up the loan department at the nearby Bank of Monticello, and Gwen taught third grade at Monticello Elementary School. They built a modest ranch house 25 minutes from the center of town.
For young people, the hangout place was the town square, a grassy, nondescript area in the downtown section, not far from the weathered statue of Confederate war heroes. It was a 30-mile drive to the nearest movie theater, in Macon, and the only fast food outlet—at least when Trisha Yearwood lived and went to school in Monticello—was an old drive-thru Dairy Queen.
The most exciting thing to happen in Monticello, to many people's minds, was the arrival of a Hollywood film crew in 1990. Joe Pesci, Marisa Tomei and Fred "Herman Munster" Gwynne made the movie My Cousin Vinny in town. Tomei, an unknown at the time of filming, later won an Academy Award for her performance in the courtroom comedy.
The Yearwoods were your average, church-going middle class southern family. Trisha says neither she nor older sister Beth gave their parents cause for concern. "We were both pretty responsible," she explains. "We weren't troubled kids at all. We were both A students, we both graduated at the top of our class, but she was definitely more conservative—and still is. I was the one who would speak up at the table and say something I shouldn't have said."
Both Jack and Gwen had come from farm stock, and had each been the first in their respective families to attend college. "My parents had big dreams for both of their children," Trisha says, "as far as 'You're going to be educated, and you're going to be able to take care of yourself.' It wasn't the mentality of 'Speak when you're spoken to, and go to college and find yourself a husband.'"
Both girls were given checking accounts as early as grade school, and although there was never much money in them, it helped to teach them responsibility.
Attendance at Monticello First United Methodist was mandatory—and, Trisha says, it still is. "You don't go home for the weekend and not go to church on Sunday morning, no matter how many records you've sold!"
The girls also spent at least one night a week participating in a church "youth group."
Trisha's childhood was sports, sports, sports. She played softball and basketball, and was water girl for the football team at her high school, Piedmont Academy. She was named "Miss Cougar," too, and class valedictorian.
Her dad gave her an old guitar when she was 13, to pass the time while she was laid up with a broken ankle. She also learned a little piano.
The records in the Yearwood house were a combination of Beth's favorites—the Eagles, Steve Miller, your basic '70s FM checklist—and old country albums belonging to Mom and Dad.
Trisha discovered Linda Ronstadt in 1975. "Nobody had any Ronstadt records in my house," she remembers. "I think it was when she did 'When Will I Be Loved.' I was just knocked out. It sounded like country music to me, but not really."
The first album she bought for herself was Ronstadt's Simple Dreams (1977). "Then I went back and bought everything she'd done. I found Heart Like a Wheel, Prisoner in Disguise, and through her I discovered Karla Bonoff. And I don't know where I found Emmylou Harris."
Trisha and Beth began to sing duets on Ronstadt hits—only the simple ones, though, because Trisha couldn't play too many chords—and on some of the old country standards their parents loved so much.
From the start, Trisha demonstrated a passion for singing; eventually, her sister dropped out of the "act," but Trisha kept soaking up more music. By studying liner notes, she discovered people like Gram Parsons and J.D. Souther. And Rodney Crowell and Rosanne Cash.
After her 1982 graduation from Piedmont—a private high school established by her parents and several other Monticello familes concerned that the public high school wasn't offering enough educational choices—Trisha attended nearby Young Harris College for two years.
Then she enrolled at the University of Georgia as a business major. She did not, however, make a good Bulldog. "All my friends were going to Georgia, and I was miserable 'cause I wanted to be singing," she says.
"I was not a music major in school, but I hung out with the music department. I did all the operettas and musicals and all that because I wanted that opportunity.
"I was never a very comfortable entertainer. I'm still not. I loved to sing, and I believed in my voice, but getting up in front of people was really hard for me. And making myself do that through musical theater was a real good way to learn."
It was around this time that Trisha announced her intention to investigate the music business. "Because I was a good student, and I'm a pretty logical person, I think most people expected me to follow in my dad's footsteps and be a banker," she says. "Or people that knew that I was musical expected me to get a degree and be a music teacher. But I just wanted to sing.
"And I wanted to get a business degree because I didn't know what I would do with a music degree. I mean, I knew I wanted to sing, but I knew that if I walked into a record label, they weren't going to ask to see my degree first."
And so, in the best Clampett tradition, Trisha loaded up the truck and pointed it west toward the big city: Nashville.
"I didn't know anybody in Nashville, but I did feel like the odds of my getting discovered in Monticello, Ga. were pretty slim," she says. "So what do I do? I go to where the music I want to make is being made."
A hundred starry-eyed singers arrive in Nashville every week, thinking that the right contacts or the right person in the right audience at some open mic night will open the door to a record contract, and to inevitable stardom.
Trisha Yearwood, practical banker's daughter, had no such delusions. She found a way in through a side door, by enrolling in the music business program at Nashville's Ward Belmont University, Baptist college. "I could study the industry I wanted to be in," she recalls. "Everything I did was a tiny step toward the record deal."
As part of the program at Belmont, Yearwood was given a job in the publicity department at MTM Records. Actress Mary Tyler Moore's country label never turned a profit, and before it went belly-up a year later, Trisha had graduated from Belmont and had a real job as the label's receptionist. She got to watch music bigwigs come and go every day, and she soaked up the heady atmosphere of Nashville at work.
Singing, of course, was what she wanted to do, and through her songwriter friends at MTM she began to get work making demo recordings; sometimes, if a writer hoped to pitch a song to, say, Reba McEntire, Trisha would have to perform it in a vauguely Reba-esque style.
She believes demo singing was a terrific training ground. "You learn what a good song is, and what a bad song is, because you sing every kind of song you could imagine. You're kind of forced to develop your own style.
"Before I moved to town, I was singing along with the radio, like everybody else. So this made me take a song I've never heard before and not go 'Well, how do I imitate Linda Ronstadt singing this?' but 'How would I do it?'"
After a year or two, she began to realize that singing on demos—and getting paid for it!—beat the hell out of knocking on anonymous doors.
"You learn that the very people that need to hear you are hearing you every day without you having to do anything," she says. "So what better way?"
Future country stars Billy Dean, Linda Davis and Joe Diffie were all "doing the demo thing" at the same time. But Trisha Yearwood was always the one who stood out.
"By the time I got my deal with MCA in 1990, it was pretty much undeniable," she explains. "They were hearing my voice every day. People started to ask 'I like the song, but who's the girl singing on this?'"
Meanwhile, Garth Fundis was a record producer without a cause. Fundis was still hurting from the death the previous year of Keith Whitley, whom he'd championed and steered to a career at the top. Along with producing Whitley's records, Fundis was the singer's friend and confidante, just as he'd been for Don Williams a decade earlier. Fundis didn't believe in punching a producer's clock—when he got involved with an artist, their lives became intertwined, the artist's goals became his goals.
Fundis was devastated when Whitley drank himself to death at age 33. For a while, he convinced himself he would never get that close again.
Then he accepted an invitation from a songwriter friend, Pat Alger, to come to the funky Nashville club Douglas Corner. Alger had a sometime band—it was called, tongue in cheek, the Algerians—and the harmony singer, he told Fundis, was something else. An amazing vocalist. All the record labels in town were showing an interest.
Fundis had only worked with male artists before, and so he had never heard any of the demos with Trisha Yearwood's vocals that had been circulating for months.
At the club, recalls Fundis, "Pat asked her to step up and do a couple of songs. And all I could see was this face, and this tremendously gorgeous voice coming out of this woman's throat. The tone, and the way she articulated, the way she phrased things, the way she let go of words. It was pretty striking."
It didn't take long, he says, before he started thinking about forming a working relationship with Yearwood. They went to lunch a couple of days later and he said he wanted to "get involved" in her career, if she was interested. "She was very cautious, and my instinct was to try and gain her trust," says Fundis. "We had a couple of meetings before she said 'Let's do this.'"
Yearwood: "There were a couple of producers who were interested in going into the studio and recording some stuff, all of which would cost some money and require you to sign an agreement. And I was real wary about signing anything.
"So Garth and I agreed that we would just see how we got along. We'd go in and listen to a bunch of songs together, and see if we liked the same kind of music. We agreed to do a live showcase together without any commitment."
Cost of the showcase, also at Douglas Corner, was $2,000. Fundis and Yearwood hired a pickup band and split everything down the middle.
They each brought in a handful of songs they liked, from their stacks of songwriters' demos. These included most of what would become Yearwood's first hits: "Down on My Knees," "The Woman Before Me" and "She's in Love With the Boy."
Joe Galante of RCA Records talked vaguely about a development deal, but it was Tony Brown, then heading up the A&R Department at MCA Nashville, who "heard the hits" and offered Trisha a recording contract virtually on the spot.
"I remember sitting there about two tables back in the center," Brown says. "And as soon as she did 'She's in Love With the Boy' I said 'I'm gonna sign her.' I said 'If that's not a hit, if that's not a great voice, I quit.' She did a bunch of the songs from (what would become) her first album."
Brown, who's now the president of MCA Nashville, also remembers hearing Trisha sing "The Thunder Rolls," which would be a smash hit for Garth Brooks in another year.
He had no doubts that Trisha Yearwood was going to be a major star for MCA Records—his instincts told him so right away. "I've always trusted them," Brown explains, "and very seldom has it bit me in the butt. Nine times out of 10, it works. And the times it didn't work, everybody was stupid but me."
With Garth Fundis behind the board, Trisha began recording her debut album. Before the first session, she brought her copies of Linda Ronstadt's Simple Dreams and Prisoner in Disguise albums and thrust them in front of her producer. "This is the kind of record I want to make," she told him.
In their years together, Fundis would produce six albums for Trisha Yearwood. She was, he says, somewhat difficult to record—at least in the beginning.
"Difficult in the sense that she has all this power. She goes from a whisper to a roar in the blink of an eye. That in itself presents a technical challenge—not impossible, but a challenge.
"But she's an amazingly gifted singer. She knows where her voice is at, what it's doing, what it's not doing. She just has a gift of tone."
According to Fundis, Trisha "has paid attention to a lot of singers, not just Linda Ronstadt. She gives Linda a lot of credit as far as influencing her, and it's true, but there are a lot of other things that go into it—I think Barbra Streisand must've had a huge influence on her as well. I heard things from her that made me think of Barbra Streisand from time to time."
On Trisha Yearwood, Fundis and Yearwood developed a formula that made her an immediate standout among the show queens and cowgirls getting hits in those days. Her big, take-no-prisoners voice was applied to a collection of smart, well-said but still nakedly emotional songs that showcased her power and delicacy, all within a stone's throw of one another. Trisha Yearwood was, in other words, a varied palette of contemporary country with some rock 'n' roll and a little careful balladry—not unlike your average '70s Linda Ronstadt album, as a matter of fact.
In May, 1991, "She's in Love With the Boy" galloped to the top of the Billboard country chart, the first time any woman's debut single had accomplished that feat since Connie Smith's "Once a Day" in 1964.
Based on the single's success, Trisha's album went platinum; that hadn't happened to a debut from a female artist since Donna Fargo 20 years before.
It all happened so quickly that Trisha felt like a deer in the headlights. She says she thought her career would probably build like Reba's—take one or two albums to get established, a few hit singles …. she says she never even had time to think about it.
She remembers when someone from MCA handed her that first CD. "Getting that package with the pictures, and the lyrics are written out … you can't believe it," she says. "And there's a certain element of it that's still there, every time you make an album.
"Every time you walk into a record store and see yourself on the racks, you still … I mean, it's not normal. It's a little more normal than it was then, but it's still not normal and I hope it never is."
For his part, Tony Brown felt vindicated immediately. "If an artist can make a great record, that's one thing. If they can perform live, great, that's another thing. A lot of times an artist can make a great record and can't perform live."
In his office, Brown says, he keeps all the country music TV stations going constantly, muted, just to see what's up, and the turns the sound up when he sees an artist being interviewed. "The other ingredient is when they open their mouth and talk, either on TV or in the press. Her voice had been that good for a long time, and I'd heard her voice on demos forever. But when you talk to her, this girl is intelligent. To me, that's one of the first things you pick up on."
All over Nashville, in early 1992, MCA had erected Billboards with Tricia's picture. The ads trumpeted her success with the caption PLATINUM BLONDE.
Trisha, meanwhile, was trying to get her life and career together, and sometimes it seemed as if the elements of her success were conspiring to make every day more difficult.
In college, she had married Chris Latham, a musician friend. Chris was very supportive of his wife's goals, but, she believes, she was just too ambitious to make the marriage work. Almost immediately, they were at loggerheads.
"You learn early on you might as well not even try to fight that, and just do what you do," Yearwood says. "The marriage thing would have fallen apart no matter what I was doing for a living. It just wasn't meant to be. We're friends today; he's very happy and I'm very happy, so it was the right thing for both of us."
When the album hit, "I went out on the road and immediately realized that I could live out there. I wasn't missing him, I wasn't being the kind of wife that … I should have missed the guy! We were really good friends, and we should have probably stayed friends."
Chris and Trisha were quietly divorced in 1992.
By then, she was shuffling a number of important men in her life, all of whom respected her drive and her desire to call as many of her shots as possible—something no woman in country, except for Reba, had successfully done.
In her demo-cutting days, Trisha's songwriter friend Kent Blazy brought Trisha in to cut a duet with another aspiring singer, a chubby, steely-eyed Oklahoman named Garth Brooks.
"We did the duet together, and we naturally sang the same places together," Yearwood remembers. "And it just kind of clicked. He just became a fan of my voice, and he said I don't know what's going to happen to me, but if I'm lucky enough to have success, I want to work together someday. And he went on his way, and I went on mine.
"Two years down the road, he's the hottest thing in country music. I get signed to MCA, and he marches into MCA Records and asks if I can open his shows. Which was a pretty major thing, because he'd never seen me perform live, and he was so hot at that point there were a lot of more established artists that would've jumped at that slot."
Trisha's spot as the opening act on Brooks' tour led to speculation in the tabloid press that the two were an item—her recent divorce and all, nod, nod, wink, wink. Not a bit of it was true.
The two singers just enjoyed working together—and they both know a good thing when they hear it. To this day, Trisha Yearwood is the only duet partner Garth Brooks has ever had.
She says their kinship is under the skin. "His music is different from mine, and his performing style and all that is very different, but we grew up on the same music. I've always wanted to be Linda Ronstadt, and he's always wanted to be James Taylor. So it works, it works really well."
For a while, Brooks' managers handled Trisha's business affairs, but after the album took off she began to feel dissatisfied. She fired them the very week Nashville was painting itself red with the CMA Awards, which set tongues a-wagging with speculation that this newcoming hussy had shot herself in the proverbial foot.
With Garth Fundis temporarily shuffling contracts and faxing memos, Trisha accompanied her lawyer to a seminar given by Ken Kragen, the legendary music-business manager who'd driven the boat for Kenny Rogers and Lionel Richie, and who had spearheaded the "We Are the World" and "Hands Across America" events. She took extensive notes.
Here, thought Trisha Yearwood, was a man who knows how to get things done.
"He's such a positive guy," she says. "And it all made sense. I had always felt that everything had just kind of happened to me—we were kind of reacting to everything instead of reacting to it and having a plan, like he always does.
"I just got this feeling from him that whatever you wanted to do, you could just say, oh, 'I want to sing on a movie soundtrack,' and he would make it happen. He's just that kind of guy."
Kragen was flattered and intrigued when Yearwood asked if he would consider taking her on as a client.
From his office in Los Angeles, Kragen dictated a 17-page memo to Trisha, outlining his thoughts for her ascending career. He called it a "game plan" and it methodically covered such topics as her physical appearance, her performance technique, marketing strategies and television/film placements.
"It is important for you to recognize that it will take a certain amount of time for me to get a good feeling for your abilities and full potential," he wrote at the conclusion of his lengthy Trisha manifesto. "I find it takes anywhere from a minimum of one month to several for me to understand fully a person's needs, desires and capabilities."
"I was impressed that he had a plan," says Yearwood. "I mean, nobody had had a plan so far. We've worked together six years now on a handshake agreement, and it's very much that way. He's a big thinker. He's the reason that I have done a lot of things that I wouldn't normally get a chance to do."
Through his many connections in the entertainment business, Yearwood says, Kragen got her on Leno and Letterman, and cameos in the film The Thing Called Love and on the TV series Jag, and it was because of Kragen she performed at the closing ceremonies of the Olympic games, and sang the National Anthem at Game 3 of the 1998 World Series in San Diego.
He also paid Broadway producer Joe Layton $50,000 to work on Trisha's "act," helping her reach out and touch the people in the nosebleed seats; Layton, who'd worked with Streisand, Ross and Parton, provided "invaluable" showbiz assistance to the green young singer. Trisha says she's still using his advice to this day.
"She's in Love With a Boy" was a winner out of the gate, and it set a pattern that would continue more or less unabated for six years.
Between 1991 and '96, Trisha Yearwood and Garth Fundis cranked out five albums, a Christmas collection and a greatests hits set, all of them well-reviewed and successful, all of them putting singles on the chart. To date, six of Yearwood's singles have hit No. 1 on the Billboard chart, with 10 of them going all the way on the Radio & Records chart.
Says Fundis: "Our deal from the beginning was 'I won't ever ask you to record something you don't want to sing,' and 'I don't want you to ever sing something you don't want to sing just because I like it.' There have been things along the way that I thought would've been great for her, or she thought would've been great for her, that we didn't do because we both disagreed.
"It worked both ways. I think we were a great team. I think we complimented each other."
He marveled, he says, at her proficiency in the studio. "I don't think she ever really struggled over very many songs. Once we found a demo that we liked, she would listen to it a few times and then put it away. She wouldn't listen to it over and and over, because she didn't want to be influenced too much by the demo, or by the singer on the demo.
"She would basically learn the song at the same time the musicians were learning the song. She had worked as a session singer; she knew how to do that. She would make her own marks and her own notations, set it up on the music stand and go for it."
Yearwood won her first Grammy in 1994, for "I Fall to Pieces," a duet with Aaron Neville on the Patsy Cline standard, taken from the Rhythm, Country & Blues anthology.
Three years later, she took home another Grammy, this one for her duet with Garth Brooks, "In Another's Eyes." This was the same year Yearwood was named the CMA's Female Vocalist of the Year for the first time.
In 1992, during the recording of her second album, Hearts in Armor, Yearwood met bassist Robert Reynolds of the alterna-country band The Mavericks. Her divorce from Chris Latham had been finalized, and rather than deal with the pain and heartache of more romance, she had decided to focus her attention on her career for a while.
Reynolds' group was also on MCA, and they literally met at the office. A charming, sensitive man whose heroes were Buddy Holly, Hank Williams and the Beatles, Reynolds quickly won her heart and changed her plans, and they were married May 21, 1994.
"He was just one of the nicest people I'd ever met," Trisha says. "He's got an incredible sense of humor; we laugh a lot. And we share such a passion for music—it was the first time I'd ever been with someone that really understood why I have to do what I do, musically."
For his part, Reynolds—whose band has sold far, far fewer records than his wife—retains a level head and a good sense of humor about his role as "Mr. Yearwood." Sometimes he'll even good-naturedly sign an autograph that way.
"When she's onstage, I'm proud of her and I know that the woman singing is my wife, but while she's singing for 20,000 people I believe she really kind of belongs to them," Reynolds says. "They bought a ticket for that show, that singer, that person.
"It's an extremely balanced relationship, and we never have the occasion to compare who we are personally to who we are in terms of our careers. Since I'm married to the human being that is Trisha Yearwood, and I'm not married to the celebrity image, I'm dealing with the woman."
Robert, says Trisha, has "a difficult job. It's a difficult position—not to be chauvenistic here—to put a man in a position of watching his wife go off and tour all the time. It's harder for a man in some ways. But it was never hard for him; he's been very understanding and supportive of that because he does it."
In England, their roles are reversed—Trisha doesn't move a whole lot of records there, while the Mavericks' latest, Trampoline, went platinum. The band recently sold out two nights at the Royal Albert Hall.
"Most people think well, why can't I be more important than the music?" Trisha continues. "And we don't ask that of each other. If he asked me tomorrow to quit the road to save our marriage, I would do it. But he wouldn't do that, and vice versa. We know that each other is more important than what we do for a living, but we also know that what we do for a living is very important for us to be happy. We don't ask each other to make crazy sacrifices to prove it."
The couple—when they're home—reside on 18 wooded acres in Hendersonville, a rural suburb of Nashville. It's considered quite a coup to get them both at a social engagement.
"We look after each other quite well when we're together," Reynolds explains. "We never turn our backs on one another. We know how to enter a room together and know that each of us will be pulled aside. We're good with this now."
Every so often, Yearwood will make a surprise stage apperance with the Mavericks. She cut the old Frank & Nancy Sinatra tune "Somethin' Stupid" as a duet with the group's lead singer, Raul Malo.
MCA has all but given up on getting the Mavericks' music played on country radio. Talk around the water cooler is that the band will soon be marketed out of the label's Los Angeles offices.
"There's nothing about them that is typical Nashville, or typical band," Yearwood enthuses. "They're very unique, and no they're not going to be as mainstream as acts that are trying to be all things to all people. They're trying to be the Mavericks, and they don't care what anybody thinks of them.
"The reason they are so great is because they're different. And they reason they are having trouble at country radio is because they're so different. Country radio seems to really embrace something different, but then they want everything to sound like it.
"When I first moved to town, we were just getting over the Urban Cowboy phase, thank God. Then Randy Travis and George Strait came out, and they were really traditional country, which was totally going against what was being played on the radio. And then when they hit, of course everybody wanted to be the next Randy Travis and the next George Strait. So I guess the music industry is notorious for jumping on the bandwagon after something has hit."
She's Got the Look
Although Yearwood has a natural, God-given talent, a talent she is justifiably proud of, she is in a business where physical appearance is all-important.
"Image has to be a concern," she says, "and it is a concern. Losing 30 pounds, which is what I've done in the past couple years, does not make me a better singer. But it does make me a better entertainer, because I'm so much more confident—I feel so much better about myself—that I'm better onstage. Because I'm not self-conscious any more."
Trisha's weight was one of the first issues Kragen addressed when he took over as her manager; since he signed on, her album covers and publicity photos have always featured just her face; on The Song Remembers When, she seemed to be hiding behind a bouquet of flowers. At one point, feeling particularly self-conscious, she passed on making a video for her single "Better Your Heart Than Mine."
"It's my little cross to bear, you know?" Trisha says. "Everybody has something in their life that's hard for them. Thank God, with me it was never alcohol or drugs or whatever. But food, and my tendency to be overweight because of heredity, it's just there."
In 1996, when her father was diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes, Trisha decided to take an active role in her health. She hired a trainer and began regular gym workouts, and, more importantly, began to watch her intake of food. "I got over whining about the fact that I couldn't eat whatever I wanted," she admits. "I finally just accepted that. And I have been up and down.
"I've learned what to do to be healthy. And I've learned that if I don't want to weigh 200 pounds, this is what I have to do. So I have to watch what I eat, and I have to exercise."
She has a new philosophy: It's what you look like inside that counts.
"I can stop looking at the magazines and bitching about how Cindy Crawford doesn't have to worry about what she eats, because I'm not her, I'm me," she says. "And she probably does.
"I'm not skinny, but I'm happy with where I am. I represent more the norm of women than what is projected in magazines."
She's proud of the fact that she's always nice to her fans, people from all over the country who feel they know her. "Part of what makes country music artists different from any other kind of artists is our accessibility," she explains. "And that's part of what makes country music fans great. You don't have to be afraid of your fans, because for the most part, they're pretty good people. They're pretty polite, and for the most part they just want to come up and say 'hey, I like your music.'
"Because country music artists make fans feel like they're very approachable. So somebody doesn't think twice about coming up to you in the grocery store, because you make them feel that way through your music and through your interviews. That's the country music way."
Tony Brown likes to say that every artist's career has its high points—he calls them spikes—and that the really significant artists, like George Strait and Reba McEntire, will hit several spikes during a career, each one higher than the last.
Although Trisha Yearwood's career since joining MCA had included some pretty darn pointy spikes—each of her first five albums, with the exception of The Sweetest Gift, her Christmas package, sold platinum or better—the feeling around the MCA boardroom was that she could be doing better.
"Sales of the first record were so huge, but she and Garth (Fundis) were getting just a little more arty every time," Brown says. "And radio was whining about her records being a bit artistic, and the sales were sliding. So we had to deal with it, you know?"
According to Fundis, Trisha tried to keep the truth from him, that MCA wanted him out of the picture.
Brown: "She had finished Everybody Knows, and when she turned it in it wasn't quite … there weren't enough singles, we thought. So they sent me over to talk to her about maybe we should have someone go in and cut two or three sides … and maybe I should do it, because I signed her and it would be less traumatic."
Trisha, who had been fighting for her old friend Fundis, finally relented. "She agreed, and she said 'You've got to go talk to Garth with me.'"
Fundis, by this time, had taken a job as staff producer with another label. "I called Tony to make sure it wasn't going to jeopardize anything," he recalls. "Because I basically told them 'I'm Trisha Yearwood's producer, and you're negotiating for the rest of my time during the year.' And Tony said no, it shouldn't be a problem at all.
"I was uninvited from future marketing meetings at that point, which I'd always been included in. It was like I was going to give away some secret. And from that point, I knew it was going to be just a matter of time. It got more and more complicated, and Trisha felt in the middle. She felt a loyalty to me."
Brown says he and the label bosses agreed to "let Garth finish the record; that way he'd have one complete body of work."
Although it produced a Number One single ("Believe Me Baby I Lied)," the Everybody Knows album failed to reach platinum status. In the boardroom, the absent Fundis was blamed—or, rather, it was concluded that his and Trisha's working relationship had stagnated.
"I don't want her to ever feel like she was stuck in a rut," says Fundis. "We never made any long-term agreements with each other—I worked on an album-to-album basis.
"I was disappointed, understandably, but at the same time I care for her a great deal personally and I just wanted her to have every opportunity, to do all the things that she wanted to do musically. And I can't give her all those opportunities."
Trisha understands a change was necessary, and she's diplomatic about the change. "I want to make my Emmylou record," she explains. "I want to make my acoustic record that's totally self-indulgent, that may sell 20 copies. But I'll be really proud of.
"That might be the record I'll make with Garth, to go back and do it again. It wouldn't be a record to make to make with Tony Brown.
"I'd like to make that album like a Gillian Welch record, or an Iris DeMent record, that I totally make for me. It may not be the next record, but it definitely will happen."
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer planned to use Diane Warren's melodramatic song "How Do I Live" as the theme for his 1997 summer blockbuster-to-be Con-Air; 15-year-old country sensation LeAnn Rimes recorded the track and turned it in, but Bruckheimer didn't care for it. Apparently Rimes' rendition wasn't "mature" enough.
Trisha got what she refers to as an "eleventh-hour" call to re-make "How Do I Live." She understood the big stakes involved, a major-major Hollywood movie, and she saw it as a golden opportunity.
"I'd love to sit here and say I knew it was a smash, and I would've recorded it anyway," she says, "but I can't say I would have. I'd never heard of Diane Warren; I was the only person on the planet, I'm sure."
With Tony Brown in the producer's chair, Trisha took less than a week to cut a beautiful rendition of "How Do I Live," and it provoked the "emotional response" that Bruckheimer was looking for when they played it to him over the phone from their Nashville studio. It got the green light to go into Con-Air.
The Rimes version, it was generally understood, was a dead issue and would not be released.
"The day before we were going to release it to radio, we found out that she had released it to radio," recalls Trisha. "It became a battle at radio that I didn't want to have. I mean, LeAnn Rimes sells five million records every time you blink! If I could've picked anyone to be in competition with, that would've been the last person I would have chosen.
"And I really thought I wouldn't have a chance against her at country radio, for sure. I was really blown away by the support I got at country radio."
Massive country airplay sent the Yearwood version of "How Do I Live" to Number One, while Rimes' rendition, with a nearly-identical arrangement, became a chart-topping pop single.
"I guess if there is a positive scenario it's that we both had a hit with it," Yearwood says. "And that doesn't happen very often, I guess."
As some sort of consolation, Yearwood's version topped the pop charts in several foreign countries including Australia, Japan, and the Phillipines.
And because hers was the official movie version, she got to sing "How Do I Live" at the Academy Awards.
From her first year in the business, Yearwood has taken a very hands-on approach to her career. She works very closely with her publicist and booking agent, and is in constant communication with manager Kragen on matters of business (although, she says with a snicker, her manager doesn't have her private cell phone number "because he would use it five times a day").
She thinks she's a good boss. "I like detail. I like being a part of the business. There's that banker's daughter coming through. I like knowing what's going on. I can see why some artists totally turn their business over to somebody else, and then lose their ass."
The touring company is called Trisha Yearwood Inc., and it employs 20-plus people, each with a family to support. "If you don't really like it, it can be a nightmare," Yearwood says. "It can be a nightmare when you like it. I have to make decisions that I don't really want to make—I wish somebody else would help me decide something only I can decide. But there's a real satisfaction that comes from knowing that, right or wrong, at the end of the day, you are in control of your own career."
In the early days, she says, "Part of my motivation was to not have a real job, because I didn't want to have to get up early in the morning. I'm not a morning person, and having to be at a job at 8 or 9 in the morning every day was incredibly depressing to me."
Although she and Reynolds keep a home in Tennessee, Yearwood, like most country stars, actually lives on 12 wheels, in her Prevost luxury liner.
"The bus is actually one of the best parts when you're traveling. The worst part is the travel, only because you're just never in one place. If you're a road dog, and you like that, it's one thing. I like travel and stuff, but I'm a homebody. I like to cook my own meals, I like to wake up to my own coffee pot. Those are things you just can't do on the road.
"But that's where the bus comes in, because the bus becomes the only thing consistent. And when you get on the bus at midnight after a show, and you've got a 10-hour drive to the next town, nobody can find you for 10 hours. You can't make a decision, nobody can call you, Kragen doesn't have the bus number, and you can just hang out."
During 1998, Yearwood hung out a lot with Garth Brooks; as their duet on "Where Your Road Leads" hovered near the top of the countrychart, they shared several dozen concert dates
she performed, unbilled, as the opening act on his sellout American tour.
"The relationship now is really cool," she explains. "It's nice for me because I did go out on my own and prove myself, so I'd come back with a lot under my belt. Without having to feel like 'Oh, I'm just this chick singer who has no hits, and you're Garth Brooks!' We've known each other so long, it's just a real mutual thing.
"And I have to say, the guy has a lot on his plate, and he's pretty much the same guy at heart that he always was. He's really had a lot to deal with, and no matter what is said or written about him, he makes his decisions from the right place. I'm proud of the way he's handling himself."
She dreams of the day she can join the Grand Ole Opry, although she's not expecting the invitation in the mail any time soon.
"I don't do the same kind of music these people do, I'm from a different generation than they are, but I have a lot of respect for what they do. And I know that what I do stems from what they did. And I want those people to know that I know their music, and that I did grow up listening to it."
The trouble is, Opry members must commit to performing at the hall in Nashville a certain amount of weekends per year. "It's Friday and Saturday nights, and I think you get paid 60 bucks," Yearwood chuckles. "Most artists can go out and make a pretty good Saturday night's wage somewhere else.
"It's kind of hard to get people motivated to give up their weekend and play the Opry. But there is a tradition there that I really do believe in, and I want to be a part of it."
Still, the Nashville establishment seems to have accepted her on her own terms. Tony Brown, in fact, thinks Yearwood may be the heir apparent to Vince Gill when it comes to hosting the annual CMA Awards telecast—she has, he believes, the right combination of talent, smarts, stage presence and sense of humor.
Trisha herself isn't so sure about anything but music. "As many records as I've sold, and as successful as I've been, and I'm proud of that, I'm not the poster child for mainstream country music," she says. "I don't fit the bill.
"If I was catering to radio, and totally trying to record what I think they would like, I would never have recorded a song like 'On a Bus to St. Cloud' and released it as a single. I think it went all the way to 62 on the hit chart! But I still think that's one of the best songs ever written, and nothing will ever make me think otherwise."
She's one artist who isn't afraid to wonder out loud if country radio might not wield too much power.
"If you ever make a record for country radio, you're setting yourself up for a failure, because you don't know what they're going to play. You can't predict what's going to be a hit. And if you're catering to someone else, you're not an artist any more. An artist has to make music for themselves. It's a totally self-indulgent thing."
Yearwood is proud of her track record as an uncompromising artist. "Garth Fundis and I never, ever cared about who we were pleasing except us, and finding what we thought were good songs," she continues. "I've been one of those artists that has been lucky to just kind of straddle that fence. I've not come out and sold gazillions of records like Shania Twain, but I haven't ever had a record that bombed. And I've never really had to compromise the music to do that.
"I would look at songs like 'How Do I Live' and 'She's in Love With the Boy' and 'XXXs and OOOs,' songs that were really big records for me, that have had mass appeal, as the flukes. They've been the ones that were the exception to the rule. The fact that a song like 'The Song Remembers When' went to Number One at Country radio, blows my mind. It's a poem. And 'Walkaway Joe' is this intricate story … I never thought those songs would be huge records, because they're not falling in the mainstream."
She's not interested in changing anything in order to follow the crossover dream. "'How Do I Live' was the first pop hit we've had; it was No. 1 outside of the U.S. It was like, wow, we've got a gold record in Malaysia! And so now, there's this pressure of 'You should release some songs to pop radio.' Well, I'm very aware of the Urban Cowboy period, and I don't think we've seen yet what the repercussions are going to be.
"As far as artists who have had a lot of success at pop radio, what's that going to mean for the country audience? And I don't want to lose the country audience."
Her status as reigning Country Music Association Female Vocalist of the Year means, to Trisha, long-desired respect. "It's acknowledgement from the industry that puts you on a fairly short list of people who've taken that award home," she says. "It's an honor to be on that list.
"Growing up and watching it on television, watching people win, it's a really big deal to see it. And it's a pretty big deal to have it happen to me.
"I don't know how it translates into a career thing. That remains to be seen."
Since 1991, Trisha Yearwood has released 25 singles, all on MCA. Between the trade papers Billboard and Radio & Records (R&R), more than a dozen of them have topped one chart or the other. She has become a dependable hitmaker, and the strongest argument for belief in the continued health of the country/rock hybrid germinated so long ago in the music of Gram Parsons, the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt.
Yearwood may be country music's saving grace—she combines artistic integrity with an unshakeable commercial sense, and although her music flirts with pop, it's still wearing country's letter sweater. So far, and she's extremely happy about this, she's remained true to herself and she hasn't pissed anybody off.
This impressive resume of hits could only belong to a woman who's comfortable with her muse. "It's much easier for me to find the gut-wreching, depressing ballads," Trisha said after this Q&A session was completed. "Those are the ones I love. It's always harder for me to find something uptempo that's at least intelligent."
She's in Love With the Boy. "I still think it's one of the greatest story-songs ever written. It's exactly where I was in 1991. I sing it every night, and it strikes a chord with everybody. It's one of those universal songs. And when you get to that last verse, the payoff verse, it's a great feeling.
"Songs are like little movies to me, and so you put yourself in the movie. You become a character in the movie. The new ones are exciting because they're fresh. But if it's not that, if the story is not what you get into, maybe it's the crowd response. You hit the first chords of 'She's in Love With the Boy' and 20,000 people start to scream, you're pretty motivated. You get what you need. And it's a great story. It works."
Like We Never Had a Broken Heart. "It was the second single. People were saying 'This is going to be the career record,' because Garth was singing on it, and it was a big ballad, and then of course 'She's in Love With the Boy' made history and all that.
"I always thought it had that 'Help Me Make it Through the Night' kind of vibe; I always loved that song."
The Woman Before Me. "I thought the song was a great story, because it's not your usual lyric. Everything that can be said about lost love, romance and jerks, has been written. But I thought the way this song was written was different, and really cool, about how everybody comes to a relationship with whatever's in their past. We're all who we are because of what we've been through."
Down on My Knees. "When I first heard it, I thought of my parents, because it's about 'I'm always in a hurry, and you think I take you for granted, but I wouldn't know what to do without you.' That's enough to make you bawl when you're singing it."
Wrong Side of Memphis. "That song definitely has everything. The groove is incredible. It was a song I'd always wanted to sing; I love that image of just throwing your bag in the back of the car and going to Nashville. Because that's what I did."
Walkaway Joe. "No matter what happens now it's on there, it's on tape, preserved forever: I got to sing with Don Henley. Having him on there is very special. The images in that song are great. When I heard the demo, I thought of him. I thought it sounded like something he would've recorded."
The Song Remembers When. "When people ask me what my favorite song is that I've recorded, I used to say 'I can't answer that; I don't have a favorite.' But this song always comes to mind. Because it's the ultimate song about the power of music. We've all had that experience.
"I recorded it because it was beautiful; I never dreamed it would get that kind of reaction. We started doing it live before it was released as a single, and the crowd response was incredible. People were going crazy for it early on; I'm really proud I was the one who got hold of it."
Thinkin' About You. "I heard that song and immediately loved it. Thought it was a hit. And it reminded me of Robert. That's why I had him be in the video, but not with me—the song's about thinking about somebody that's not with you, which is pretty much our lives.
"It's very hard for me to find positive love songs that don't just make me sick, that aren't just so sappy that I don't want to sing them."
XXXs and OOOs (An American Girl). "That was a song that I don't know if I would've recorded. I got asked to sing it for a TV movie. Wynonna was supposed to sing it—she threw her back out or something and I got asked to do it. And we were between albums, and I didn't have anything on the radio."
How Do I Live. "We started putting that at the end of the show even before it was a Number One record, because the response … I cannot explain it. The only thing I can imagine is that it's so simple. The lyrics are 'How Do I Live, How Do I Live'… it's so simple in what it says. And maybe because there's some pretty big vocal gymnastics, and having to really go up to that high note, people just respond.
"I can't explain it, but it has become the song that's sung at everybody's wedding. It has taken on a life of its own."
In Another's Eyes. "Garth and I had been trying to cut a duet together for years, and we'd gone in the studio; nothing ever worked. It had been so easy to sing harmony on each other's records that we thought making a duet together would just be easy.
"Even though we sing well together, we've got several notes between what's comfortable for us to sing. So to find something that we could sing in the same key is not easy."
Perfect Love. It was one of those things that was just meant to be, because we were in the studio the next day, trying to cut a couple extra things to go on the greatest hits record. Tony Brown called and said Stefony Smith and Sunny Russ had just dropped him off a tape that was not even a demo; they had literally written it and sung it into a jam box.
There Goes My Baby. "Everybody either thinks it's a remake of an old song, because it has that sound, or that I was highly influenced by the Mavericks!
"First of all, I don't play Robert the record till I'm done with it, because if he doesn't respond the way I want him to, then he's in big trouble, and I don't want to put him in that position.
"This was one of those songs that I just found myself singing, and I thought 'This is something I've heard before.' I think thay might be part of why it had that appeal, because it's very familiar-sounding."
On her friend and singing partner, Garth Brooks: "His music is different from mine, and his performing style and all that is very different, but we grew up on the same music. I've always wanted to be Linda Ronstadt, and he's always wanted to be James Taylor. So it works, it works really well."
On her husband, bassist Robert Reynolds: "If he asked me tomorrow to quit the road to save our marriage, I would do it. But he wouldn't do that, and vice versa. We know that each other is more important than what we do for a living, but we also know that what we do for a living is very important for us to be happy. We don't ask each other to make crazy sacrifices to prove it."
On becoming a success: "If you don't believe it, you're not gonna be there. Always, since I was a little kid, I've been a visual person. I always saw myself singing onstage. I saw myself at the CMA Awards, winning Female Vocalist. OK, so it took me seven years to win it, but I finally did!"
On demo singing: "Before I moved to town, I was singing along with the radio, like everybody else. So this made me take a song I've never heard before and not go 'Well, how do I imitate Linda Ronstadt singing this?' but 'How would I do it?'"
On country radio: "If you ever make a record for country radio, you're setting yourself up for a failure, because you don't know what they're going to play. And if you're catering to someone else, you're not an artist any more."
On country fans: "Part of what makes country music artists different from any other kind of artists is our accessibility. You don't have to be afraid of your fans, because for the most part, they're pretty good people. They're pretty polite, and for the most part they just want to come up and say 'hey, I like your music.'"