It Was A Very Good Yearwood

IN COMMON with many women, country superstar Trisha Yearwood spent much of her adult life believing that all men could be lumped into the same poisonous bracket, and she admits that this viewpoint was shaped by bitter experience. But, for her, this particular perspective was revised when she met The Mavericks’ bass guitarist Robert Reynolds, who later became her husband.

“I certainly had that cynical view that the true happiness people sing about in syrupy love songs doesn’t exist,” she elaborates. “And so, after I met Robert, there was a song I did called ‘Fairy Tale’ that I never would have recorded before I met him! You have to believe what you’re singing about and I just couldn’t have believed those lyrics before that. Then again, I probably still don’t record songs that present love in a very positive light!”

Trisha isn’t joking. On her new album, Where Your Road Leads, there are few such songs.

“There is one, I think!” she responds. “But then I’ve always been a Linda Ronstadt fan so I’m more interested in lyrics that sing of ‘desperate’ love, rather than those that say everything is peachy and fine,” she responds. “Linda was, in her songs, the queen of heartbreak and I even wanted to be her, in that sense. I also prefer singing those heart-breaking songs, which may explain why I chose so many of them for the new album.

“In fact,” she continues, “I was singing those Ronstadt songs long before I had any of those experiences with men that did leave me cynical. So I really sunk my teeth into that kind of music from the beginning, and still do, because it has that dramatic element to it. To be practical, it really is more dramatic to be a martyr in these horrible situations than to be happy all the time. At least in songs. In real life, I’m as hard-as-steel. It’s rare that anything rattles me, on the outside. So music is where I let go.”

Given that Trisha is so inclined towards drama, let’s get back to her PR (Pre-Reynolds) attitude to men. Was her cynicism really rooted in the fact that she thought we all were “jerks”?

“Not all men, just all the ones I’d been with!” she says.

So, are we talking single or double figures here?

“Single!”

Therefore, Trisha’s market survey didn’t cover a representative selection of the male species?

“I guess not! It was a very small, localised cross-section,” she admits. “I was never big on commitment or wanting to get married. That just wasn’t me. Basically, I had had this fairy-tale belief that I was going to have some guy ride up on a white horse and have all the answers – which I realised just wasn’t true. I was 26 years old when I made my first album, and I’d been through all that before I even began to sing these songs! Whereas now I’m close to 34 and I realise that my ‘knight-in-shining-armour’ is my husband, though I know he isn’t perfect either. But now I see that the flaws are part of the relationship.

“Ten, 15 years ago I was so immature I ran away from my first marriage at the first sign of trouble. In other words, I never really gave a guy a chance to be a ‘good guy’. So maybe it wasn’t just my belief that ‘all men are scum’. I, myself, was probably far too immature to hang around and let one prove they weren’t. And if there’s blame to be apportioned, I guess it lies on both sides.”

Adding another layer to the equation, Trisha admits that in relationships she has always been an “all-or-nothing” person.

“If I’m in love with you, I’m in love with you. If I’m not, I’m over it!” she says, laughing. “There’s no middle ground and I think that, too, comes across in the music. But, in terms of how Robert has helped changed my attitude to men, the male population does now look better in my eyes. I can say – and have said – I really like men.”

Having now got that off her chest, Trisha can start getting down to discussing the real business at hand – namely, her music. She admits she was “mortified” last year when the country ‘n’ western satellite channel CMTV ran a competition asking voters to choose between her version of ‘How Do I Live’ from the movie Con Air and country wunderkind LeAnn Rimes’ version.

“Actually, I was in Ireland when they had that competition,” says Trisha. “And I’m sure people were saying, over there, that LeAnn Rimes would have the hit, because she is what they’d call the new, hot young thing. But what I find objectionable about it all is – as much as we are all in competition for the slots at radio, and sales – you’re not usually in competition with an artist for the same song. So that, to begin with, was bizarre.

“Her single came out that morning you saw the video and ours came out five minutes later! I knew she’d recorded it, for the movie, but they told us they were using our version. If I’d known she was going to release it, I never would have even recorded it, because I would not have chosen to put myself in that kind of competition. So I was caught off-guard when they said they had a licence to release that song.”

That said, both artists did very well out of it, each being nominated for Grammies and encountering each other at the resultant awards ceremony.

“That was the most stressful situation of all,” recalls Trisha. “Because we were up against each other, again. She performed it, then they gave the award – to me. And it was very difficult for both of us. Robert and I were nervous wrecks that night and I’m hoping that song cannot be nominated for anything else.”

As a woman in her early-to-mid-30s, did Trisha feel disadvantaged, to any degree, by being set up against the 15-year-old Rimes in this way?

“The age factor in country music is very real,” she says. “Then again, age in America is not revered the way it is in other parts of the world. And in country music in particular it’s true that the older artists, like Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, even Emmylou Harris, are frozen out. All of the artists of my generation talk about how great an influence these people were, but radio is not playing them, they’re not getting onto television and it probably is simply because of their age.

“I’ve been approached several times to do TV Specials and they say, ‘Who do you want on your show?’ and I say, ‘The Highwaymen, Emmylou’. Then they go, ‘But we need somebody really hot’, and I have to say, ‘Okay, I’d rather not do the show’. So age is a big subject in country.”

Does this make Trisha feel she has to get everything done in at least the next decade before she reaches the age of, say, Emmylou Harris?

“My attitude is ‘I gotta get it done anyway’,” she replies. “I’m enjoying more popularity this year than I’ve ever had, in a string of good years. But I know there’s no-one who can maintain this level. So, even if I was ten years younger, I’d have to say I don’t know how many years I’ve got left. We are not in a predictable business.

“Then again, there is a lot about the country music industry right now that is depressing and unpleasant. I’ve been in it and watched it change drastically, even in the last five or six years. It has changed from an artist-driven industry to a different kind of thing altogether. I don’t know who’s in charge now. Country radio? Record labels who change the heads of the label daily and are totally looking at the bottom line and have made so much money – and now that the numbers are dropping they are making some drastic, damaging decisions. Damaging to the music. Because they are just going for the quick buck, the fast hits, the immediate thing.

“Yet the intelligent audience for country music – which has always been smarter than it is given credit for – is saying ‘there’s nothing sincere here, in most of what we’re seeing and hearing.’ I could get really cynical about this! The majority of it isn’t really from the heart.”

Would Trisha Yearwood agree with Nanci Griffith’s recent claim that it is artists such as Iris DeMent and Gillian Welsh who now are true country, singer-songwriters capturing the folk concerns of the people?

“Definitely,” she says. “And when I heard Iris DeMent’s first record, I was in a car in California and I just felt ‘I’ve got to find out who this is!’ Then I bought the record and it affected me like the first time I heard Linda Ronstadt. That happens to me very rarely, these days, unfortunately. Yet when I do hear a voice like that, it inspires me to remain real.

“I am on-the-fence in terms of music. But I could cross over. You see these record sales figures and you see everyone having these pop smash hits and it’s like the devil luring you over and you do think ‘I could do that and who cares who thinks I’ve sold-out?’ But then I listen to someone like Iris DeMent or my old Tammy Wynette box-set and that takes me back to where the real stuff is. My way of measuring my integrity in all this, is by saying to myself, ‘if I passed Emmylou Harris on the street, would I be able to hold my head up?’“

What about the question of country music’s current failure to capture the folk concerns of the American people?

“Well, one argument I’ve heard is that back, say, when Merle Haggard was writing about the problems of the working man 30 years ago, times were different and that country music now reflects new concerns for the ’90s, but I don’t buy that,” muses Trisha. “I think most of it does fail at that level. Most of it is fluff. There are a few writers writing really deep songs, but these are the exceptions.”

What is Trisha’s response to her record company’s press-release claim that her songs are “soulfully agile investigations into women’s interior lives”?

“I didn’t say that! I don’t even know what that means! How do you know if your soul is ‘agile’ or not? If it can do sit-ups, or what?” she says, mockingly.

More seriously, does Trisha ever worry about projecting this potentially negative image of women, as in her song ‘Down On My Knees’, where the female character seems to be telling a man, “If you leave I will die”?

“No,” she responds. “As I said earlier, most people’s opinion of me is that I am strong and independent, maybe even more so than I am. But then, I can say I’m strong, independent, successful, but I can be vulnerable, too. I’m not made of stone and as confident a person as I am – and as I project in other songs – I also feel this way. Besides, most of the mail I get is from women who say the songs helped them through. Like ‘Nearest Distant Shore’ which is about ‘you’re drowning and you’ve got to swim to the nearest distant shore’. I got a lot of letters from women who say that helped them. To me, that song was about getting out of a relationship that was going nowhere but to those other women it was about being in an abusive relationship and they’d say ‘the song gave me the strength to get out of this’. So, responses like that, to me, over-ride any criticism that, in my music, I may be sending out negative images of women.”

Trisha recently released as a single Melissa Etheridge’s ‘You Can Sleep While I Drive’, and she also appeared on the sitcom Ellen which, of course, became hugely controversial when its lead star “came out”. Did any of this lead to problems for Trisha herself, particularly, say, in Nashville, which is still remembered for its freezing out of kd lang as soon as she declared she was a lesbian?

“There certainly hasn’t been a backlash against me, personally,” she says. “But then Melissa was ‘out’ when I recorded that song. And no one has said to me, ‘You’ve been on Ellen, are you condoning being gay?’ Though, yeah, Nashville is a very closed community. There are a lot of gay people in Nashville but you’d be hard-pressed to get them to admit it.“

Why? Because they fear a backlash themselves from the Christian fundamentalists that rule that town?

“This whole image of country music as squeaky-clean, to me, is bizarre!” responds Trisha. “When we were growing up listening to country music you’d be lucky if George Jones turned up for a show, given that he drank so much! And if you read Waylon Jennings’ or Willie Nelson’s autobiographies, you’ll be blown away by the stuff they did with regard to drugs. But now there is like a new moral code that didn’t seem to exist in the ’70s. Yet if we’re to believe, as those Christian fundamentalists say, that we are all going to hell in a hand basket and we’re getting worse-and-worse as a society, then maybe we should be decadent anyway! Though what I believe is that we are being decadent but we’re saying we’re not!”

Trisha claims that she herself has steered clear of drugs at all times. What, then, were and are her principal vices?

“French fries. I really had it bad, I was doing three, four Big Macs a day, spending a fortune!” she says, laughing. “But, all joking aside, food was my thing. And I do have to be very careful. Two, three years ago, I put on an awful lot of weight. And when you’re carrying round 30-40lbs extra, you can’t breathe too well on stage. So it affects you, even on a professional level.

“Also, I didn’t want to do any televison. Every time I saw a picture of myself I looked 20 years older and I hated it. Then I finally realised, ‘This is my cross to bear’. If I was an alcoholic or if I did drugs I’d have to quit, do cold-turkey. But I have to eat, so I decided I have to learn how to live with this. And I did. I started exercising, started eating better and lost the forty pounds.”

Tony Brown, the head of Trisha Yearwood’s record company (MCA) and the co-producer of her new album, recently revealed on Channel 4’s Naked Nashville series that he judges the potential of female artists first on their photograph, checking to see if the singer is “a babe, blonde, 21, because sex sells” – whereas with males he listens to the demo first then asks for a photograph. Was Trisha put under this kind of pressure?

“People were not saying it to me, but you’d hear things,” she says. “You knew people were talking about it. But, in this climate, if I’d been a new artist, I probably never would have gotten a deal. Every time I saw the Shania Twain video I’d get on the treadmill! That definitely was a motivating factor, which is why, in the liner notes, I dedicate this album to Shania’s belly button!

“I do get letters now and people say, ‘We’re really proud of you for losing weight and proud that you have not shown your belly button to sell records’ and I’m thinking , ‘That’s great, but if I could . . . !’ If I looked like that and if you don’t believe I’d have been out there doing it, you got me wrong! But no one wants to see my belly button, trust me on this!”

Surely her self-consciousness along these lines was made all the more acute by the fact that she was being pitted against svelte 15-year-olds like, yes, LeAnn Rimes?

“I’m 5’9”, whereas most of the artists in country music are really tiny!” she exclaims. “So if you put me next to, say, Martina McBride, I’m already bigger but I look twenty times bigger because she’s so small. And Shania is very petite. So it is difficult. Even if I wasn’t in this business I would still have these issues to contend with, particularly as a woman. And America is just the worst because, as I said earlier, ageing is seen as a social disgrace.”

At the time of this interview Robert Reynolds was touring with The Mavericks, which leads us into a subject Trisha addresses in ‘That Ain’t The Way I Heard It’ from her new album. Namely trust, being secure in the feeling that when your companion is across town, or in another country, he, or she, isn’t being unfaithful. Do Trisha and Robert have that kind of trust?

“We have the kind of relationship where, because Robert is a great communicator, he doesn’t let me get away with anything, as far as not discussing things. And we don’t pretend that we’re super-human and that we never have an impure thought. That makes it easy to talk about this. But we do have this agreement whereby we love each other and if one of us decides we don’t, we tell the other one.

“If I lived my life worrying about what he was up to, I wouldn’t be able to be married to him. For him it’s the same. And because both of us do this for a living, we understand the situation the other one is in and it makes it easier. Like, right now, I think, ‘He’s not here, but I would want to behave the same way I would if he was in this room’. And he’s the same. Though that doesn’t mean that there aren’t nights I call him at five in the morning and say, ‘Well, I really thought you’d be home by now!’”

But have Trisha and Robert also decided that if either of them meets and falls in love with someone else they will tell the other?

“We haven’t really discussed that! It’s not an option, right? At least, not an option I left open to Robert! But, seriously, we have been together six years, married for four and the decision we made was to go down this path together. That’s the only way I look at it.”

Trisha Yearwood freely admits that, at least in her professional life, she is something of a control-freak. So, would she consider recording a full album with The Mavericks?

“I have suggested that to Robert and I would,” she says. “We – as in Nashville in general – get criticised for using the same musicians in the studio and it can get pretty predictable, which is why, on this album, we used a lot of different musicians. And even though my being married to one of The Mavericks may make this sound biased, I’ve never heard a better ‘live’ show in my life! If you saw them a hundred times you’d never see the same show twice! So I would love to be in the studio with that kind of energy and see what I could do!”

What else would she like to do, in terms of her career? Does the prospect of recording left-field albums in the vein of Emmylou Harris appeal to her?

“Yeah, I think so,” she muses. “If I want to enjoy the next few years I have to find something that challenges me. I don’t want to repeat what I’ve done. I don’t want to continue to do the same songs over and over. And I haven’t let the record company take a record of mine to pop radio in the States – I’m not trying to compete with Celine Dion and I don’t want to. I do want to be like Emmylou Harris, but I want to sell records too!”

Does this mean that we don’t have to worry about Trisha releasing an album comprised totally of Diane Warren power-ballads such as ‘How Do I Live’?

“Never!” she says, grimacing. “But the truth is, I could go that way – and probably have some success doing it! Those possibilities are there. But I don’t want to do that. I want to sell records, want to be successful. but only in a way that I can be proud of. And, fortunately, I do have that power base now. I now am in a position to do only whatever it is that I want to do, which is a great position to be in, right?”

• Trisha Yearwood’s new album Where Your Road Leads is out now on MCA.