INTERVIEW: Trisha Yearwood on Her Career, Life and Biggest Hits

I came to town in ’85. I was in college. I was 19. So I did demos and finished college and got a couple of solid years of demo work under my belt before I got my deal. So I signed in ’90, and then the album came out in ’91. So it was six years. So it was a six-year overnight success.

If you would’ve asked me when I was 4 or 5, I would’ve said I want to be a singer. I just knew. I never felt like I wasn’t a singer, I just had to figure out how to get where I wanted to be. And Nashville, I convinced my parents to come to Nashville on vacation when I was 15, and I just thought, they’d leave me here. I was like, “I’m going to just stay. I’m going to be a big star.” And they made me go back home and finish school. But, yeah, this was always my dream.

You wait your whole life, right? I’m 25, I’m like, “This is it.” And then we recorded the entire first album in two days or three days. I think it was four or five songs a day and you were done, and that was in December. And then “She’s In Love With The Boy” came out I think by that spring or summer.

You wait your whole life and you think, “This is going to be so hard,” and in the beginning it wasn’t, so I think I had this false sense of, “Oh, this is not going to be that hard,” but it gets harder.

You’re lucky as an artist to have one of those kind of songs. You’re lucky to have a “She’s in Love With the Boy” to hang your hat on for your whole career. “How Do I Live”, another huge moment in my career, like a new beginning, really. Most people know the story that LeAnn Rimes had also had a version of the song. I was asked to do a version for the movie, having no idea that LeAnn would or could, or would release that song as a single. The upside is it became a number one for me on country radio and it became a number one for her at pop radio, so we both really won. I think that it probably made the song bigger than it would’ve been because both of us had it out and the controversy surrounding it. She and I are good. Everything’s good. But I really think it was a good thing for both of us. I think as much as we wouldn’t have wished it on each other, I think it helped us both.

“Walkaway Joe” was one of those songs that The Judds actually had on hold. And then The Judds went through that breakup because Naomi was ill and they disbanded basically and Wynonna was getting ready to embark on a solo career. So all of the songs The Judds had on hold went back into the pool and “Walkaway Joe” is one of those songs.

I ended up meeting him [Don Henley], and I am not a bold person, but I boldly asked him if he would… Because he said he liked my music. I’m like, “Cool. Would you like to come sing on my record?” And he did, and that kind of was… I think that was the thing that made it… You know, kind of took it over the top.

My musical heroes are women. I go back to Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris and Patsy Cline and Bonnie Raitt. And I feel that those are strong women who really did speak to me as a young girl. So I guess it’s natural that we have all the emotions. We want to hear songs when we’re sad, we want to hear a sad song that commiserates with us. When we’re happy and we want to drive with the top down, we want to hear a song that makes us celebrate how happy we are. So I feel like I just kind of covered the gamut, but I do think there are songs about, you know, believe in yourself because I want girls to… We have such a hard time believing in ourselves, I want songs that speak to that too.

The pilot did not get picked up, so no TV show, but the song was really catchy. And so the label said, “We’d like it to be single,” and then we had to make an entire album around it. So the ‘Thinking About You’ album happened because of “XXX’s and OOO’s.”