Post by erik on Apr 17, 2021 17:17:11 GMT -5
One of the great female artists of the 1990's country music explosion made a comeback in 2019, after an absence of twelve years from making an album of entirely new material. The title track from that album is in this week's Pop Music Hits Spotlight.
EVERY GIRL IN THIS TOWN (Trisha Yearwood; Gwendolyn; 2019)—For many critics, going twelve years between albums is far too long for any singer or group. Nowhere is this truism more apparent than in the country music arena. But that is how long Trisha Yearwood, one of the leading lights of the female country music boom of the 1990’s, went. Following her 2007 album Heaven, Heartache, And The Power Of Love, her only album for her former MCA boss Scott Borchetta’s Big Machine label, which hit #10 on the Billboard Country Album Chart, and #30 on the overall Billboard Top 200 Album Chart, Trisha really began to branch out away from music, starting her own cooking show and releasing a number of cookbooks based on her own Deep South upbringing (she came from the small town of Monticello, Georgia). She also appeared in a live TV version of The Passion in 2016. But a lot of other things happened during those twelve years. Both of her parents passed away, which colored some of her moods. She also re-worked a number of her biggest hits from when she was on the MCA label at the height of her success in 2014, under the title Prize Fighter, for RCA. And in August 2013, a long-cherished dream of hers got shattered when her spiritual role model Linda Ronstadt announced that she had Parkinson’s and was no longer able to sing. To complicate matters further, by that time, many singers of her gender had been all but totally squeezed off of country radio by a macho male-dominated form of country known as “Bro Country”, that borrowed all too liberally from the worst of arena rock and rap. Still, she persevered, with her first 2019 release, on her own label Gwendolyn (named for her late mother) called Let’s Be Frank, an album of standards made famous by Frank Sinatra. Then later in 2019, she came out with her first album of wholly new material in twelve years, Every Girl. The title track of the album, “Every Girl In This Town”, written by Erik Dylan, Connie Harrington, and Caitlyn Smith, was about the dreams that every young girl growing up in small-town America, including herself, always had. The album itself, whose song line-up was made largely of songs written or co-written by women, was a sizeable hit in and of itself (#57 pop; #5 C&W); and “Every Girl” peaked at #21 on the country chart, and #49 on the Hot 100. Later in 2019, Trisha would appear at the annual Kennedy Center Honors to pay tribute to Linda, whom she first met back in 1995. During the spring of 2021, she also managed to fully recover from a bout with COVID-19.
EVERY GIRL IN THIS TOWN (Trisha Yearwood; Gwendolyn; 2019)—For many critics, going twelve years between albums is far too long for any singer or group. Nowhere is this truism more apparent than in the country music arena. But that is how long Trisha Yearwood, one of the leading lights of the female country music boom of the 1990’s, went. Following her 2007 album Heaven, Heartache, And The Power Of Love, her only album for her former MCA boss Scott Borchetta’s Big Machine label, which hit #10 on the Billboard Country Album Chart, and #30 on the overall Billboard Top 200 Album Chart, Trisha really began to branch out away from music, starting her own cooking show and releasing a number of cookbooks based on her own Deep South upbringing (she came from the small town of Monticello, Georgia). She also appeared in a live TV version of The Passion in 2016. But a lot of other things happened during those twelve years. Both of her parents passed away, which colored some of her moods. She also re-worked a number of her biggest hits from when she was on the MCA label at the height of her success in 2014, under the title Prize Fighter, for RCA. And in August 2013, a long-cherished dream of hers got shattered when her spiritual role model Linda Ronstadt announced that she had Parkinson’s and was no longer able to sing. To complicate matters further, by that time, many singers of her gender had been all but totally squeezed off of country radio by a macho male-dominated form of country known as “Bro Country”, that borrowed all too liberally from the worst of arena rock and rap. Still, she persevered, with her first 2019 release, on her own label Gwendolyn (named for her late mother) called Let’s Be Frank, an album of standards made famous by Frank Sinatra. Then later in 2019, she came out with her first album of wholly new material in twelve years, Every Girl. The title track of the album, “Every Girl In This Town”, written by Erik Dylan, Connie Harrington, and Caitlyn Smith, was about the dreams that every young girl growing up in small-town America, including herself, always had. The album itself, whose song line-up was made largely of songs written or co-written by women, was a sizeable hit in and of itself (#57 pop; #5 C&W); and “Every Girl” peaked at #21 on the country chart, and #49 on the Hot 100. Later in 2019, Trisha would appear at the annual Kennedy Center Honors to pay tribute to Linda, whom she first met back in 1995. During the spring of 2021, she also managed to fully recover from a bout with COVID-19.