A couple of weeks ago, American vocalist Trisha Yearwood, a small-town Georgia native who sings uptown country music, exploded the austere atmosphere of an intimate chamber music theater in Hamburg, Germany.
Encoring repeatedly, Yearwood had the little venue’s patrons “standing up, stomping the floor and screaming, even when the house lights came on,” she recalls.
“We finally had to go out and tell them, `We’re done. We’ll come back out and sign autographs, but we’re not going to sing any more songs.’ We didn’t know any more songs.”
Listen up, world. Yearwood-the quintessential new Nashville female face of the ’90s-could be raising sand in your town tomorrow. Wherever you are.
Symbolic of the new breed of Nashville woman, whose seven-figure record sales challenge what was once an all-male domain, she also is typical of an intelligent new kind of Nashville star who refuses to overlook possibilities overseas while enjoying her career in the United States.
Yearwood says the Nashville office of giant MCA, for which she makes her records, has tapped her and Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year Vince Gill as MCA/Nashville’s first candidates for international fame. Already-after starting last fall from ground zero-she is hearing “good things” from record merchants as far away as Japan.
“They reprinted the lyrics of `Hearts in Armor’ (her first international album) in Japanese and put the CD out (in Japan), and it’s doing real well,” she says.
“So maybe Japan’s next. You can’t expect to sell records internationally if you don’t go over there, just like you can’t expect to sell records here if you don’t go around the country and let people see you and get to know who you are. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, I’ve gotten to travel all over Europe.”
Yearwood says she hopes her second and latest European jaunt-a half-dozen shows that included stops in Germany, the Netherlands and England, as well as the world music-industry festival, MIDEM, in Cannes, France-will be just one of a series of future brief overseas hops that could be made “every couple of months.”
At the same time, she can’t ignore her ever-increasing U.S. commitments, which in 1994 include:
– A 40-show tour with Gill.
– A string of her first real headlining appearances on the summer fair circuit.
– The recording, probably in April, of a Christmas album that she says she is determined will be much more than just “Trisha Yearwood’s version of `Jingle Bells.’ “
– In July, the recording of her fourth album, which follows the current “The Song Remembers When,” her fastest-selling yet.
– The possible recording of a long-awaited duet album with superstar Garth Brooks, with whom she began her career as an opening act.
“We keep sending messages back and forth between everybody we know, because we haven’t been able to talk to each other for a while,” she says. “Probably a year ago, he called me and said, `Let’s really do this,’ and we made an agreement that we would not put a time limit on it, that we would find the right songs and do it right.”
A farm girl from Monticello, Ga., whose friendliness is subtly underlaid with a stronger allure, she has been on Nashville’s fast track since the issuance of her smash-hit first single, “She’s in Love With the Boy.”
Although still one of the Tennessee capital’s youngsters, she has worked long-term on the road with such stars as Brooks and, last year, Travis Tritt; been the country music industry’s first female affiliated with a major international cosmetics company (Revlon); been featured as herself in Hollywood’s latest Nashville-songwriter movie, “The Thing Called Love”; and this year been profiled in depth in the book “Get Hot or Go Home: Trisha Yearwood, The Making of a Nashville Star” (Morrow, $20) by business reporter Lisa Gubernick.
Asked to describe the experience of being the subject of a whole volume at a mere 34 years of age, Yearwood giggles.
“Kind of a nightmare,” she replies offhandedly. “It’s one of those things you say yes to because it sounds like a really good idea at the time, and then you go, `Why did I do this?’ One thing I want people to know is, it’s not an autobiography; there’s nothing for me to write yet. So it’s not `my book,’ and I have really mixed feelings about it.
“I thought what would be good about it, if it was going to have any value at all, was for it to be kind of warts-and-all, no sugar-coating. People don’t just see `Trisha wakes up and always has perfect hair and makeup and has a wonderful day and then is whisked back to her mansion blah blah blah.’ This says, `Yeah, some days are good, but some days are real hard.’ I think if there’s a value to it, it’s that it’s honest and human.”
Which are the same elements paramount in her music.
She obviously spends a lot of time searching out her songs, which include many wonderful explorations of the human heart. She says that for each album she records the 10 best songs she can find. For “The Song Remembers When,” more than usual were down-tempo tunes with deeply meaningful lyrics, and she and producer Garth Fundis worried a little that the collection’s slow musical pace might affect the way it was accepted in the marketplace. It did-but in a positive, rather than negative, way.
Having seen each of her previous albums sell more than a million copies, Yearwood thinks she knows the reason women are selling more records these days: As a group they are being allowed to appeal more to the predominantly female country record buyer by singing about things women feel strongly about. Many times in the past, country music’s females obviously were dominated by male executives.
“Sometimes women couldn’t even have last names,” Yearwood points out. “It was like a token woman on a show: `Here’s pretty Miss Norma Jean to sing you a song.’ I think elements of that were still in existence not that long ago.”
She says she is not preoccupied with singing songs that are “female, necessarily. The thing is to be able to make records for people, and I think what happened was, women started including women in that group.”
Another reason Yearwood’s records are being accepted is that they are so well crafted: They feature enough pop-style singles to appeal to radio while also containing deeper songs that appeal strongly to album buyers.
Such a sophisticated formula seems calculated to keep Yearwood’s popularity growing-worldwide. The slower and deeper songs, she says, also were often the ones that went over best with the European audiences, who had heard little of her music before she got there.
“I found that because they didn’t know the songs real well they listened really intently,” she says. “That worked great for songs like `Hearts in Armor’ and `Nightingale,’ things that wouldn’t necessarily get played on country radio here because they don’t have enough drums or whatever.”
If Yearwood develops a European stardom rivaling the one she already has in the U.S., her total profile will be huge. The fact that just a few Nashville artists so far have concerned themselves with the international scene gives her no pause.
“I believe it is just uncharted waters,” she says. “People usually are slow to change until something breaks. It will just take one or two artists, and I’m hoping to be one of them.”
