Trisha Yearwood

Cover Story

by Mary Welch

April 11, 2008

Country music superstar Trisha Yearwood had trouble balancing her life. So she did what many other women these days are doing – she opted out.
     “When I look back at it, I missed the early ‘90s because I was out on the road doing what I love to do – performing and making music,” she says. “But I was on the road 250 days a year. That was my life. I was not the focus of my life, my music was. And it wasn’t because I didn’t have a personal life; I was married. But my life revolved around work.”

     Yearwood, a three-time Grammy Award winner, decided to take action. “ I wanted a life – I wanted my life back,” she says simply.
     She scaled back her career, and for several years, she split her time between her home base in Nashville and Oklahoma, where her future husband, Garth Brooks, lived. Brooks had declared he was “retired” so that he could be a stay-at-home father for his three daughters with his ex-wife. Yearwood became what she dubs the  “bonus mom.”

     Still she took a tremendous career risk. In a business in which record sales are often supported by heavy promotion and touring and the next young thing is right around the corner, Yearwood put her foot down.
     “I no longer was willing to trade off my life to be on the road all the time. It was time, and I had a man that I wanted to build a life around,” she says. “I had planned to take a year off, but it just kept going. But it was a leap of faith that my fans would miss me and radio would embrace me when I came back. I just really didn’t know. Luckily, it worked out.”

     Indeed it did. Yearwood released her latest album, Heaven, Heartache and the Power of Love, in late November to rave reviews and a Grammy nomination for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. Her second song on the album, This is Me You’re Talking To, is climbing the Billboard charts, and she just shot the video with John Corbett, the Sex and the City hunk.

     The album is her first release on her new label, Big Machine Records. She had spent 15 years at her previous label, so leaving it was a big deal. “I was with a record label that was great, and had been great to me, but I felt they were not champions. I had two people in the business who were like my cheerleaders, and when my contract was up, they were no longer at the label. I decided to be a free agent.”

     She agonized over the decision to leave. “I’m old-fashioned, and it’s not like I don’t like change, but it’s hard for me. I was so worried I was making the wrong decision. I so overanalyzed it. It’s not good to make rash decisions, and I wanted to make the right decision, and I did.”