After more than three decades in the music business, Trisha Yearwood has built not only a reputation as one of country music’s most revered vocalists but also fashioned a multi-faceted career as an author, businesswoman, label head, actress and Food Network star.
On her 16th studio album, The Mirror, out today (July 18) on Virgin Music Group and her own Gwendolyn Records, she adds a career-redefining role as a songwriter, with The Mirror marking the first of her own albums in which the songs she sings are from a first-person perspective.
“Most of the really great things that have happened me in my career were not planned,” says Yearwood, noting that she initially didn’t intend on making an album of her own compositions. “It was really something that clicked a couple of years ago. I started writing and it was really kind of therapeutic and really evolved naturally out of something I felt like I needed to do and I’m so happy with how it came out.”
Yearwood has very occasionally dipped her toe in songwriting before: She co-wrote Kenny Rogers’ 1991 track, “How Do I Break It to My Heart” and Michelle Wright’s “If I’m Ever Over You,” as well as “For The Last Time,” which was featured on her 2018 Frank Sinatra-inspired album Let’s Be Frank, and was a co-write with husband Garth Brooks.
But in making The Mirror, five-time Billboard Country Airplay chart-topper Yearwood overcame self-doubt to make the most personal album of her career, co-writing and co-producing with Chad Carlson.
Those seeds of self-doubt were sewn almost 40 years ago while Yearwood was a student at Nashville’s Belmont University and she was told she didn’t have talent as a songwriter. “It made me think I wasn’t a songwriter and I just always downplayed it,” she says, adding that many of her key influences such as Linda Ronstadt and Patsy Cline hadn’t been known as songwriters.
“I never felt like I needed to be a writer to be a good interpreter. There was no regret or anything,” she says. “I used my creativity to write cookbooks and all that, but when I started writing songs, it was like this world opened up in a new way.”
It was songwriter Leslie Satcher, who wrote previous Yearwood cuts including “Help Me” and “Pistol,” who became the catalyst for getting Yearwood into the writing room in fall 2022.
“She was the one who kept calling and saying, ‘You are a songwriter. You need to write.’ I wasn’t confident. You have to be really vulnerable to say, ‘What about this line?’ in front of a writer who has had a bunch of hits.” That first collaboration with Satcher and songwriter Steve Dorff (George Strait’s “I Cross My Heart”) resulted in the album’s final, soul-baring song “When October Settles In,” a song about grief and reflection inspired by the passing of Yearwood’s mother in October 2011.
As happens in Nashville circles, one co-writing session led to suggestions of other potential co-writers.
Yearwood worked with a primarily female collective of co-writers, many of whom have contributed songs to previous Yearwood albums, including Maia Sharp (“Standing Out in a Crowd”) and Rebecca Lynn Howard (“I Don’t Paint Myself into Corners”). The album also features songs written with Erin Enderlin (Alan Jackson’s “Monday Morning Church”), Bridgette Tatum (Jason Aldean’s “She’s Country”), Emma-Lee and Texas singer-songwriter Sunny Sweeney.
With the encouragement of her fellow songwriters, Yearwood quickly disproved that long ago college naysayer by exploring her songwriting talents in writing rooms around Nashville and at her home — and concluding that self-doubt is something songwriters of all success levels struggle with.
“I’ve learned that all the apprehension I had about speaking my mind or saying, ‘What about this line?’ is that every songwriter feels that way,” Yearwood says. “Even songwriters who have had 29 No. 1 records, I’ll hear them go, ‘This might be dumb, but what about…’ So, everybody feels the same sort of vulnerability.”
Through those writing sessions, Yearwood realized, “I could now sing something even more personal than the songs I’ve sung in my career, but also, I can write these songs.”
She wrote “Girls Night In,” a fun song about friends that offer good times but also a safe space to be vulnerable, with Howard and Rachel Thibodeau. The soulful, country-rock track “Bringing The Angels” came courtesy of Yearwood’s creative inspiration with Satcher, Tatum and Yearwood’s sister, Beth.
“My sister is my champion and the person that I went to when I would finish a song. I would do an iPhone work tape and I would just text it to her, like, ‘This is what I did today, good or bad,’ because she’s such a great support,” Yearwood says. “She got to know some of the writers and there was a morning where we were talking about knowing you’ve got somebody on your side. I feel like my mom and dad are with me, so let’s write a song about it, but make it a rockin’ song. My sister was like, ‘Man, y’all are bringing the angels today,’ and I was like, ‘Well, okay, that’s the title.’”
Yearwood realized she was writing a number of the songs to her younger self.
Personal growth, confidence and wisdom pour out on songs such as “The Mirror,” “Fearless These Days” and the Enderlin/Sweeney co-write “Goodnight Cruel World.”
“I realized there were a lot of songs to young Trisha,” she says.
“Fearless These Days,” which she wrote with Satcher and Makayla Lynn, is a vulnerable recounting of how she went through with a marriage she knew wasn’t right in her 20s, but it’s also about accepting and learning from youthful mistakes. She sings, “You don’t know until you know that it’s OK to rock the boat/ It’s so much easier to just be who you are.”
“I couldn’t have written these songs in my 20s or 30s. There’s a freedom at 60 years old of like, ‘This is who I am.’ There’s a fearlessness that this song is such a raw, honest song,” she says of “Fearless These Days.” “You have to give yourself some grace for being young, making mistake and owning the mistakes. I spent a lot of my young life pretending I didn’t make a mistake. At some point you go, ‘I made some bad choices,’ but you don’t know better until you know better.’”
“Little Lady,” another fiery track she wrote with Satcher and Tatum, captures her fierce independence, and recalls a Southern woman’s reaction, praising her for her upcoming marriage shortly after she became engaged to Brooks in 2005, with the song’s lyrics reflecting that woman’s comments that now Yearwood could “settle down and quit that music thing,” to which Yearwood responds, “I ain’t nobody’s little lady but my own.”
“We’ve been married for almost 20 years, but when we got engaged, people would want to see the ring, and sometimes someone would say something like, ‘Oh, you did good,’” Yearwood recalls. “Which, to me, it’s like you don’t know what you’re saying. You’re saying to a woman, ‘Now you can relax. This is the crown jewel in your life,’ and that bothered me. So, I was telling that story and it became this really fun song.”
Many of Yearwood’s most enduring songs, such as “She’s in Love With the Boy,” “The Song Remembers When” and “Walkaway Joe,” are vivid musical stories, so it’s not a stretch when Yearwood says she realized her strength in the writing room was contributing lyrics.
“That’s important to me. You can change the melody and make it work, but if the lyrics aren’t there, there’s not much you can do with it. With Garth Fundis, who produced most of my records, we were really hard on songs. I feel like I learned a lot in just the singing of other people’s songs, so it doesn’t feel like a wild departure. It just feels like the next chapter.”
The album is filled with collaborations, and not only in the writing room. Yearwood previously sang on Hailey Whitters’ Livin’ The Dream album, and Whitters returns the favor, co-writing and singing on the new album’s spunky “Drunk Works.” Lady A’s Charles Kelley is featured on “The Record Plays On” and Americana stalwart and country songwriter Jim Lauderdale appears on “The Shovel.”
Yearwood had reservations about including another song, “So Many Summers,” until she got a vote of confidence from Brooks.
“The album was going to have 12 songs, but we ended up having 15. I just couldn’t cut songs out. But that one was on the fence because I thought I had maybe cut it [in a key] a little too low. I was in the house listening to it one day and he was there. He tears up at commercials, but he was a little teared up and said, ‘I know it’s not my place. It’s your record. But I just want to raise my hand and say I really think you should think seriously about making sure you finish that song.’ So, he’s been nothing but encouraging.”
The new album also marks her signing with Virgin Music Group and her return into the Universal Music Group family — Yearwood recorded for the UMG-owned MCA imprint from 1991-2005.
“The whole music industry works now is completely different from what it was even 10 years ago. And I’ve been independent for so long, but I felt if you’re going to go with a label, finish where you started and go back into the [Universal] family. And Virgin felt right because they are nimble, and they are so excited. They came and sat in this room,” she says, gesturing around the intimate Music Row studio where much of The Mirror was recorded. “They are run by a female [Virgin Music Group, North America president Jacqueline Saturn], so I love that. There’s an energy and it felt like that’s the right place to be.”
Being a writer on these songs has also brought changes to her set list as she’s been promoting the album on tour.
“I think the biggest surprise has been — in my 34 years of touring, if I have a new album out, I’ll perform the single and maybe one more song,” she says. “But with this, there’s been a real request to do the new songs, so I’ve done more new songs in these shows than I would ever do. And the girls in the audience, I see the recognition of themselves in these songs and it makes me feel so good to see that they’re going, ‘That’s me, too.’
She adds, “I’m proud of it. I’m at a place where I’m not really worried about what people think. I feel really at peace in saying, ‘This is what I’ve been working on. This is the art I’ve been doing. I hope you like it,’ and then you turn it loose and let it be what it is.”
Since finishing work on this project, she’s continued writing, working with writers including Tom Douglas and The Love Junkies (Liz Rose, Lori McKenna and Hillary Lindsey). “There’s so many songs that I’m still writing that there might have to be a part two,” she says.
