Music Makes The Musician, Not Looks, Yearwood Says

After visiting three other college campuses to answer questions from music students about how to attain stardom, Trisha Yearwood returned for the same purpose recently to her alma mater, Nashville’s Belmont University.

She said immediately afterward that her stop at Belmont was her longest and “hardest” campus visit, but also her most rewarding. She added that her mind is stimulated by all the campus question-and-answer sessions, which have been arranged through a sponsorship by Discover Card.

“Usually when you do interviews you get asked the same questions,” she says. “They (the college students) ask different questions. They make me think.”

No doubt. The questions at Belmont dealt with everything from how to showcase one’s voice to the right people and how one chooses a musical repertoire to Yearwood’s views on the importance of hairdo, weight and attire for aspiring female singers. Yearwood’s answers were commendably candid.

“All of us, no matter how much we weigh or how our hair is, are conscious of it,” she said. “So imagine if someone is taking your picture or filming you and commenting on how you look every single day. It’s a nightmare, and I think about it all the time.

“Somebody wrote about me in a tabloid that I was told I had to lose 30 pounds. Nobody came out and told me that … (although) I don’t know” - laugh - “maybe they’re talking about it right now. Maybe they’re having a meeting about it.

“But I still believe that the music speaks for itself, and I also believe that if I lose 40 pounds, which I would love to do, I’m not going to sing any better, and I’m not going to choose different songs, and I’m not going to dance around half-naked in a video.”

She was accorded appreciative female-sounding cheers.

“We’re not models out here,” Yearwood continued. “There are very few of us who could compete with Cindy Crawford on the runway. And, as a listener, I care more about what somebody says musically than what size jeans they wear.”

Saying that it’s a great time to be female in country music because Nashville now boasts a lot of women who are “selling a lot of records” and are different from each other, Yearwood - whose husband is bassist Robert Reynolds of The Mavericks - added that she feels “it would be harder to be a new male artist right now, because your choices if you’re a guy and a country music artist are basically, do you wear the hat or not? Or do you wear the striped shirt or not?

“I’m not as cynical as I sound,” she said, in response to a chorus of laughs. “There just aren’t that many clothing options (for men) - unless you want to do something REALLY radical.”

Nashville going alternative?

In Nashville, as in other places, there’s always a sizable minority of music lovers who find lesser-known and/or female artists and their “alternative” sounds more interesting than the bulk of the mainstream and/or male megasellers. The question after this year’s Country Music Association awards is whether even along Nashville’s Music Row this minority is still a minority.

Neo-bluegrass queen Alison Krauss, an “alternative” type if there ever was one, took a third of the night’s dozen awards all by herself - Horizon, Female Vocalist, Vocal Event and Single of the Year - while male alternative types captured Group of the Year (The Mavericks), Video of the Year (The Tractors) and Musician of the Year (fiddler, Mark O’Connor).

In one of the night’s bigger surprises, the Album of the Year title went to Patty Loveless for her “When Fallen Angels Fly,” which could be described as an alternative-style album from a mainstreamish performer. Another female, songwriter Gretchen Peters, took Song of the Year with “Independence Day.”

What does all this mean for the future?

Maybe nothing, because Nashville’s moods are notorious for their pendulum swings, but a couple of things can be said for certain. One is that the “alternative” concept has made by far its strongest inroads into country music’s inner circle, going against the mainstream’s prevailing neo-traditional male grain.

Another is that, unlike in past days with their influx of diversity, a fear that Nashville music may lose its traditionalistic core seems pretty groundless.