Country star Trisha Yearwood thinks about the Pacific Northwest every time she walks up to the front door of her Nashville home.
| 8 p.m. today and Saturday, Tulalip Amphitheater, 10400 Quil Ceda Blvd., Tulalip. Tickets: $30 to $50, at Tulalip Casino, by calling 206-628-0888, or at www.ticketmaster.com. |
Well, maybe that’s a stretch. But a couple of rocking chairs from Seattle’s Pike Place Market adorn the entry and spark some memories now and then.
“I’m looking forward to coming back,” Yearwood said in a phone interview from her Tennessee home this week.
Yearwood marks her return to the stage and radio after four years with a show at the new Tulalip Amphitheater at 8 tonight and another at 8 p.m. Saturday.
Yearwood has played a couple of small shows for radio contest winners, and the Tulalips have held a couple of small events in their new digs. But tonight’s concert at the 2,000-seat venue is considered the grand opening for both. Her fall tour starts in earnest in September.
“We’re not going to be able to hit the Seattle and Portland area on the fall tour, which is only 30 dates,” Yearwood said. “But it’s a place that has always been really nice to me, so we decided it’s a little bit early but if we don’t do it now, it will be next summer before we get there.”
Yearwood is kicking off a 35-date national tour in support of her upcoming new album, “Jasper County,” which is due in stores Sept. 13.
It’s certainly been a special year for the Nashville singer. She got engaged to country star and longtime collaborator Garth Brooks in May and now she’s embarking on a national tour and releasing her first album in four years.
Yearwood says she’s particularly proud of the new collection, for which she reunited with her original producer, Garth Fundis. It was the longest she’s ever taken to make an album.
“I was so anxious to get in the studio, I just picked some songs and went in,” Yearwood said. “The songs were good, they weren’t bad songs. But … recording for me has always been really fun and natural, and we were having to work too hard. We kept thinking, ‘What else can we put on this song to make it better?’
“I finally sat down with my producer, Garth Fundis, and told him I’m not feeling the way I want to feel about these songs. He said it’s OK to start over, it’s OK to say now this isn’t working. We took a really hard look at the songs and there were two or three that made that cut, but we essentially started over, and that was the right move.”
Yearwood first emerged with the hit single “She’s in Love With the Boy” in 1991. It was the first of nine No. 1 hits, including “The Woman Before Me,” “XXX’s and OOO’s,” “Thinkin’ About You” and “A Perfect Love.”
Yearwood won Grammys for duets with Brooks (“In Another’s Eyes”) and Aaron Neville (“I Fall to Pieces”). She has also lent her voice to such hits as “The Song Remembers When,” “Wrong Side of Memphis” and “How Do I Live?” for which she earned her only solo Grammy in 1997.
She said this weekend’s shows will be a sort of greatest hits collection, with some new stuff sprinkled in.
“I think what you can hopefully look forward to is that I’m enjoying singing so much. It’ll be fun,” she said. “I’ll do a few things off the new album, but as a fan, when I go to a show, I want to hear songs that I know.”
Reporter Victor Balta: 425-339-3455, or e-mail vbalta@heraldnet.com.
Trisha Yearwood performs this weekend at the new Tulalip Amphitheater.
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