23 May 2017

The country queen describes how her new album of hymns and contemporary gospel has come at just the right time. Reba McEntire has been the Queen Of Country Music for so long, it’s sometimes hard to remember just how many boundaries she’s crossed and how many ceilings she’s smashed through. She’s our touchstone, a direct connection from traditional Nashville names of the past through to today’s country-chart acts. And she also taps into the eternal, symbiotic relationship between country and church, especially on her brand new double album, Sing It Now: Songs Of Faith And Hope. Perhaps surprisingly, this is Reba’s first gospel record, and she’s taken immense care to make every track count, gathering old hymns – mainly from the 19th century – for the first disc, and much newer, inspirational material for the second. She’s just come through a challenging couple of years, reluctantly divorcing her husband Narvel Blackstock after 26 years of marriage, which also meant completely remaking the multifaceted business empire that they’d previously been running together. In fact, it’s now been renamed RBI (Reba’s Business Inc). So she’s coming up for air, touring, performing in Vegas with Brooks and Dunn, and flying to the UK and Ireland to headline the C2C festival. Raised on rodeo and religion, Reba McEntire has never been a quitter. She always picks herself up, brushes herself down and throws herself into a new project. So when her private life was being splashed across the tabloids, instead of hiding away, she gave honest interviews. She admitted that she hadn’t wanted the divorce, but firmly believed that life is too short to be miserable. So while she acknowledges the invaluable support of fans, friends and family, she also prayed for guidance, which is what got her through. “I’ve had a pretty trying time this last two and a half years, and God’s the one that I always turn to,” she says. In fact, Reba can’t recall a time when her faith hasn’t guided her. “As far back as I can remember, I’ve known about the Lord,” she says. “And my relationship with God has been very solid. I’ve always known He’s on my side. I’ve known He’s always there when I need Him. And I try to do things in ways that please Him, and I listen and get direction from Him. Of course, I’ve not been the perfect follower all my life. At times my dedication ebbs and flows. It’s probably not a good thing to say, but it’s honest. I turn to Him when I need help. And now that I’m so appreciative I’m going to stay in communication with Him a lot more.” So a gospel album became an ideal pick-me-up for Reba to reconnect her with her faith and her past. We might assume that this was influenced by her sister, country-gospel singer, Susie McEntire, but Reba disputes this. “It was actually my friend Bill Carter, my manager in the 80s, and my producer Tony Brown who encouraged me to do an inspirational album.” She then talked to Susie, whose reaction was: “Oh yeah, you’ll have a blast!” Not that Reba hasn’t belted out spiritual numbers before. “I’ve recorded a lot of songs on the 37 albums that I’ve done – like Suddenly There’s A Valley (on 1980’s Feel The Fire) and Walk on (on 1990’s Sweet Sixteen) – that are very inspirational,” she says. “You could call them gospel songs if you want, because they are uplifting.” And she always knows the kind of response she’ll get, because audiences “get riled up and responsive, just like church!” Starting Over When she tried to select songs for Sing It Now, Reba found it wasn’t easy. “There are so many great songs. But they only wanted 10, so I was going to do a mixture of five old hymns and five new songs. I recorded way too many, so when I gave them 15, I said ‘Okay, I’ve over-recorded. You guys are going to have to pick which ones you want to take out,’ but they said, ‘We can’t decide either, it’s going to be a two-disc CD. So go on back in the studio and record five more!’ It worked out really well.” She has a simple yardstick when picking songs. “If I listen to a song and it doesn’t touch my heart one way or the other, happy, sad or something, I don’t record it,” says Reba. “Because if I record a song, when I sing it on stage, and if it really did touch my heart, hopefully it will touch your heart too when you hear it. And if that doesn’t work, then we’re wasting everybody’s time, mine and yours included!” Reba says she didn’t need to try them out in church, because “I’ve been singing I’ll Fly Away forever, since I was a little kid. And When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder, How Great Thou Art, Amazing Grace, those are tried and true. We just made some different arrangements on the songs.” To make the album distinctive, she brought in friend Jay DeMarcus of Rascal Flatts – who’d previously founded contemporary Christian music group East to West – to co-produce in his home studio, along with her bandleader and musical director Doug Sisemore. “They came up with new ways of doing the great old hymns to make them a little different. So instead of me doing How Great Thou Art real big and loud, with orchestra and choir, I made it a love song to God. It’s very special to me.” You don’t have to be religious to appreciate this double album though, as it’s also satisfying musically. Reba, DeMarcus and Sisemore have taken disc one’s old, familiar material, and made it new, while the second disc sees new songs made more accessible. So listeners can either immerse themselves in classic gospel hymns, like Oh Happy Day, or dive into contemporary compositions like Hallelujah, Amen that complement Reba’s faith. Or just ‘shuffle’ between

Brad Paisley reveals his love of all things British to Kieran Kennedy. George Hamilton IV was popularly known as the International Ambassador for Country Music. But since Hamilton’s passing in 2014, that title could equally well be given to this year’s C2C headliner, Brad Paisley. The clean-cut, Stetson-clad singer has always appealed to British fans, and particularly those who favour more traditional country sounds, thanks to songs like the unashamedly nostalgic Too Country, with its guest appearances from genre legends Buck Owens, Whisperin’ Bill Anderson and George Jones. The song was literally ‘too country’ to be considered for release as a single in America, but was embraced as an instant classic on this side of the pond. Paisley, meanwhile, is happy to take on the responsibility of maintaining the reputation of country music – and indeed America – around the world. As he said when Keith Urban presented him with the CMA International Artist Achievement Award in 2015, “I think country music works as one of the best ambassador-type things you can do in an artform. When you send other forms of music overseas, it’s obviously something people flip out over and love, but I don’t know if it reflects real life like our format does. Any time you see people in Sweden loving country songs and buying into what we are as artists, they’re seeing the real America. In that sense we have an obligation as a format to try and get this everywhere we can.” Looking forward to this year’s C2C, Paisley says: “I’ve loved every time we’ve ever played over there. I think that when it comes to country music, the fans in the UK are in some ways more intense, because they’re sort of starved of it. We show up and we feel exotic to you, whereas in America, I’m the farthest thing from exotic!” Brad last played C2C in 2014 and feels that the annual bash has made a big difference to perceptions of country among the wider British audience. “I know for a fact that the first time I did C2C there were a lot of people who were there more out of curiosity than a desire to hear country,” the singer says. “And I think that now, a couple of years later, that’s changed and they know what to expect and they can’t wait.” Early Relationship Paisley has been coming to the UK since 1999, the year that he released his first album, Who Needs Pictures. As a new artist, he was part of a package headlined by another of this year’s bill-toppers, Reba McEntire. “I had a great time, but it was a lot of work,” he remembers. “The touring wasn’t as cushy as it is now and we didn’t necessarily have it all mapped out right. There was a lot of jet lag and no time to acclimate, so it was rough. I had band members that I had to wake up to go on stage, because they were asleep in the dressing room! “I remember telling my manager at the time, ‘I’d kinda like to become a star in America first, because that’s hard enough, and then after that, we’ll go back.’ “And that’s exactly what we did. Out of the blue, I really got the bug to go over again. I was heavily into British culture. I was watching The Office on TV, and Jools Holland and Top Gear. I loved everything about it and said, ‘I wanna go back!’ “I was told at the time, ‘There’s not much return on your investment, you’re gonna play small venues, but go because you’ll have a good time.’ So we went, and it went so much better than anyone expected. We started to really focus on the UK and we went every year for a little while. It was truly magical.” It wasn’t just that Paisley had become an established artist, but that country music had become much more accessible in Britain, generally. “When I first went, there wasn’t YouTube or any way to find my music. When I went back, I realised that the world had really shrunk,” he says. One of Paisley’s favourite things about his UK fans is that our tastes haven’t been shaped by country radio. We’re as likely to latch onto an album track as a particular favourite as opposed to a US hit single, simply because those singles never had blanket radio play over here. “I can get away with doing different songs when I go to London than I can do in the United States, where they want to hear No. 1 hits and not have too much new thrown at them,” he says. “I can dig in and do things that would be obscure to some of my American fans, because the European fans have studied them more and they know them. “I remember the first time I played Shepherd’s Bush,” Paisley continues, enthusiastically. “I was testing the waters and I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to dig back and play something really old.’ I played Long Sermon, which was the first track on my first album. If I played that in America, there would be a really small proportion of the crowd that knows the words, and there would be a lot of fans who came along in the last decade that don’t. They might like it, but they wouldn’t know it. “But here I was in Shepherd’s Bush with a couple of thousand people singing every word. I realised at that point that there was probably nothing I could do that would stump them.” It’s particularly rewarding to Paisley when fans ‘get’ the words of his songs, because more than many artists he is very much a word man. His songs such as Celebrity, Alcohol and Online are full of humorous observations and funny lines in the tradition of Nashville lyricists Roger Miller, Tom T Hall and Shel Silverstein. “I don’t know what it is about British culture and the British