For the past four years, a tabloid-skewed version of LeAnn Rimes’ life has played out online and in public. With her new album, Spitfire, (released June 4) the twice-married, 30-year-old singer tries to set the record straight.
“It’s an emotional roller coaster ride of everything I felt, everything a human being could feel, in the last four years,” she said. “I didn’t set out to write a record that attacked the stories that have been out there. I’ve always said there’s 10 to 15 percent truth in those stories — the rest is BS. There’s a lot being thrown around out there. Any real artist takes what they’ve been through and uses it for their art. That’s basically what I’m doing.”
Rimes co-wrote eight of the 14 songs on Spitfire, her first album of mostly new material since Family in 2007. “She’s loosened her tongue, she’s loosened her heart, she’s loosened her spirit,” said producer Darrell Brown, who wrote many of those songs with her. “She’s writing ungodly better than she has in her entire life.”
Rimes signaled the direction of the new material in late 2012, when she released “What Have I Done?” (written by Rimes, Brown and David Baerwald) and “Borrowed” (Rimes, Brown and Dan Wilson), which acknowledge the guilt and shame she felt about the dissolution of her eight-year union with Dean Sheremet, and the circumstances under which her current marriage with actor Eddie Cibrian began. But these only hint at the emotional depths Rimes plumbs on the album. As she works through desire, anger and ultimately acceptance and wisdom, she sings honestly but never defensively. She may be the principal character in this drama, but she doesn’t see herself as its hero.
“I’m not perfect,” she says. “And I don’t want to be. At all. Anymore. I want to be imperfect — and I want to write about that.”
“God Takes Care of Your Kind,” which Rimes and Brown wrote with her then-husband Sheremet, is almost a harbinger of her ambition to honor her imperfections. “We always wrote together,” she remembered. “We had a great relationship that way. It probably was the first song we wrote for this record that ended up here. That’s life, isn’t it? It kind of works out like that.”
As Rimes’ personal life began to implode, she, Brown and their co-producer Vince Gill ended up recording Lady and Gentlemen, which features Rimes’ versions of classics written by John Anderson, Gill, Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson and other Country giants.
By the time Rimes returned to the studio, she was deep into the process of setting her life to song. “I didn’t set out to make a record that was true to my life,” she said. “At the same time, I didn’t know how to stop that train, because it was coming out of me, just so naturally. I didn’t want to record songs just to record songs anymore. I wanted everything to mean something to me. Even if I didn’t write it, I wanted it to be part of the story.”
A good example would be “Where I Stood,” which Australia’s Missy Higgins wrote and released as a single in 2007. Brown adjusted the song’s structure to accommodate Rimes’ broad vocal range, at one point modulating the chorus up a fourth for more dramatic impact. Its lyrics (“She will love you more than I could/She who dares to stand where I stood”) became Rimes’ message to Sheremet and his new wife, photographer Sarah Silver.
“It was important for her to say what she wanted to say with Dean, to apologize to him, but also to let him know that Sarah was going to love him more,” Brown noted.
Brown recruited top-notch songwriters Baerwald, Wilson and Nathan Chapman to write with Rimes. To bring out what he heard as “the blues and the soul” in her voice, as well as its Appalachian and Texas influences, he hired the R&B-based rhythm section of bassist Willie Weeks and drummer Steve Jordan. Then he fleshed out the band with Dean Parks, Dan Tyminski and Waddy Wachtel on acoustic instruments and Paul Franklin on pedal steel.
On all but a couple tracks, there’s no electric guitar. “I didn’t want any other frequency to interfere with that lower part of LeAnn’s voice, which is her natural voice,” Brown said. Instead, he instructed Franklin to play lines on steel that he thought an electric guitar player would add to the tracks.
Rimes also employed some unorthodox methods while recording her vocals. A hand-held microphone, much like the kind she would use in a live setting, allowed her mobility in the studio. Rimes recorded “Borrowed” on her knees and “What Have I Done” while lying flat on her back. That freedom of being able to move her hands and body appealed strongly to her. “It’s a very expressive thing I haven’t been able to do before,” she said.
Important as her messages are throughout Spitfire, Rimes now understands that the most important conversations are the internal ones. “Looking at this album, you see someone who’s talking to herself, almost, who’s being honest with herself for the first time and not worrying about everyone else,” she said. “From there, God knows where I go. But if I can start here, I’ll be so proud of myself.”
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By BRIAN MANSFIELD
© 2013 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.
