Trisha Yearwood: Stepping into the Spotlight as a Songwriter on Her Confident, Vulnerable New Album, ‘The Mirror’ – It Feels Like the Next Chapter!
Trisha Yearwood has been a force in the music business for over 30 years. She’s not just one of country music’s most beloved voices; she’s also built an incredible career as an author, businesswoman, label head, actress, and Food Network star.
Now, with her new album, The Mirror, which just dropped today (July 18) on Virgin Music Group and her own Gwendolyn Records, she’s taking on a whole new role: songwriter. This is the first time she’s sung all her own songs, written from her very own perspective.
“You know, most of the best things that have happened in my career just weren’t planned,” Trisha shares. She didn’t even set out to make an album of her own compositions. “It just clicked a couple of years ago. I started writing, and it was really kind of therapeutic. It just evolved naturally out of something I felt like I needed to do, and I’m so happy with how it turned out.”
Trisha has dabbled a bit 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.” There’s also “For The Last Time,” which appeared on her 2018 Frank Sinatra-inspired album, Let’s Be Frank, a song she co-wrote with her husband, Garth Brooks.
But with The Mirror, the five-time Billboard Country Airplay chart-topper really pushed past her self-doubt to create her most personal album ever. She co-wrote and co-produced it with Chad Carlson.
That self-doubt actually started nearly 40 years ago. Back when Trisha was a student at Belmont University in Nashville, someone told her she just didn’t have what it takes to be a songwriter. “That really stuck with me, making me think, ‘I’m not a songwriter.’ So I just always played it down,” she admits. She also points out that many of her idols, like Linda Ronstadt and Patsy Cline, weren’t known for writing their own songs either.
“I never felt like I had to be a writer to be a good interpreter. No regrets there, honestly,” she says. “I channeled my creativity into cookbooks and other things. But once I started writing songs, it felt like a whole new world just opened up for me.”
It was songwriter Leslie Satcher – who wrote previous Yearwood hits like “Help Me” and “Pistol” – who really pushed Trisha to get into the writing room in the fall of 2022.
“She was the one who kept calling me, saying, ‘You are a songwriter. You need to write.’ I just wasn’t confident,” Trisha recalls. “It takes a lot of guts, you know, to say, ‘What about this line?’ especially when you’re with a writer who’s had a ton of hits.” That first collaboration with Satcher and songwriter Steve Dorff (who wrote George Strait’s “I Cross My Heart”) led to the album’s incredibly personal closing track, “When October Settles In.” It’s a song about grief and reflection, inspired by her mother’s passing in October 2011.
And like it often goes in Nashville, one co-writing session quickly led to suggestions for other writers to work with.
Trisha ended up collaborating with a mostly female group of co-writers. Many of them have even contributed songs to her previous albums, including Maia Sharp (“Standing Out in a Crowd”) and Rebecca Lynn Howard (“I Don’t Paint Myself into Corners”). You’ll also find songs on the album written with Erin Enderlin (who wrote 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, Trisha quickly proved that old college naysayer wrong. She dove into songwriting sessions all over Nashville and even at home. And she realized something important: self-doubt isn’t just for beginners; even super successful songwriters deal with it.
“I’ve learned that all that anxiety I had about speaking up or saying, ‘What about this line?’? Turns out, every songwriter feels that way,” Trisha says. “Even writers with 29 No. 1 hits – I’ll hear them say, ‘This might sound dumb, but what if we tried…’ So yeah, that vulnerability? Everyone feels it.”
Through those writing sessions, Trisha realized she could sing something even more personal than anything she’d sung before. And not just sing it, but actually write it.
