LeAnn Rimes on ‘Trying Not to Screw Things Up’ and Making the Best Album of Her Career
“I like that word — grizzled!” says LeAnn Rimes. Catching up with her on the eve of her new album’s release, we’re struggling to find the right words to describe the unique position in which she now finds herself. It’s just a little past the 20th anniversary of her breakout moment and perhaps even peak moment of her stardom — the phenomenon that was “Blue,” her debut single. She was 13 when that happened, which now makes her now both a fresh-faced young woman with most of her life still ahead of her and… well, dare we say “grizzled veteran”? She laughs and assures us we can.
“It is such an odd place to be at 34,” says Rimes, who’s promoting maybe the best album of her career, Remnants. “There’s not anyone I can really call about it and go, ‘Hey, how did you handle it?’ Most people who’ve been in this position are not here anymore, because most child stars don’t really make it to having an adult career” — certainly in music. “I think that’s probably one of my biggest feats in life, is that I’ve actually stuck around, and I feel like I’m making the best music of my life and I’m more comfortable in my skin than ever. But it still trips me out. I can’t quite process it sometimes, and it’s my life; I can only imagine what it looks like from the outside.”
Like most of the more famous child stars we can think of, Rimes was not such a happy camper when she was pushed out into the limelight at a barely pubescent age, with a debut album that went six-times platinum — accounting for the first fraction of the almost 21 million albums that Nielsen SoundScan reports she’s sold (44 million worldwide). There were conflicts that came to the public’s attention in the teen years and conflicts that still fascinate the tabloids now that she’s into her thirties. She wasn’t yet an adult when she sued her father and manager over allegedly missing millions (they eventually settled and reconciled). Then she fought less publicly with her record label, Curb, which is renowned for holding artists to epic, clause-filled contracts. And her divorce and remarriage continue to fascinate the gossip sites, years after any hint of scandal has passed. This all feeds into the tone of Remnants, her 11th studio album, which has healthy dollops of hard-fought feistiness amid the mostly inspirational tone.
“I consider myself a survivor, that’s for sure,” Rimes says. “I think with this album and this part of my life, I’m actually owning all of it. It’s built into my character for me, all of these things that I’ve gone through, and I’m sharing my strengths and my weaknesses. I’ve become much more of a whole person, instead of feeling like there’s this other side to me that’s kind of projected out into the world. I feel like the mask is off.”
One of the best songs on the new album, “Love Line,” was written for her two stepchildren, and touches on a very public controversy. Rimes took a lot of heat on social media and elsewhere for sharing family photos. Her husband Eddie Cibrian’s ex-wife, Brandi Glanville, fanned the flames by repeatedly declaring that Rimes should not be acting the part of mom. Glanville finally made peace with Rimes, declaring last year that she’d “acted like a child” and accepting that they were all part of an extended “modern family.” But that didn’t stop all the Twitter rampages against Rimes. The song was written, the singer says, for all the step-families who may face similar squabbles over who gets to count as “real” kin.
“I think the first two lines kind of say it all: ‘Beaten down to an inch of my life by ignorant people/Came close to making me believe I was nothing but evil.’ I think there are a lot of parents out there that can relate to that. And me being so public, I think I’ve taken it from every angle. My private life with my stepchildren could not be more the opposite than what some people would like to throw at you. Thank you, Cinderella, for the whole stepmom [image]! Then there’s the truth of ‘We’re bound by a love line.’ You don’t have to be connected by blood to be connected.”
She also went confessional on “Mother,” written for a mom from whom she’d had some emotional estrangement in recent years. The song itself became the rapprochement needed.
“I was really pissed off at my mom,” she admits. “We hadn’t had a normal mother/daughter relationship. She kind of lost me to the world when I was 13. She always wanted to protect me and couldn’t, and I never understood. The day we wrote that, I was telling [my co-writers], ‘I really don’t think I’ll ever get here with my mom,’ to really think, ‘I know you did the best that you could; I never thought that I would.’ And within two weeks, something happened with one of my stepsons that made me feel probably a 10th of what my mom felt about protection. And I just started crying and texting her, ‘I’m so sorry. I understand now.’ With a lot of these songs, I felt like I wrote them about where I hoped that I would be, when I wasn’t quite there yet, and then stepped into them, in some ways, wisdom-wise.”
She gave the finished track to her mom for Mother’s Day. “It was so emotional for me that I couldn’t listen to it with her, so I was like, ‘Here, take this, listen to it, call me later.’ So she texted me: ‘Oh, I’ve been wanting to hear this for so long.’ She totally got it. It was a very healing thing for both of us.”
Physically repressive images pop up a few times. “Demon man with your heel on my neck, preaching to me I’m not worthy of amnesty,” she sings in the opening lines of Remnants’ title track. In the next song, “Long Live Love,” she says, “I was tired of choking, so I took your noose off my neck.”
“There are a lot of necks in there,” she laughs. “I guess I felt suffocated and choked for a while. It felt good to write those things. You know, there’s always residual stuff hanging over. With ‘Long Live Love,’ I was pissed off that day. Darrell [Brown, her manager and co-writer] actually came up with that first line, but after that, the next lines came spilling out of my mouth, and he went, ‘Huh?’ I came up with ‘I got sick of crawling so you could be a big man… I got tired of my balls being cut off ‘cause you didn’t have none.’ I was like, ‘Can I say that? Can I say balls?’ He was like, ‘We’re going to say anything you want to on this record. It’s time for you to not have those restraints.’ I feel like with that song, I feel the difference between a girl and a woman, and part of being a woman is getting in touch with this lioness thing inside of you.”
The restraints Rimes felt on previous recordings wasn’t just lyrical. In her 20 years with Curb, she was contractually bound at certain points to deliver country or country-ish records. That might seem surprising, given that two of the three biggest songs of her career were pop smashes: “How Do I Live” and “Can’t Stop the Moonlight.” And Curb seemingly was in line enough with her history of dance remixes to have put out a compilation of them, called Dance Like You Don’t Give A…, in 2014. But she says the pressure, legally and otherwise, was always to come back to country.
“I had two contracts in those 20 years,” Rimes explains. “In the first contract, I was supposed to make three albums per cycle — basically, like almost every nine months. So I’d end up doing a gospel album, a country album, and a pop album. Messy, but within that, obviously, there was specifics. And when I renegotiated my contract, there was more of the country language within it.”
When she did her last non-Christmas album, 2014’s Spitfire, “I was still on Curb the last album, and I think just musically I was a little more confined as to what I could make and create. Contractually, and verbally, it had to be a certain thing.” But she turned constraints into liberation by making a rootsy, more Americana-leaning album that was by far her most confessional work, getting deeply into the story of her divorce and remarriage in a way that she doesn’t even on the new one. She was like: You want a country record? I’ll give you a country record.
“That time in my life was very difficult. It was just honest storytelling, and I wanted to keep it as sparse as possible. With any kind of country sound for me, I’ve always loved older styles of country music, or that kind of Americana singer-songwriter style, and I felt that that time of my life lent itself to those intimate moments of soul-baring.”
With Remnants, there’s nary a moment of anything anyone would associate with country, or even Americana, per se. That’s evident in the fact that she currently has a top 10 song on the Billboard dance charts with a remix of “Long Live Love.” But it’s hardly a sellout to current fashions, as she skirts the lines between pop, R&B, and erotic gospel. There is one brilliant diva ballad, “How to Kiss a Boy,” that sounds like it was meant to be a radio smash… albeit meant to the biggest radio smash of the ‘80s or early ‘90s, or some other time when big, heartbreaker diva moments still had a chance to break through to a sobbing public. The rest of the album locks into an upbeat groove without pandering to any particular taste.
“Because I’ve had so many influences from outside voices, and because I was contractually bound to do certain things for 20 years, I wanted to know what my voice really sounded like. God knows I’m sure I’ll do something that’s more Americana again, and I’m sure I’ll do another dance record. But I’ve always known there’s a soul element to me, and while it comes out on stage all the time, I’ve never been able to have that on a record. I’m from Mississippi, so up until I was 6, I lived there. And I guess I didn’t realize how much that was really at the core of my being.” Moving toward a more soulful style has also helped her loosen up onstage. “I feel like I’ve had times where I was very robotic [on tour], and I’m very present for my shows now. It’s a whole different experience… There is a playfulness in my singing that’s coming out that hasn’t been there in a long time, an enjoyment that I think I lost in battles. I guess I’m finding a joy in it that maybe I haven’t even ever had before.”
Despite the defensive tone in some of the aforementioned lyrics, she was devoted to keeping it positive. “Love is Love is Love” is one of the songs that might be embraced by her sizable LGBT following, with a key line being “Hate the hate, but love the hater” — a play on “Hate the sin, but love the sinner” she says didn’t occur to her until later. “Standing up for equality is a big thing for me,” Rimes says. “My uncle passed away from AIDS when I was 11, and he was gay, and no one went to his funeral except my dad. That kind of always stuck with me, and it’s always been something that I’ve been in support of, just equality as human beings, for going on forever now.” In other words, she was a pro-LGBT country artist when pro-LGBT country wasn’t cool.
But the enmity directed at her on Twitter as a result of the tabloid attention may have inspired the track. “I’ve been judged my whole life and had stones thrown at me. I know what it feels like to be an outsider or to feel like you want to crawl in a hole because you’re different, or whatever it may be. And so our differences, I like to celebrate them instead of crucifying everyone for them… I would see so much stuff on social media from people, and I’d think, ‘How far can your love extend?’ You just realize that people throwing hate has nothing to do with you, it has to do with them. From that angle, for me, it took on this whole other perspective of feeling some kind of compassion.”
If the album sounds like it’s filled with defiant moments, there are also surprising moments of vulnerability, like “Learning Your Language,” in which she confesses to her husband that, even years into a marriage, key things get lost in translation. And she goes surprisingly vulnerable on “Humbled” — in which, shockingly, she uses the dictionary definition of the title word, not in its popular usage as an “honored” synonym. Being brought down in certain courts of popular opinion can be an excruciating but valuable learning experience. “I think we’ve all been there, where we thought we were exempt, and then the rug gets pulled out from under us.” Even then, there’s a wry warning to detractors, though, that they’re next in line to be on their knees.
She still appreciates “Blue” enough after 20 years to sing it willingly, and not begrudgingly, in her set. It is one of the all-time great country songs, so a singer could have a worse albatross around her neck. “It is such a signature song, and I’m really grateful for it,” she says, as the 20-year mark ticks to 21. “I get more grateful for the song as I get older, because you know where it took you and what it kicked off. I love starting it with a quiet bass thing now and making it this bluesy/jazzy thing. We’ve done it even jazzier, where I sing a completely different melody. I think it’s fun for people. They still get to hear the song they love, but especially for people that have been coming to shows over and over again, and for me, it doesn’t get stale. I know where it has taken me, that I’m grateful for that one for sure.”
Rimes knows she’s starting afresh in many ways, with less of a guaranteed audience than in the days when she was massively successful and massively unhappy. This, her first post-Curb album, is going through Sony U.K., with certain U.S. duties being picked up by Thirty Tigers, an Americana label that is making a move into pop. Rimes knows there past results are no guarantee of future superstardom, to paraphrase the investors.
“I guess now with the new record, almost considering myself a new artist in a lot of ways, sometimes you have to let the ego go and go, ‘Well, OK, I’m not gonna think that I’ve done this for 20 years and I should be doing this and should be doing that.’ I’ve actually taken a very fresh approach to everything, and kind of retraining my mind and my experiences to this time around being like even a better experience, of joy and not just killing myself. It’s such an amazing thing to be given this second time around as an opportunity to enjoy it this time, and to take it in, and to get to create what I want to create. I’m trying to not screw it up.”
