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Posted on Mon, Jan. 24, 2005
Girl to Woman
Garland-raised LeAnn Rimes was country music's precocious little girl until lawsuits and pop got in the way of her talent. Now she wants to come home, but will country let her?
By Malcolm Mayhew
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
NEW YORK CITY -- Usually, whenever LeAnn Rimes is on TV, she's got a microphone in her hand.Today, however, she's holding a plate of Tony's Quick Sauce No. 2.
Rimes is one of today's featured guests on The Tony Danza Show, a daily talk show hosted by the former Who's the Boss? and Taxi actor. After some light chitchat -- and Danza plugging Rimes' latest projects, a children's book and a Christmas album -- Danza and Rimes whip up the pasta sauce.
Then the two break out in song: "Baby, can't you see how much I care," they sing together, reading from cue cards, "for your tomato marin-air."
This is what you do when your career is on a ledge, when you're trying to re-establish yourself, when you're trying to polish the tarnish off your star. You eat from the plate of opportunities handed to you.
That's why Rimes agreed to host the new season of Nashville Star, the country music American Idol. That's why having lunch with her is part of the grand prize of a reality show called American Dream Derby. That's why she's licking the spoon coated in Danza's sauce. In Rimes' eyes, these aren't B-list gigs; they're ways of getting her name back out there.
Being a good sport, Rimes plays the game, complimenting Danza on the sauce, thanking him for the appearance, waving graciously to the audience. She has, after all, been here before, at Square One. In fact, Rimes has spent the majority of her career teetering between No. 1 and Square One.
And on this fall day, in the ABC television studio on Columbus Avenue in New York City, she's on the eve of trying again.
On Tuesday, the Garland-raised singer will release the most important album in her controversy-dotted, wildly successful, twisting road of a career. This Woman is Rimes' much-lauded return to country music, her remarriage to the genre after she briefly divorced it just three years ago for a fling with pop music -- and the pop culturisms that went along with it, like posing topless for the cover of Blender magazine.
Country music, however, can be reluctant to let artists back in after they stray. Shania Twain and Faith Hill, though both hugely successful, are often labeled traitors -- by music critics, by longtime fans -- for leaving behind the genre that gave them their start.
Rimes suffered similar criticisms, not to mention several years' worth of unrelated headaches that found her spending more time in the courtroom than on the stage. Meanwhile, she was growing up, trying to, like all teens, find herself and fend for herself.
Now 22, she says she has. Gone are her legal problems, she says, sealed up, shelved and either forgotten or forgiven. And she's gotten married, having found true love in the arms of one of her dancers, Dean Sheremet. All she wants to do now, she says, is get back to singing country music.
The question is: Will country music have her back?
"LeAnn Rimes is a country artist who decided to try her bid at crossing over into pop. That's the rite of youth," says Dann Huff, the well-known producer (his credits include Faith Hill, Michael Jackson and Madonna) who worked on This Woman. "In doing so, she mucked up her relationship with country. The tendency of country music is, unfortunately, 'If you stay the same, we'll accept you. If you get outside our box, we'll stab you to death.' "
Pushing boundaries
After Danza and Rimes make the sauce, then sing their song, the singer is escorted to a backstage dressing room for this interview. Oddly, it will not be monitored by a publicist, as is sometimes the case with a high-profile artist whose career has had as many crescendos and nose dives as Rimes'.
In jeans, a white T-shirt and a gold vest that glitters like a Vegas casino, Rimes seems comfortable, open and secure. She doesn't twitch when asked a prickly question, like why she posed for Blender -- topless -- for the music magazine's November 2002 issue.
"First off, all you see is my back," she says. "And you've seen more of me in certain dresses that I've worn. It wasn't a big thing. It was something different. I'm always looking for avenues that aren't necessarily, typically what I would do. I enjoy giving everybody a little bit of a shock."
For the past few years, Rimes has done just that -- one seemingly strange thing after another, from releasing an all-pop record, Twisted Angel, to putting out over-the-top, overtly sensual music videos, to packing up and moving to LA, to, basically, leaving her Southern roots in the dust.
All this followed her initial burst of success: A No. 1 hit, Blue, at age 13; Grammys at age 14 for Best New Artist (the first country singer to win in that category) and Best Female Country Vocal Performance; and, also at age 14, more than 12 million records sold. Talk about a winning streak.
"Everyone around here loved her," says Johnnie High, who gave Rimes her start at his Johnnie High Country Music Revue in Arlington, back when she was about 7. "But watching her do all those things in LA, it was kinda like watching one of your kids writing on the sidewalk. You shake your head, criticize them and wanna give 'em a spanking. But at her age . . . I think everybody understood it's a growing-up thing. It's a kid thing. You just think to yourself, 'This, too, shall pass.' "
For a kid, Rimes was making some heavy decisions, including signing on dotted lines to take three parties to court. She went after former bodyguard Robert Lavetta for blackmail; her label for an "unfair" record deal; and, shockingly, her own father, Wilbur Rimes, for "gross mismanagement."
At the time, she claimed her dad and his Dallas business partner, Lyle Walker, had stolen from her at least $7 million by charging her various exorbitant music-biz fees.
"For a long time, there was a real danger that her litigation threatened to overshadow her music," says Phyllis Stark, the Nashville bureau chief for Billboard music magazine. "I have a folder in my office that's as thick as my arm, full of copies of all her court papers. A lot of people began to wonder if she was going to derail herself and her career. It's hard to concentrate on your next album when you're in court all the time."
The album that came out amid and in the aftermath of all her courtroom drama was 2002's Twisted Angel, her foray into pop music. Although just a few years earlier she'd had enormous success with the pop single How Do I Live, which spent a record 69 consecutive weeks in the No. 1 slot on Billboard's Hot 100 chart, Angel barely flew, selling a little more than 500,000 copies -- zilch compared to her monster sales of yesteryear.
"You want to sell a million or 2 million every time out," says Benson Curb, Curb Records' vice president of sales. "Obviously, it wasn't her best sales outing to date. We would have at least liked to have had it go platinum."
Despite Angel's disappointing sales figures, Rimes says she has no regrets about making a steel-guitar-free pop album.
"I love everything I've ever done," she says, chugging a bottle of water. "I've gotten grilled a lot about that album. You know, people just didn't want me to experiment. When you're a teen-ager growing up, you learn a lot about yourself, and that's what I did with my music. I did something different, something that not a lot of people expected me to do. And that's what you're supposed to do when you're a kid, find yourself, find what works for you. And, in a lot of ways, that did work for me. It was a great learning experience. So, nope, no regrets whatsoever."
Off to a good start
Obviously, given Angel's hardly stellar sales, one would be inclined to think that Rimes' return to country music is being disguised as a hopeful return to the gold mine she dug with her debut, Blue.
She, and others associated with the disc, insist that's not the case.
"If she had sold 50 million copies of Twisted Angel, yes, this conversation may not be taking place," says producer Dann Huff. "But I think it goes deeper. The truth is, in her roots, she's very country, and she wants to re-establish her ties with country music. This is who she is. This is her core audience. She has tasted everything and decided this is what she likes best. She doesn't seem to be influenced by anything but her own gut instincts. Believe me, she's not hurting for money."
Every musical decision about This Woman, Benson Curb says, was Rimes' -- and he says those decisions were based on her passions, not her cash flow.
"This record is indicative of where she is as an artist and a person," he says. "It's reflective of where she is in her life right now."
That would be living in Nashville, happily, with her husband and seven dogs. The lawsuits have been settled. She and her father, who lives close by, have reconciled. She's developing more, she says, as a singer and writer. Matter of fact, she points out, she wrote or co-wrote a handful of This Woman's songs.
"I do think I am growing more as a writer," she says. "And there's a very cool energy to this record, I think, because of that. It's absolutely country, but it's my kind of country. I would get bored if I didn't play around with stuff.
"It has a modern twist to it. I still want to attract a younger audience," she says of the record. "But there's also stuff on it for my older fans who liked Blue. I was really inspired by a lot of old-school country rock and blues. I was listening to a lot of Janis Joplin, when music was music. It's not overproduced, I'm not hiding behind anything. To me, it's the most personal album I've done."
So far, so good, says Chris Huff, music director for local country station KSCS 96.3-FM, pointing out that the album's first single, Nothin' Bout Love Makes Sense, already has leapt into the Top 10 zone of Billboard's country music singles chart -- the first time in four years Rimes has had a Top 10 country single.
"She's off to the right start," he says. "We haven't heard any resistance from our audience saying, 'Hey, she went pop, why are you playing her?' I'm sure there are a few out there, but our audience just wants to hear good country music."
When asked if This Woman means she's staying true to country from this point on, she gives a definite "I have no idea."
"The more people don't want me to do something, the more I'm going to want to do it," she says. "There's a real inner strength in me. I'm really driven to not be predictable. I've heard some people say, 'Oh, she's over.' I think you're over when you become predictable."
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