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Review

Yearwood shares life, emotions with crowd

By HELEN HUNTLEY
Published January 8, 2006

She kept us waiting four years for her new album and an extra three months for Saturday night's show at Ruth Eckerd Hall, but it's great to have Trisha Yearwood back.

Her soaring, full-bodied voice still sounds powerful enough to have turned back Hurricane Wilma, the reason her October concert was rescheduled. "I'm used to tornadoes, but hurricanes send me packing," she said.

Yearwood took the capacity crowd of 2,104 on a tour of her 1990s highlights, including her first smash hits, She's in Love with the Boy and Like We Never Had a Broken Heart.

As she acknowledges, most of her songs are depressing, and Yearwood wrung every bit of emotion out of them. She showed why she is one of the greatest interpretive singers in country music. Listening to The Song Remembers and Trying to Love You, you'd think she was the loneliest woman on earth instead of a new bride.

Yearwood's mother, sister and several other relatives were in the audience, but she said husband Garth Brooks was home in Oklahoma doing laundry. "I thought it would stop after the marriage, but he's still doing it after three weeks." She joked that she was on tour because "somebody has to work to support the family."

Yearwood's concert also featured songs from her new album, Jasper County, including the first single, Georgia Rain, which evokes the beauty of rural Georgia and the memory of young love. Although the album has won her two Grammy nominations, it hasn't made the same splash on country radio as Yearwood's big hits of the 1990s.

Yearwood showed she knows how to rock with the Wrong Side of Memphis and a rollicking Pistol, about being in love with a bad boy "you get lost, you get lonely, you get calls from the police." And, her band, without its fiddle player, did a great job of improvisation.

Ruth Eckerd Hall is a great venue for her. Her big voice fills the room and the size facilitates the intimacy that her concerts generate. Yearwood chatted with the audience like they were old friends or soon would be, joking about her "witchy poo" shoes with long pointed toes and raving over the "wedding cake" the caterer provided.

Opening act Jessi Alexander offered tracks from her debut album, Honeysuckle Sweet, released last year. She also went back in time for I'm Not Lisa, in tribute to country singer Jessi Colter. Alexander said her dad had a crush on Colter, best known as the wife of Waylon Jennings, and named his new baby after her.

[Last modified January 8, 2006, 00:43:05]