Trisha Yearwood
Heaven, Heartache, and the Power of Love
2007
Trisha Yearwood was already the most consistent albums artist in country music since Emmylou Harris when she switched labels and released Heaven, Heartache, and the Power of Love, her best album of the last twenty years.
Yearwood sticks to her tried and true formula of sophisticated songcraft delivered with precision and nuance. What elevates Heaven above most of her catalog is the strength of the material collected here.
We get both a catchy uptempo romp (“They Call it Falling For a Reason”) and a devastating ballad (“Dreaming Fields”) from the pen of Matraca Berg, the latter of which might be the finest song that Berg ever penned. Yearwood taps into her diva roots with tour de force vocals on “This is Me You’re Talking To” and the title track, where it sounds like the studio itself can barely contain her raw power. She’s more playful than she’s ever been on record on “Cowboys are My Weakness,” and anyone who has been touched by grief will need a box of tissues and some time to themselves after hearing the album closer, “Sing You Back to Me.”
What’s most interesting about the album is how loose Yearwood sounds, a word that could rarely be used to describe her consistently excellent material up until this point. This is particularly evident on “Drown Me,” her most ferocious performance yet. If you told me it was recorded live at a dive bar after midnight, I’d believe you. She sounds rejuvenated by the label switch, making her solid MCA swan song Jasper County seem timid and reserved in comparison.
Yearwood’s career took a different path after this set, and her recordings have been sporadic since then. I’m sure she’ll meet or exceed this highwater mark in the years to come, but for now, this is her finest effort of the last twenty years and her best set overall since 2000’s Real Live Woman.
More essential Trisha Yearwood from the CU era
- Let’s Be Frank showcases Yearwood’s range as a vocalist better than any other album of hers to date
- Every Girl was uneven by Yearwood standards, but “The Matador,” “Bible and a .44,” and the title track are as good as anything she’s ever recorded
Country Universe: A 20th Anniversary Retrospective
Previous: Miranda Lambert, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend |
Next: Laura Bell Bundy, Achin’ and Shakin’
It should be mentioned that Heaven, Heartache, And The Power Of Love was Trisha’s only album on Scott Borchetta’s Republic label (he was at MCA Nashville when Trisha started out in 1991); and while she made a really good album here, I don’t think she was given all that much of a push at the label. She seemed to be shoved aside in favor of the then-new kid on the block, one Taylor Allison Swift.
It would be twelve long years before Trisha would come back with Let’s Be Frank and Every Girl, both in 2019. So much had happened to her, both internally and externaly, in that 12-year span, most especially losing both of her parents. She, like so many other female artists, also found herself exiled from country radio because of the Bro-Country onslaught of 2009-2017. And she also was deeply affected, as were her fellow female artists, by the public revelation in 2013 by her spiritual role model Linda Ronstadt that she had what she thought at the time was Parkinson’s Disease (it was re-diagnosed as Progessive Supranuclear Palsy in 2019) and would never be able to sing again.
But I don’t doubt that we’ll still have another album from Trisha. She just needs to find the right material and the right time and place to make it happen (IMHO).
This is brutal to choose a top 5 from:
“Dreaming Fields”
“Sing You Back to Me’
“This is Me Your Talking To”
“They Call It Falling for a Reason”
“Help Me”
They Call It Falling For A Reason might be my favorite Trisha single of the aughts. And Nothin’ Bout Memphis remains one of her finest deep cuts.