It only took country star Trisha Yearwood twenty-something years to put together her dream project: a tribute to the one-and-only Frank Sinatra.
One single listen to Yearwood’s purely sublime album Let’s Be Frank, a finely-curated collection of Sinatra’s catalog, leaves listeners in complete awe of Yearwood’s range and versatility as a vocalist.
So just what the heck took her so long to put it all together?
“I think it was really just fear,” she told CMT.com in a recent sitdown chat, seen in the exclusive video below.
“As long as you don’t do the thing that you feel is a little out of your comfort zone, you can’t fail at it.”
You won’t fail, but you certainly won’t soar either.
“That was a lesson for me in not waiting,” she wisely observed.
Assembling a veritable dream team including legendary producer Don Was and Grammy-winning engineer Al Schmitt, with a fifty-plus person orchestra nailing divine arrangements of the selected songs certainly helped alleviate Yearwood’s fears and concerns.
“I got a sense of confidence, and I have to say thank you to Don Was and to Al Schmitt . . . to the musicians who made me feel when I walked in the room like I belonged in that room with them. It made me believe it, and that’s why I sang those songs that way. Now, I believe it and I’m like, ’Alright, what else ya got?’ I’m ready to do it again because I’ve done it. I’m glad that I didn’t keep talking about. I’m glad I finally did it.”
More to come from our chat with Yearwood. In the meantime, if you haven’t spent time with Let’s Be Frank, you must. The album is now available.