{"id":1319871,"date":"2020-05-11T07:30:45","date_gmt":"2020-05-11T13:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cmt.com\/news\/?p=1820915"},"modified":"2020-05-11T07:30:45","modified_gmt":"2020-05-11T13:30:45","slug":"sara-evans-the-copy-that-covers-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/music-news\/sara-evans-the-copy-that-covers-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Sara Evans: The Copy That Covers Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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by Alison Bonaguro<\/a><\/span> 44m ago<\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n

When you first hear that a country artist is releasing an entire album of covers, you naturally assume it will be all classic country covers.<\/p>\n

But Sara Evans has cast a much wider net than that.<\/p>\n

Her Copy That<\/em> album \u2014 due out on Friday (May 15) \u2014 goes way, way back to the songs of the 70s and 80s. And only two of them are country songs.<\/p>\n

Instead, Evans pulled ideas for the song stack from radio hits when she was just a kid, but a kid who played in a covers band growing up in Missouri.<\/p>\n

CMT.com: The majority of these songs come from the pop music of the 70s and 80s. It\u2019s almost as if you were listening to the same Top 40 radio stations that I was in middle school. How did you came up with these particular songs?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Evans: I grew up in a cover band. I started singing when I was four years old (around 1975) with my older brothers in cover bands. And so every weekend, I was singing in a bar and watching drunk people try to two-step. So I have been covering Reba, Patsy Cline, Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, Belinda Carlisle and so many others. I mean, you name it, I covered it. And that\u2019s an art, because you want to choose songs that are cool, but they don\u2019t have to really popular. I always tell people who haven\u2019t made it yet and they\u2019re booking gigs for their first jobs, \u201cDon\u2019t play any (expletive) original songs.\u201d I learned how to do that my entire life: choosing the best songs to cover. So I feel like I\u2019m good at it because of that.<\/p>\n

Okay, but still. How did you narrow it down to these 13?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I just kept listening to the XM 60s station, 70s station, 80s station. Then I would make this huge running list and just kept sending songs back and forth in group texts going on with my brother, my sister, my kids and my husband. And so we were all just throwing in ideas constantly.<\/p>\n

Well you certainly chose well. Because there isn\u2019t a middle-aged woman alive who won\u2019t love the Carol King and Fleetwood Mac songs. But then you throw in some Dexys Midnight Runners and Yvonne Elliman and The Knack. It sounds so clich\u00e9 to say it\u2019s diverse collection, but that\u2019s exactly what it is.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even when I didn\u2019t understand the meaning of some of these songs, they are what they are and they\u2019re just iconic. And I really wanted to blow people\u2019s minds by showing them that I can sing anything, and that I\u2019m so much more than just the singles that you\u2019ve heard on the radio. I\u2019m a better singer today than I ever have been. I wanted to show everybody that I can sing like that.<\/p>\n

I bet there were a lot of songs that you wanted to cut but it would\u2019ve made the album 12 hours long. Am I right?<\/strong><\/p>\n

For sure. There were so many songs that I wanted to put on it. I\u2019m going to have to do a Volume II. Just yesterday, Jay and I were driving around and that A-ha song, \u201cTake on Me\u201d (1974) came on. I\u2019m like, \u201cOh my God, we have to record that.\u201d But we just had to call it done at one point. Because it\u2019s like you can just go on and on forever and never make up your mind. So we were like, \u201cThis is it. This is our list.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, you nailed it. I have a group text of my own with friends from grade school and high school, and this is definitely going to be our soundtrack for our next weekend trip \u2014 God willing, it will be soon \u2014 because this track list is so well done since it\u2019s got those older and kind of obscure songs that weren\u2019t treasured enough. You know? It\u2019s not the cover songs that have been covered to death.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We definitely have a little bit of everything. But there\u2019s no question I am going to do more volumes. And I\u2019m going to do it the same way: I\u2019m going to copy the songs just as they were. This is just fine with me to choose the right songs and then make them sound more modern. In the middle is right where we went.<\/p>\n

Listen to Evans\u2019 take on Yvonne Elliman\u2019s slow-dance disco hit \u201cIf I Can\u2019t Have You\u201d 1977.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Embedded from www.youtube.com<\/a>.