reba duets

Reba McEntire began her new Reba Duets album with a wish list of singers ― half from the pop world, half from country. Then on a day off during last year's concert engagement at the Las Vegas Hilton, she started making phone calls and sending e-mails.
Connecting with some of the artists was easy. Kelly Clarkson came to one of McEntire's Vegas shows. She asked Brooks & Dunn's Ronnie Dunn over for dinner; they wrote their song, Does the Wind Still Blow in Oklahoma, by e-mail.


MORE: Clarkson finds her idol in McEntire
CLIP: Listen to Reba and Kelly sing 'Because of You'

She approached Vince Gill at the Kennedy Center Honors, where both singers were helping honor Dolly Parton. "He said, 'I've got a song (These Broken Hearts, from his 2003 Next Big Thing album) that I think would be a great duet,' " McEntire says. "He MP3ed it to me, and we recorded it."

She asked Justin Timberlake through actress Joanna Garcia, who played McEntire's daughter on her CW sitcom Reba and was dating a friend of Timberlake's. The two singers spotted each other at the Grammy Awards. The next day, she says, he wrote The Only Promise That Remains for her.

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"I didn't know if it was going to be SexyBack 2, 3 or 4," McEntire says. "I was really nervous. I didn't know how I was going to say no to a song I didn't like if Justin had written it."

The list grew over several months to include LeAnn Rimes, Trisha Yearwood, Kenny Chesney, Rascal Flatts, Don Henley and Carole King.

"She is the nicest, most humble, most unassuming star I've ever been around," says the Flatts' Jay DeMarcus. "It's refreshing to see someone who's had as much success as she has be as personable as she is."

McEntire insisted that singers and musicians record at the same session whenever possible. "I don't like to do things by myself," she says. "I don't eat by myself. I don't like to go to the movies by myself.

"I feed off the band, they feed off me. And so to have our guests come in and all of us be together ― it was like one big, happy family."

That involved some maneuvering for times and studios that would work for everyone. "Whenever they were all available, that's when we went," McEntire says.

With Reba ending its six-season run in February, her schedule was more open than usual. "When we get a little down time, we take it while we can," she says.

So McEntire, her husband/manager Narvel Blackstock and their 17-year-old son, Shelby, went to Bora Bora, Fiji and Hawaii in consecutive months. "Then I did South Pacific at the Hollywood Bowl, so it was a South Pacific summer," she says.

The release of Duets means McEntire's schedule is picking back up. She'll launch a tour in 2008, possibly as early as January. In March, she'll introduce a shoe line at Dillard's to go with her already existing clothing line and bedding collection.

She'd also like to get back into television. "We'll start working on that, probably next year," McEntire says. She hopes to do another sitcom, a struggling genre these days.

It's kind of like before Bill Cosby came out with The Cosby Show, she says. "People were like, 'They're probably going to go away.' But I think (sitcoms) will come back."


While LeAnn Rimes can be heard on "When You Love Someone Like That" on Reba McEntire's Reba Duets album, she's also paired with a couple of other singers for duets on her own upcoming album, Family. LeAnn and blues singer Marc Broussard sing "Nothin' Wrong" which they wrote with Blair Daly, and she also recorded with rocker Jon Bon Jovi for "'Til We Ain't Strangers Anymore."
"Recording with Jon was great," says LeAnn. "He has such a great work ethic. He knows what he wants and he knows how to get it. He's had such longevity in this business. I have true, true respect for him as a visionary and as an artist. I think our voices sound great together."

The recordings LeAnn did with Reba and Jon are available on their current albums, and will be bonus tracks on LeAnn's Family, which will be released Oct. 9.


Reba: Duets is the twenty-fifth studio album from Reba McEntire and was released on September 18, 2007. Recording for the album commenced in 2006 and ended in early 2007. 11 songs have been recorded for the album. The first single from the album was "Because of You" with Kelly Clarkson. The release of the album was announced by both Billboard and McEntire's official website on May 10, 2007.
Reba McEntire released Reba Duets on Tuesday (Sept. 18) on MCA Nashville. Musical partners include Kelly Clarkson on the hit single, "Because of You." McEntire was recently named Woman of the Year by Billboard magazine. ... Other new releases include Larry Cordle & Lonesome Standard Time's Took Down and Put Up (Lonesome Day), Mary Gauthier's Between Daylight and Dark (Lost Highway), Emmylou Harris' Songbird (Rhino), Jim Lauderdale's