Yearwood Puts the Focus on the Songs

Trisha Yearwood’s lustrous voice is one of the most remarkable instruments in contemporary pop. She can caress a ballad or belt out an up-tempo screamer with no loss of emotional impact, and while there may be greater technical singers around, no one touches Yearwood’s ability to wrest every last ounce of passion from even the most benighted lite-pop material.

Even though she was battling vestiges of a flu on Sunday, Yearwood’s performance at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza only served to confirm her preeminence among the current crop of middle-of-the-road country divas.

Unlike such contemporaries as Wynonna and Reba McEntire, whose bloated stage shows are monuments to unchecked narcissism, Yearwood likes to keep her performances uncluttered and focused entirely on her material. Clad in a simple ankle-length black dress and a blue cardigan, Yearwood and her no-nonsense five-piece band ran through a hits-heavy set that never felt workmanlike.

And there’s a good reason why: Yearwood’s unerring instinct for material. Most of the songs she performed Sunday--from the almost absurdly sunny “Perfect Love” and “Thinkin’ of You” to third-person story-songs such as “American Girl”--fell just short of Nashville corn pone. Even the ones that were just plain bad, such as the LeAnn Rimes hit “How Do I Live” (which Yearwood also recorded, for the movie “Con Air”) benefited from her crystalline, pitch-perfect delivery.

Yearwood closed the show with a moving version of one of the world’s most played-out songs, “Over the Rainbow.” Her voice swooping into her high register, then plunging back into her mid-range, Yearwood captured the song’s rueful optimism and made it her own.