Taking Her Chances Again

Lee Ann Womack has good reason to be singing a happy tune these days--and the tune she’s singing is more than making up for the curveballs that threatened to knock her out of the game 18 months ago.

That tune is the glowingly upbeat “I Hope You Dance,” a record with broad-based appeal that’s winning not only country fans but pop listeners as well. It’s rapidly turning into an “event” song that’s popping up at commencements, weddings and other special occasions.

“It’s one of the two or three hottest records out right now,” says Lon Helton, country music editor for the trade publication Radio & Records. “Everybody is raving about it. It’s a huge impact song because its very nature touches so many people.”

Among the song’s string of affirmations for getting more out of life is one that Womack, 33, doesn’t just sing but also seems to live on a daily basis: “I hope you never take the path of least resistance.”

It’s what helped her bounce back from a double whammy at the beginning of 1999, when her record label, Decca, folded just as Womack gave birth to her second daughter after a surprise pregnancy.

“That was when I knew it was time for me to take a little time off and regroup,” says Womack, who was preparing to record her third album at the time. “I wanted to give [her record label] MCA as complete a package as I could. I wanted to be as together as I could for them. So I did take some time off . . . because I was working on my family, which is the most important thing to me.”

Womack became a mom for the second time with the arrival of Anna Lise 17 months ago (Anna’s sister, Aubrie, is 9), and last fall Womack married the baby’s dad, former Decca artists and repertoire executive Frank Liddell. Lidell produced three tracks on her new album, also titled “I Hope You Dance,” which recently debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s country album chart.

Womack, a Jacksonville, Texas, native, often says how “lucky” she feels about how everything is going now. But the fact is, she leaves as little to fate as possible.

Each time she visits a new town on tour, Womack and her entourage fan out to record stores to check on how her albums are stocked and displayed. And during her recent appearance on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” she insisted on personally reviewing the playback of the camera rehearsal tape to make sure the music would sound right on TV, rather than delegating the task to her road manager or a sound technician.

“It’s not that I don’t trust people,” the petite singer says during an interview on the patio outside the NBC commissary in Burbank, where “The Tonight Show” is taped. “But who is going to look after your career better than you? Who’s going to care about it more than you?

“What I fear is looking back at the end and saying, ‘Golly, why didn’t I stay on top of that?’ ” she says with a sense of quiet self-assuredness, not professional insecurity, reflecting the upbeat pragmatism that seems integral to her decision-making.

Womack’s hands-on approach to the business side of music is one reason she didn’t collapse when Decca did in January 1999, barely four months after her second album, “Some Things I Know,” came out.

“We were watching what was happening in the country music industry, and a lot of those labels were closing,” she says, “so I can’t say it was a surprise.”

Promotion and marketing efforts for her album, which ultimately sold 330,000 copies, were simply switched to MCA Nashville, Decca’s sister label, where Womack had worked as a college intern. Their efforts also pushed her 1997 debut, “Lee Ann Womack,” to the 440,000 sales mark, according to SoundScan. (“I Hope You Dance,” by comparison, has sold nearly 170,000 after just three weeks.)

What did catch her by surprise, however, was the arrival of Anna Lise. Given the sequence of events that started with her 1996 divorce from her first husband, singer Jason Sellers, and continued with the closing of Decca and the birth of her second daughter, did she worry about what life might have in store as she set about working on her third album?

“Oh no,” she says, bolting upright, her enormous blue eyes widening. “Hopefully with all the time I took on my personal life, we have things in order enough that nothing [else] will happen.

“But you know what?” she adds. “Every time it does, I grow and I mature and I learn from it and that’s the most important thing.”

Drawing the positive out of life is what “I Hope You Dance,” written by Mark D. Sanders and Tia Sillers, is all about.

It’s the kind of feel-good song that can quickly turn treacly, but Womack walks the line separating sincere encouragement from sentimentality.

It’s also one of the most pop-leaning songs on an album that, like its two predecessors, balances pop and traditional country material, sung in a high, quavering voice out of the Dolly Parton-Alison Krauss school.

Yet even when Womack moves into country-funk on “After I Fall” or country rock for “Ashes by Now,” she never sounds as if she’s pandering to the forces of crossover. That quality has helped her hang onto country purists who embraced her early, while also pulling in fans who like their country with more pop.

“I’m not ashamed at all of very traditional country music even to the point of bluegrass, if it’s done well,” she says. “What’s important is to keep my goal and my focus on making great music--as close as I can come to that.

“I think people that say they don’t like traditional country have maybe heard some bad traditional country. And you know what? There’s bad pop, there’s bad gospel, there’s bad country, there’s just bad music. And there’s good music. . . . What I’ve not really understood [is] why more people don’t get that point.”