Yearwood Keeps Things Real Both on the Inside and Out

Trisha Yearwood has sold more than 8.5 million albums in the U.S. since putting out her first album 10 years ago, a decade in which she logged 19 Top 10 country singles, five of which went to No. 1.

So what’s this multi-platinum country star doing on a recent morning at home in Nashville?

“I’m just unloading the dishwasher,” she says sheepishly. “It’s just me and the dog.”

Unglamorous? Totally. But real life is often unglamorous, and that’s just peachy with this 36-year-old Georgia-born singer, who plays the Greek Theatre on Friday and the Sun Theatre in Anaheim on Sunday.

She’s carved out a niche in country music as a real live woman, in contrast to the majority of her peers, who fill their music with romantic fantasies.

“If you truly want to be able to call yourself an artist--whatever that word means--you have to make music because it’s in your heart and because that’s what you want to say,” she says. “If you let that not be the priority and you start thinking about marketing and radio and consultants and image, and you let that rule the songs you record, I don’t think you can call yourself an artist anymore.

“I understand that things like marketing and radio are important, and that I have to compete if I want to maintain a career,” she says. “The difference is, those questions are addressed after the album is done, not before.”

That Yearwood has hit the 10-year mark in her career gives her reason to be reflective, yet the June release of her 10th album, “Inside Out,” keeps her from focusing exclusively on the past.

It’s gotten her more glowing reviews for the cliche-free songs she chooses and the bombast-free way she delivers them.

Because cliches and bombast frequently add up to records that tear up the pop as well as country charts, it’s no idle feat for a singer to resist that temptation. Especially for one with a voice as rich and powerful as Yearwood’s.

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But her musical role models are Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, so Yearwood’s priorities are on the musical rather than the commercial payoff. “Emmy’s always just done her own thing, and radio has been off and on with her,” she says. “For me, she’s the goal, because at the end of it all, she can look back and know that she’s sold a fair amount of records. But even though maybe she didn’t have one record that sold 5 million copies, she’s consistently had integrity. She’s made her choices for all the right reasons.”

On “Inside Out,” Yearwood can be as serious-minded as her current single, “I Would’ve Loved You Anyway,” an acceptance of pain as the price of love, or as light-humored as Matraca Berg’s “For a While,” which invokes long-suffering Wile E. Coyote in the quest to understand what people put themselves through in the name of love.

“A lot of people think, ‘All we have to find is four hits’--because you’ll be lucky if there are four singles off an album--and they view the rest of it as filler, because it’s not going to get played on the radio,” says Yearwood.

“But I always hated hearing something I loved on the radio, then finding that the rest of the album sounded exactly the same or it [was no good]. I felt cheated.

“Again going back to Linda and Emmy’s albums, every song counted, even if they knew they’d never get played on radio. So I always have that in my mind, and some of my favorite songs from my albums never saw the light of day at radio.”

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It all comes down to setting priorities according to the heart rather than the pocketbook, something Yearwood does off stage as well as on.

Heading into a second decade of her career with a slew of hit records, a busted marriage and a faithful pooch still in tow, Yearwood says, “I have learned how to focus on things I can do something about. I went through the ‘let’s-see-if-we-can-have-it-all’ phase and learned, no, I couldn’t really have it all.

“For the last 10 years I’ve been going nonstop. I wouldn’t change anything, but I do want to figure out how to have a personal life too. I wouldn’t want to look back in another 10 years and [think], ‘I never had kids, but I’ve been touring for 20 years straight and I’ve made some really cool records.”’

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Trisha Yearwood, with Kim Richey, Friday at the Greek Theatre, 2700 Vermont Canyon Road, L.A. 7:30 p.m. $27.50 to $55.50. (323) 665-1927. Also Sunday at the Sun Theatre, 2200 E. Katella Ave., Anaheim. 8:30 p.m. $67.50. (714) 712-2700.