LeAnn Rimes became a country music sensation with the release of her first single, “Blue,” when she was just 13 years old, but if she had listened to her dad, her version of the song would never have been recorded. Rimes looked back on the 25th anniversary of her album of the same name during an interview with Kelleigh Bannen on an Essential Album special on Apple Music Country, revealing that her dad had thrown the song’s demo in the trash.
“I never knew until recently that there were actually multiple people that had recorded [‘Blue.’] I got it as I received it in the mail, my dad and I did after, I think, he heard me sing at some kind of sporting event and the National Anthem,” Rimes recalled. “He sent us the demo of ‘Blue’ and my dad threw it in the trash and didn’t let me hear it. I was a very defiant child and sometimes that served me well. In this situation, it did. When my dad left one time after he threw in the trash, he was leaving to go somewhere. I went and dug it out of the trash and I listened to it.”
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Rimes shared that “obviously” she understood why her father threw the demo away because it “was awful.” “It didn’t sound anything like the song that you hear now, but because of my defiance, I’m like, ‘I’m going to show my dad that this song’s great,’” she said. “By the time he got back, I’d put that little Yodel thing in there. Then he was like, ‘Oh, it’s like a different song.’ That’s really how that song came about, was this little girl who was just like, ‘I’m going to show my dad that I can make the song cool.’”
The Grammy winner admitted that she doesn’t love listening to her own music but recently heard “Blue” and was able to appreciate the artistic direction her younger self had. “I definitely had a very strong sense of my own artistry, I guess, or what I loved and what moved me as a child from very, very early on,” she said. “There’s something about [‘Blue’] that’s just so classic. I heard it the other day, twice actually in Montana when I was on vacation. I’m like, ‘This song is haunting me at this moment.’”
She added that when she was “forced” to hear the song while sitting in the car, “I really could appreciate how classic of a record that is. It brought kind of the roots of country music into a genre in the 90s that was very, very different. That was a very different sound for the time. I really do, when I think of country music for myself, there’s so many classic songs that an artist and that kind of vibe of the genre that really plays to my heart and so that spoke very, very much to who I was as a country music lover.”
