LeAnn Rimes is done trying to fit into boxes. “I’ve never really belonged anywhere,” she tells me, sipping on the idea like it’s both confession and weapon. “Sometimes I don’t even feel like I’ve belonged to myself, because I’ve belonged so much to the world.” Which is a hell of a way to open an album, but that’s exactly what she does on God’s Work, kicking things off with “Spaceship” and the line: No, I never felt like I belong here. “I like to make people cry right out of the gate,” she shrugs.
That blend of despair and defiance runs through the whole record. There’s primal drum thump and ethereal drift, a cosmic rhythm section beamed in from the ancients. “I recorded a chant record in 2020,” she says. “It influenced the sound. I wanted to dig into how ancient rhythm is—how primal we can get.” Then she stacks on collaborators like she’s casting a film: Dave Matthews Band’s Stefan Lessard, Sheila E, Ziggy Marley, Ben Harper, Ledisi, Mickey Guyton. Some she’s never even met in person. One she literally found at the dentist’s office. “I saw Ben Harper sitting there, and I’m like, that’s Ben Harper,” she laughs. “So yeah, I asked him to play on the record while waiting for a cleaning.”
The songs themselves swing between grief and uplift like a pendulum that never stops moving. “It’s milk and meat,” she says with a smirk. “You get the heavy subject, then something to wash it down.” On “The Wild,” she channels a kind of battle-cry rage—one she rewrote five times before finally surrendering to the moment in the studio. “I just opened my mouth and something came out,” she says. “That sound became the hook. Rage can be incredibly healing.” Healing, but also funny. Her crew has taken to only texting her Rage Against the Machine lyrics. “They fit every situation,” she says. “It’s weird, but true.”
For all the fire, she’s not running from the past either. Twenty-six years since Blue, she’s learned to embrace the time stamp fans hang on her. “I was annoyed for a while. People freeze you at 13 or Coyote Ugly. But I’m over that hump. I can appreciate it now. There’s freedom. I don’t need to prove myself. I just want to express.”
That expression will next take her to the Taylor Hawkins tribute, though she still doesn’t know what she’s performing. “Taylor was my neighbor. I’d see him every day on his bike. He once called me like, ‘Come down the street, sing on this record with me.’ That was him. The kindest man. I miss him.” Her voice catches a bit, then steadies. “I don’t know how I’ll get through the show, but we’re all in the same boat. It’ll be fun, heavy, and great—all of it.”
And so it goes for LeAnn Rimes, still balancing heaven and dirt, hope and fury, the cosmic and the primal. Or as she puts it: “It’s God’s work. Or love’s work. Either way, it’s about letting creation move through us.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
