Rita Wilson’s Now and Forever: Duets isn’t just a stroll through the past, but a full-on conversation with it. The singer, songwriter, and actress reenters the soft-lit world of the 1970s, where singer-songwriters ruled and radio still felt personal. “Those songs still resonate,” she tells me. “It was the birth of people writing for themselves, not just for someone else to sing. You had Carole King coming out of the Brill Building, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Crosby, Stills, and Nash—people writing from a very personal point of view. That’s why those songs endure.”
The record is a 10-track time capsule of 1970s classics, reimagined as duets with an eclectic roster that includes Willie Nelson, Smokey Robinson, Elvis Costello, Josh Groban, Leslie Odom Jr., and Keith Urban. Wilson recorded it during the pandemic—an unexpected blessing of availability. “Nobody was touring, so they were around,” she says. “It was like the one good thing about that time.”
What makes Now and Forever stand out is the framing. Wilson didn’t just want to sing these songs—she wanted to redefine them. “If you’re going to cover a song, you have to bring something new,” she says. “I started imagining these songs as conversations. Two people talking, maybe lovers, maybe old friends. What would they say to each other?”
That approach turns classics like “Songbird” and “Slip Slidin’ Away” into miniature plays. “With ‘Songbird,’” she says, “I imagined two people who’ve just made love, speaking to each other almost like vows. It’s tender, intimate, like a whispered promise.” When she brought the song to Josh Groban, he surprised her. “He said, ‘Thank you for asking me to sing like this—no one ever does.’ People expect big notes from Josh, but here he’s so delicate, so present. It’s beautiful.”
“Slip Slidin’ Away,” her duet with Willie Nelson, takes on an entirely different emotional weight. “I knew Willie loved Paul Simon’s songs, so I did some research and realized he’d never recorded that one,” she says. “Hearing him sing ‘The nearer your destination, the more you’re slip slidin’ away’—that line hits different when you’re almost 90. There’s so much life in his voice. It’s wise, funny, heartbreaking, all at once.”
She chuckles. “And yet Willie’s probably going to outlive us all.”
Wilson’s voice takes on an affectionate reverence when she talks about her duet partners. “Everyone came in with so much care,” she says. “No one phoned it in. Elvis Costello, for example—when we did ‘Fire,’ he changed the phrasing completely. He took out the ‘ooh’ in ‘and when we kiss ooh fire,’ and put all the longing into the word ‘kiss.’ He held it forever. You could feel the whole story in that one note.”
For Wilson, Now and Forever is also a quiet love letter to her first musical awakening. “These are songs I grew up with,” she says. “They’re part of my DNA. Every one of them carries history—mine, the songwriter’s, and the listener’s. When you sing something like that, you want to do it justice.”
It also serves as a kind of spiritual sequel to her 2012 debut, AM/FM, which paid tribute to the pre-singer-songwriter era of the 1960s. “That record looked back at the time before this one,” she says. “So yeah, maybe this is the next chapter.” When I mention how it feels like a musical counterpart to her 1995 film Now and Then, she lights up. “That’s so funny you say that, because that’s exactly why I put ‘I’ll Be There’ on here. My character sings it at the beginning of that movie. I thought, maybe a few people will catch that Easter egg.”
Wilson’s affection for the material goes beyond nostalgia—it’s about emotional truth. “A friend once told me, ‘Good songs stay written,’” she says. “And he’s right. You can hear a song like ‘I’ll Be There’ or ‘Where Is the Love’ fifty years later, and it still lands.”
As for what’s next, Wilson already has ideas. “I’d love to do a Volume 2,” she says. “Female duets this time. What would the conversations be between two women? That would be really fun to explore.”
Outside the studio, Wilson’s creative life is just as rich. She’s also appearing in Wes Anderson’s next film, and she describes the experience like she’s recounting a dream. “It was magical,” she says. “We shot in Spain during COVID, so all the actors lived in one hotel. Every night, we’d have dinner together under these beautiful arbors—like something out of an Italian wedding. Wes was there every night. No cynicism, just pure creativity. It felt like being in a circus he was leading. I’d work with him again anytime.”
For Wilson, whether she’s harmonizing with Smokey Robinson or sitting across a long Spanish dinner table with a cast of Anderson regulars, it all comes down to connection. “That’s the whole point,” she says. “You make something. You share it. You hope it means something to someone else.” She smiles, warm and wry. “And if it doesn’t, well… at least you got to sing with Willie Nelson.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
