Trisha Yearwood may be more than three decades into her career, but she's checking off a few big firsts with her new album, The Mirror.

Out now, the LP is the "She's In Love With The Boy" singer's first project since 2019's Every Girl (Deluxe Edition) and her first with Virgin Music Group, which partnered with Yearwood's Gwendolyn Records to bring the songs to life. Additionally — and perhaps most importantly — The Mirror is also the three-time GRAMMY winner's first album she's fully co-written and co-produced, resulting in some of her most intimate and personal vignettes to date.

Developed in conjunction with her longtime engineer and first-time producer Chad Carlson, The Mirror hones in on the tantalizing sound that skyrocketed Yearwood from an intriguing upstart in the early '90s to a stadium-sized headliner by the end of the decade. Equal parts pop and twang with just enough country soul pull the listener in on cuts like "Bringing The Angels" and "Girls Night In." She offers her trademark balladry, too, with poignant sentiments on "When October Settles In" and the introspective title track.

In Yearwood's eyes, The Mirror feels isolated from the rest of her catalog due to how much songwriting she contributed to it. Yet, the arrangements still feel wholeheartedly Trisha to longtime fans, reminiscent of the intimate, country pop aesthetic of her early material. The culmination is a collection of songs that have re-energized Yearwood as she steps into this new chapter in her career.

"What I'd love to do moving forward is follow a path similar to one of my biggest heroes, Emmylou Harris," she tells GRAMMY.com. "Emmylou is a songwriter, but she doesn't write every song on every record. Sometimes she does, but mostly it's a mix of those things. I'm hoping that's where this will evolve, too. It's a combination of finding great songs and then writing some yourself."

Below, Yearwood speaks about the album's many milestones and reunions, her advice to the latest wave of women in country music, and what's still on her career bucket list.

The Mirror is your first album in 6 years and first with the UMG family in nearly 20 — what prompted both of those moves?

The music industry has changed so much since I started in 1991 — there's so many more ways to do it now. Back then, if you were not on a major record label, you had no chance of getting played on the radio or selling records. You really needed that machine behind you, but that has changed a little bit.

When I started writing this album a couple years ago, it was all so new for me. I had not really ever done much writing at all. In fact, I'd been discouraged in my young life from doing it. When I was 19 years old, I had a guy tell me, "Well, you're not really a songwriter," and I just let it be the truth. 

All of my success has come from recording other people's songs, which I am grateful for. To be able to find songs like "The Song Remembers When" and "She's In Love With The Boy" and "Walkaway Joe," "Wrong Side Of Memphis" — songs that feel like mine — has been such a gift, and I would never go back. But this album gave me the opportunity to add a layer to that.

The reason it's been six years is because time goes by fast and we had COVID happen. I wrote a cookbook during that time since I was home for a year before finally starting to write songs for myself. I really never intended to make a record, but all of the people around me like my co-writers and my husband [Garth Brooks], who's an incredible songwriter and in all the Hall of Fames, was so complimentary and so encouraging. They said that I needed to make this record, and so I did.

Usually when I make a record, I just hope people hear it and quickly move on to the next thing, but this one's so personal that I want to figure out a way to make sure as many people can know about it as possible. And also, I loved being on MCA Records and thought, If I'm going to do this with a major label and I'm going to go back into the system, I want to do it with the people that I started with. 

Lucky for me, Virgin Records — who's part of the [UMG] family — were so excited about the idea. It just feels like a full-circle moment, and in a lot of ways, similar to when I made the first album. It's just really exciting because even though I've made a lot of records, I've never made one like this. It's like a whole new beginning for me.

Sounds like we have lots to look forward to! Regarding The Mirror, what was the timeline like for writing its songs — do any of those older songs or deep cuts from earlier in your career pop up here?

All of these songs were written in the last couple of years, but it's interesting. I'm actually going through and archiving my career for the first time currently. A couple of the younger people helping me do it stumbled upon a bunch of journals containing my writing from the early '90s in the past week or so. While this album doesn't have anything old on it, I may go back and revisit some of that material eventually. 

I've also been keeping a list of what I call "thoughts and one-liners" for 30 years that I did mine when writing these songs. As much as I felt discouraged to be a writer early on, when I look at these songs and listen to them, I realize that most of them I could not have written in my 20's or 30's because most of it just comes from life experience and looking back at younger Trisha going, "I wish you had known this" or "I wish you weren't as hard on yourself in this moment because that's part of life and you were just growing up." Those are lessons that you just have to learn when they arise.

Tell me about the team of co-writers you worked with on this album and why you chose to feature each on the project.

It all started with Leslie Satcher. She's an amazing songwriter who most people know for George Strait's "Troubadour." I've sung on her records and we've been friends for a long time. She's the one who kept calling and I would say, "Leslie, you don't want to write with me. I'm not really a writer" — the same excuses I'd been making for 35 years — and she said, "You are a writer and we're going to write." There were a couple times I even booked sessions with her before canceling them altogether because I was so terrified.

Then she went and booked a writing session with me and Steve Dorff — another very famous songwriter — and said "You're gonna show up." It was about an hour drive from my house, and I remember feeling sick to my stomach the whole way wanting to turn around but knowing I couldn't. At that point I had to show up. When I went in that day, I had printed out my list of thoughts and one-liners. There were several pages of stuff and she just said, "Hand them over." That was the moment when I knew I was going to be vulnerable.

Not long after, Leslie asked me about "When October Settles In." I told her about how my mom passed away in October several years ago and that even though I don't mark those dates on my calendar, I can feel it in my body when the weather starts to change and the leaves start to fall. After opening up about that she said, "That's the song we're going to write today." 

It was the first song of this new era that we wrote. Two and a half years later it made the record because it was such a powerful moment. It gave me the confidence that I could write, because I really did contribute.

From there, Leslie began introducing me to and scheduling sessions with folks like Bridgette Tatum. I also called my friend Sunny Sweeney to ask if she wanted to write together, which led to me meeting Erin Enderlin and writing with her for the album as well. 

That's been one of the coolest things about all this, the camaraderie. The Nashville music community is small, so once word got around what I was doing, I started getting calls from people interested in writing with me. The only writer I sought out and called myself was Sunny. Everyone else just found me or knew somebody who knew somebody, and that's how the community started.

It sounds like you dealt with a bit of imposter syndrome throughout the process?

What I've learned, now I've sat in a room with a lot of different and really successful writers, is that they all say the same things. You'll be sitting there with Leslie Satcher — who should have all the confidence in the world — and she says, "This might be a dumb line, but what do you think?," which is exactly how I'd react too. Everyone has the same stakes when you walk in the room. The slate is empty, everybody has to be vulnerable and everybody has to risk saying something that might not be right knowing it's a safe space to do so.

I love the record's nods to old school Nashville with Jim Lauderdale on "The Shovel" and to country music's present/future with Hailey Whitters on "Drunk Works." Tell me about your relationships with each of them and why they were good fits to sing with you on each of these tracks?

I've always been a huge Jim Lauderdale fan — he even sang on a song from [2005's Jasper County]. I first met him in the '90s when we did a tour in Ireland together. When we finished recording "The Shovel," I turned to Chad [Carlson] and said I wanted to put a guy on the song since it's about a fella who can't say the right thing — like, just stop talking, you're digging a hole and it's not getting any better [Laughs]. 

It's got such a sense of humor that I wanted the harmony singer to be a man with the personality to match, and Jim was that guy. When we first reconnected, I hadn't seen him in a long time and had planned for him to only record harmonies, but once he was in there I asked if he'd mind uttering a couple under your breath lines, which he was more than happy to do. When somebody like that comes in to sing on your record it takes things to another level.

With Hailey, she actually came to me with a song ("How Far Can It Go?") that reminded her of "She's In Love With The Boy" she was recording several years ago and wanted me to sing on, which I did. We've written a few times together now, but "Drunk Works" was a song I almost didn't put on the record because it's just a silly, irreverent song, but it's fun. She and I were singing a demo and she was laughing so hard that I couldn't not include her on the final version. In the school of finding really great songs, your job is to find serious songs that really resonate, but to also have some fun.

Another collaboration I really enjoyed on this record was with [Lady A's] Charles Kelley for "The Record Plays On." The two of us sang together a decade or so ago during a Songs of Tom Petty show in Nashville where we did "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around." We immediately knew that we needed to sing together again. His standout harmony on "The Record Plays On" is just killer. I remember him coming into the studio once and nailing it. I love how you can find the right person like that. I don't ever want to invite anybody to sing and it not feel special.

What are your thoughts on the latest wave of women in country music and the moment they've been having in recent years?

It reminds me so much of the '90s because there are so many women doing the thing and being successful at it. During the early 2000s, I moved to Oklahoma and wasn't making records — I was raising kids and writing cookbooks. When I finally did make an album after 12 years, one of the first questions I got was, "Why aren't there more women being played on country radio?" and I didn't really know why, but I'm so glad it's coming back. 

A big tie in I've learned from being friends and talking with all these girls is that they all grew up on '90s country and treat it almost as folklore, like they want me to tell them all about it. I mainly just tell them that we all had big hair and that back then people actually bought physical albums [Laughs]. 

Back in the '90s, it was Reba McEntire who came along and showed the labels that women can sell records and concert tickets — and money talks. A lot more women were signed after that, and I think you're starting to see the same thing happen again with Lainey [Wilson], Hailey and others. Then you've got folks like Miranda [Lambert] who bridge that gap between the '90s and '00s and embody how you can be strong, be confident and do things yourself.

Who are some of your personal favorites from this new wave?

I'm buddies with Carly Pearce. She has a real powerful voice and I love her songs. I'm also close with Kelsea Ballerini and Caylee Hammack. Lauren Alaina is a buddy too, so I check in with them all the time and am always around for support. I tell them that I can't give them advice on what to do in 2025 because it's a whole different world than it was in 1995, but I'm here if you just need to talk. 

I've also encouraged them to be friends with each other because I'm still close with a lot of my '90s gals. We get together for dinner a couple times each year and talk about how we all wish we'd been closer during that moment in the '90s, because we were all going through a lot of the same things but didn't have each other to lean on since we were all out on the road.

You've touched on cooking a couple times now. In addition to writing cookbooks and being featured on The Food Network, you've also gotten to display your passion for food lately through the menu and other offerings at Friends In Low Places on Broadway. What's that experience been like for you?

Owning a bar on Broadway was after whatever the last thing I would ever want to do in my life would be [Laughs]. It was not something I had on my list, but with all the artist-endorsed spots on Broadway, it made sense for Garth to be one of them — if anyone should have a bar there, it's him. And if he's gonna have something there, the food's got to be Trish's food. 

I was nervous about it at first because cooking to me is a love language. I had been reluctant to do a restaurant or something similar because how do you ensure when you're cooking for 200 people that the food is consistent and tastes like it would if I made it at home? We took a lot of time to work on that because it's all about the people that are on the bus. 

It was tough at first trying out chicken tender after chicken tender and everything else to make sure it's right. I actually took the family down there to eat the other day because I like popping in unannounced to do a bit of quality control, and it was so good. I was proud because people typically come to Broadway for the food — the profit margin is on the alcohol — but you can't have Trisha food and it just be average. 

The restaurant business is not for the faint of heart. We bought the property, own the building and redid it from the ground up exactly how we wanted it to be. I'm really proud of what we've done and the team we've assembled, from the door security to the bartenders, wait staff, VIP, and rooftop. There's no other team I'd rather be a part of.

Is there anything left on your career bucket list?

If you told me two years ago that I'd be sitting here talking to you about a fully co-written album I would've thought you were crazy. I don't really have a bucket list, I've just tried to remain open to whatever opportunities come my way, which is why I have done things outside music. I never had writing cookbooks on my list, but the opportunity came and it's something I really enjoyed.

The one thing that I want to do is Broadway. I'm obsessed with the shows, but it's a huge commitment. It's a "live in New York" thing for a while and that's not quite where I'm at in my life. I did some musical theatre in college, so a part of me feels like I could do it. Ultimately, I'm just excited and open for whatever comes next.