Recently, Trisha Yearwood’s had reason to think back to her early days in country music: She just celebrated the 30th anniversary of her debut single, “She’s in Love with the Boy.”
Trisha tells Billboard that when that song first came out, she was surprised by its success, simply because she never expected her first single to be a chart-topping hit.
“The thought process was that normally your first song is an introduction to the artist, because it won’t get to No. 1; at least that was the thinking back then,” she reflects.
But get to number one it did. “She’s in Love With the Boy” was a hit for Trisha, the first of five chart-topping country songs she’d snag over career to date. When she saw its success, the singer says, she was “amazed, actually.”
“I was a demo singer prior to being signed to MCA and this was a dream of mine since I was five,” she continues. “The thoughts ranged from, ‘Wow, that was easy,’ to, ‘Well, if we can’t follow this up, I’ll just be the answer to a trivia question about one-hit wonders.’”
Once she got her first hit, Trisha had to confront the pressure of replicating her success. “I didn’t even know what a sophomore jinx was until I was asked about it in every interview I did,” she admits.
Fortunately, she never succumbed to the sophomore slump. After a handful of memorable top-10 hits, Trisha scored her next number one three years later, in 1994, with “XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl).”