29/07/2010

One of the old adages of the music business is the tale of the sophomore album: An artist has an entire lifetime to build the material for a debut project, but just a year or 18 months to come up with the songs for the second one.

Trisha Yearwood discovered the same principle applies to writing books — specifically, to writing cookbooks. She released Georgia Cooking In An Oklahoma Kitchen, written with her sister and her mother, in 2008. And it went so well that Trisha followed it up this year with another volume, Home Cooking With Trisha Yearwood: Stories And Recipes To Share With Family & Friends.

“The first one was easier,” Trisha told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “It was mostly out of our shoeboxes of recipes, things we’d been making our entire lives. The second book, we had to extend the net. I talked to some successful cookbook authors, and one said, ‘You wrote all your recipes? You can’t continue to do that.’ I guess these successful big-time authors hire people to develop recipes.”

So how much do the Las Vegas commitments of her husband Garth Brooks interfere with Trisha’s home cooking? Apparently not that much. Her issues with dinner are, it appears, pretty much the same as all the parents in her fan base.

“The Vegas gig is about one weekend a month, and we go together,” Trisha said. “Most people think he’s living in Vegas, but he’s not. The deal was that if he did this, it wouldn’t change our lives at home. The harder part is coordinating around the girls’ schedules… If we have a home-cooked meal on the table three nights a week, that’s good.”

Garth’s next run in Vegas comes the weekend of Aug. 6-8. During his last Vegas appearance earlier this month, Garth helped raise $200,000 for charity when a 2011 Shelby GT350 muscle car was auctioned off to the highest bidder. The man who placed the winning entry was familiar to Garth: Bill Austin, founder of the Starkey Hearing Foundation. Garth sang in June 2008 at a benefit in St. Paul, Minn., that raised $5 million for the Starkey organization.