Mattea

“When I first started working with him, he said, ‘It’s the song, pal. Find a great song and sing it honestly, and it will be timeless. You don’t want to chase a trend.’ I feel so lucky to have someone so close to me steering me that way when I was young.” Desmond of Nashville. You can’t picture her cradling her CMA and ACM awards while “Walking Away a Winner” plays on a loop in the background. She’s just too forward thinking, too optimistic.

“Oh my God, Chris Stapleton is amazing,” she enthuses. “Florida Georgia Line — I can hear them pushing the envelope. And Carrie Underwood? I listen to her sing and think, ‘What would it be like to do be able to do that?’ It’s like she’s the Whitney Houston of country music.” be included on a forthcoming album.

“We just recorded that, and the low note is a low C,” she says. “It is round and easy and full, and when I was young, I could hit that note, but I could not use it in a song. It’s like finding something new instead of just ‘my voice is getting old.’ That’s something that wasn’t there before.”

She rediscovered “Billie Joe” when she and her longtime guitar player, Bill Cooley, began hammering out songs during her sabbatical.

“I just started throwing out these crazy, weird songs I would never do, and then they just started to improve,” she says. “Out of all this process, we just kept adding songs, pecking away at songs, to see if I could work my way into them. It was fun, but at a certain point I said, ‘The dog and you are not enough feedback for me.’ I called my manager and said I needed some gigs, and it’s just kind of grown into something.” more organic than that. It’s more about being real than being perfect.”

The result is an evening that features her hits along with album cuts, requests and cover tunes: some familiar, some “sort of nichey, but they’ve all been roadtested,” she says.

When you have as many hits as Mattea, some naturally get left by the wayside. One that never will: “Where’ve You Been,” the 1991 Grammy winner for best country song and best female country vocal performance. Her husband, Jon Vezner, co-wrote the tune about an aging couple, Claire and Edwin, near the end of their lives. Elegant and quietly devastating, it’s tough to listen to without a tissue handy.

“Luckily, I’ve always had the gift of some six inches of emotional space between me and that song, just enough to sing it,” she says with a chuckle.”My husband wrote it about his grandmother who had Alzheimer’s, then my mother got Alzheimer’s, then I heard stories and stories from fans about Alzheimer’s. For me, it’s like having this diamond you get to pull out at a certain point in your show. To make people sob audibly is just something that doesn’t happen very often. It touched something deep in people, and it’s a privilege to sing something like that.”