Sara no Cover

“I started onstage when I was four years old in cover bands with my brothers, so I've been waiting my entire career for the right time to do a covers record,” Sara Evans tells Apple Music. More than two decades into her recording career, recognizing that both her interest in brightly lit country-pop singles and her chance at radio success have faded, she’s gotten back to her roots her way. Over the course of 13 tracks, Evans reinterprets vintage crowd-pleasers, many of them plucked from a plushly orchestrated era of ’70s and ’80s pop rock like Fleetwood Mac and the Pretenders, with a couple of more recent pop tunes and country classics thrown in. “I just wanted to flex my muscles and show people what I can do,” she says. “There's so many sides to me and so much to my personality other than just people thinking I'm just a straight country singer.” She made the new album a family affair by featuring the vocal and instrumental talents of her own progeny, and enlisted a co-producer, Jarrad Kritzstein, from outside her circle because she was taken with how he blended subtle eccentricities, moody warmth, and finesse on Ruston Kelly’s 2018 breakthrough Dying Star.