Leann Rimes

Country hit maker LeAnn Rimes is ready to present her acclaimed voice in a whole new way, announcing a new album of meditations titled CHANT: The Human & The Holy. Set for release on November 20 and featuring 12 soothing tracks, the project will be a bold (but relaxing) change of pace for the “Blue” star. It aims to showcase the power of her country vocal “in a completely new light, channeling wisdom into mantras and messages of hope and remembrance during a time of need.”

Arriving 12 years after LeAnn Rimes' first Greatest Hits collection but more importantly just after she closed out her long-running contract with Curb, All-Time Greatest Hits rounds up 20 highlights from her nearly 20 years with the label. Most of these – 13, to be precise – can be found on Greatest Hits and not all of the additional seven were charting hits; "Amazing Grace" was never released as a single and "The Right Kind of Wrong" is pulled from the Coyote Ugly soundtrack. Those other five are highlighted by the Top Ten hits "Something's Gotta Give," "Probably Wouldn't Be This Way," and "Nothin' 'Bout Love Makes Sense," all of which showed up in the years immediately after 2003's Greatest Hits. The latest single here is "Nothin' Better to Do," which came out in 2007, and that's a fair reflection of Rimes' past decade. After 2007, she released several albums, many of them quite good, but for a variety of reasons they weren't hits. This concentrates on the radio songs people know, and it's better for it.

As concept albums go, LeAnn Rimes’ 2011 album Lady & Gentlemen is a good one: a collection of masculine country classics reinterpreted by a female singer. Sometimes, this reinterpretation amounts to little more than swapping a gender – “The Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line” becomes “The Only Mama That’ll Walk the Line,” Charlotte in John Anderson’s “Swingin'” becomes Charlie – and some of these songs are standards that have often been sung by either gender (“Help Me Make It Through the Night”), but there are a few songs that do feel slightly different when sung by Rimes…..

The 2004 release The Best of LeAnn Rimes tweaks the 2003 U.S. release Greatest Hits, leaving behind some of the purer country hits that didn’t translate outside of the U.S. – notably, Al Anderson’s “Big Deal” is nowhere to be found – and concentrating on her big pop crossover hits, including “How Do I Live,” “Can’t Fight the Moonlight,” and her duet with Ronan Keating, “Last Thing on My Mind.”