Twenty years after launching her country music career, Jamie O'Neal is hoping for a do-over with her forthcoming album "Sometimes."
“In a way, it's to remind people, ‘Hey these are my hits and then here’s some new songs,’" the 54-year-old mother of one said during a phone call this week from home in Nashville, Tennessee.
She has been working on "Sometimes" for the past two years, lining up guest artists to join her on remakes of a few of her early hits and writing and recording new songs.
The project was supposed to be nine songs — four old songs and five new ones. But with so much time on her hands in the past few months courtesy COVID-19, O'Neal went into creative overdrive.
"I’ve just been adding more songs on this album as we’ve gone along and now it’s 12 songs. I just could never stop, never stop," she said.
The album is due out Oct. 16 — nearly 20 years to the day that she debuted with "Shiver" — and includes a duet with Martina McBride on ”When I Think About Angels,” Sara Evans on "Trying to Find Atlantis" and Lauren Alaina on "There Is No Arizona" — O'Neal's debut single that launched her career in 2000.
“Basically a lot of these collaborations that I have had in my mind have taken awhile to come to fruition and to have schedules line up," she said.
Since March, when the country largely went into lockdown in response to the coronavirus pandemic, many of those artists suddenly found themselves with time on their hands.
O'Neal also tapped John Paul White, formerly one half of the duo The Civil Wars, on her new song "The World Goes On." She released a Zoom-style music video for the song in June.
O'Neal wrote "The World Goes On" several years ago, but when COVID-19 hit, she recast it for the times. When the world seems its bleakest, the sun will come up, people will still fall in love "and the radio keeps playing your song / so you turn it up, roll the windows down / sing along and make it loud."
"Sometimes" is O'Neal's first studio album since she released "Eternal" in 2014 and only her fourth career studio album. It took her five years to follow up her 2000 debut album "Shiver" once she shifted gears to focus on being a mother after the birth of her daughter Aliyah in 2003. She also had three other studio albums shelved after label shakeups; she left both Mercury and Capitol with finished products on the shelf, and lost another record when a small indie label went belly-up.
“Basically I have ridden the rollercoaster into hell and back,” she said.
Apparently, though, she has taken to heart a line from "The World Goes On:" "You fly, you fall, you lose it all, doesn't mean that it’s the end."
Her remake of "Arizona" is expected to be her next single, due out Sept. 18. And the song also should be a highlight when she and her songwriter/producer husband Rodney Good perform Thursday, Aug. 27, on Tucsonan Jessica Northey-Shaw's "Summer Sway: Couches, Cocktails & Country" streamathon. The four-day festival, to be streamed live on Country Sway's Facebook page, features more than 40 artists and benefits the Nashville-based Music Health Alliance, a nonprofit that provides health resources to full-time professional musicians.
The show also will include O'Neal's earlier hits and a few songs off the new album.
