LeAnn Rimes - “What I Cannot Change”
When LeAnn Rimes enters a recording studio, she carries with her the most impressive instrument in the room. Indeed, Rimes’ voice is extraordinary, a stunning combination of natural talent and technical precision, bathed in character and a timbre that is instantly identifiable.But Rimes’ has a tendency to favor tempo, to chase radio trends, and to embrace the bombastic. And so her albums are typically ripe with predictably crescendoing power ballads and overproduced, pointlessly busy tracks that leave her magnificent voice buried in the mix.
“What I Cannot Change” is one of the rare instances, as was 2005’s “Probably Wouldn’t Be This Way,” when Rimes’ immense talent shines through the Nashville slickness that clutters her catalog. Here, producer Dann Huff smartly keeps the song’s piano and strings-driven arrangement sparse, allowing the track to serve as a backdrop for the real show—a tremendously sensitive vocal performance that is easily one of the most nuanced of Rimes’ career.
And then there is the song itself, an exercise in a smart, fresh songwriting.
A hook built around the phrase, “I will learn to live with what I cannot change…But I will change whatever I can,” could have easily, even in the hands of Nashville’s most talented writers, ended up as a mishmash of sugary clichés and syrupy power-of-positive-thinking mentality.
Instead, “What I Cannot Change,” with a chorus that resolves into what sounds like a whispered prayer, features Rimes’ surprisingly unique narrative voice, and lines like, “I Don’t know my father, or my mother well enough/Seems like every time we talk, we can’t get past the little stuff,” are starkly honest, slightly dark, and sometimes gut-wrenching in their poignancy.
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