Lee Ann Womack, John Legend Meet at ‘Crossroads’
Nashville is growing on John Legend. Following his June performance with Hunter Hayes and Jennifer Nettles at the CMT Music Awards, the R&B star is headed back to Music City for another country collaboration. He’ll team up with Lee Ann Womack for an episode of CMT’s Crossroads, the unique performance series that features a country artist and an artist from a different genre trading lines on one another’s hits.
“CMT asked me to do Crossroads with John Legend… a singer’s singer, a man who blurs boundaries. I’m honored — This is gonna be awesome, and who knows what kind of hybrid we’ll create?” Womack posted on her Facebook page today.
The two Grammy winners are set to film the show on a soundstage just south of Nashville early next month. It will debut at 10:00p.m. ET on September 26th, just three days after the release of the country singer’s new album, The Way I’m Livin’. The 13-track project is her first new set of tunes in seven years, but Womack hasn’t lost a beat in her notoriety for delivering songs that push the lyrical envelope yet keep a classic country feel.
“I wanted songs that talked about how life really is: the raw spots, the tough places, the meltdowns and messy parts,” she says of the new LP. “Hard, sad, rough… all the stuff people pretend doesn’t exist! Because once you embrace that, you can figure out what to do… or not do.”
Legend wrapped the North American leg of his All of Me Tour last night. Its namesake song hit Number One on both iTunes’ and Billboard‘s all-genre charts and has sold more than 4 million downloads. He tapped Hunter Hayes to arrange a new version of the song for their CMT performance. (See a behind-the-scenes video of the making of their collaboration here.) Legend is now on a short break from the road before taking his tour to Asia in late September.
CMT Crossroads: John Legend and Lee Ann Womack will be the 51st episode in the original series. Recent Crossroads pairings were Katy Perry with Kacey Musgraves, One Republic and Dierks Bentley, and the Band Perry with Fall Out Boy.