Reba McEntire is opening up about her “Trailblazer” collaboration with Miranda Lambert and Lainey Wilson. The 70-year-old says the song came from a close friendship the three already shared, in spite of their age differences.
“We’re very close,” McEntire tells CMT. “We love each other’s work ethics and our morals, and hanging in there and helping each other. They’re great ladies. I just love them to pieces.”
McEntire feels a responsibility to help those coming after her, like Lambert and Wilson, the way others helped her.
“Loretta and Dolly and Tammy and Barbara Mandrell all helped pave the road for me,” the Country Music Hall of Fame member explains. “And I thought, ‘Well, it’s my responsibility to do things to help those coming on after me.”
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The three singers debuted “Trailblazer” at the 2025 ACM Awards The song later set a new streaming record for McEntire, after almost 50 years in country music. Lambert and Wilson wrote the song with Brandy Clark, inspired in part by McEntire’s own life.
“We were like, ‘Okay, we’re going to do a song with Reba — what kind of song do we write?” Lambert tells Billboard. “We were calling her on the set [of Happy’s Place] and trying to figure out, ‘What’s the right message for this trio? What do we really want to say in three minutes?’”
McEntire still added her input to the song, in spite of her work schedule, praising the writers when it was completed.
“I remember listening to it in the dressing room. I couldn’t find a flaw in it, not a word,” McEntire recalls. “It was that great. I was very emotional when I heard it.”
McEntire also recalls when Dolly Parton inspired her, much as she works to inspire others, although life was much different when McEntire was just getting her start.
“There’s something different totally in these generations than the earlier generations, mainly because of the social aspect,” McEntire says. “We’ve got texting, we’ve got emails, communication at our fingertips, and we didn’t have that starting out. And I like it that things are more approachable. When I was getting started, I wouldn’t have even thought about talking to Dolly when she walked by me in 1977. I was brand new. She was a huge, mega, beautiful star.
“And I don’t know if it’s confidence that’s totally different,” she adds. “But I had [my musical heroes] all up on this pedestal where you can’t touch, you can’t talk. Now, we’re more friends and it’s a family. It’s totally different, and I like it this way.”
McEntire recently announced she is returning to The Voice for Season 28 this fall, for her fourth turn as a coach.
“I was really dreading it at first, because I don’t want to tell anybody they suck,” McEntire reveals on Late Night with Seth Meyer, recalling when she first joined the show, taking the place of Blake Shelton. “I passed on it years ago, when it first came over from Holland. And I said, ‘I can’t tell somebody, don’t give up your day job.’ I’m not gonna do that. But the way we did it, on the first time I was on The Voice, it was more helpful and encouraging. And everybody that’s coming back now, Snoop, Michael, myself and Niall, we’re nice people. We encourage. We lift up.”
Find “Trailblazer” and all of McEntire’s music and upcoming shows at Reba.com.
Photo Credit: ACM / Rich Polk