Friday, December 05, 2003 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Girl Power

Country singers Deana Carter and Sara Evans join the lineup for the National Finals Rodeo

Deana Carter, who first caught the public's eye in 1996 with "Did I Shave My Legs For This?" says it "takes a lot of work and a lot of focus just to stick by your guns and do what you believe in. But it's so worth it." Sara Evans hopes her new album "Restless" will make her a marquee artist. "I feel very lucky to be where I'm at this early in the game."

A rodeo's never a bad thing," says country star Deana Carter. "It means more cute guys are in town."

For country fans, however, it will be mostly the same guys. Little has changed in the country music lineup for this year's National Finals Rodeo.

Keith Urban, for instance, returns to the Las Vegas Hilton next weekend, still working the same album as last year's NFR.

Rodeo week also brings return visits from Brooks & Dunn, Chris LeDoux, Brad Paisley, Randy Travis, Darryl Worley and three country comedians: Rodney Carrington, Bill Engvall and Jeff Foxworthy.

Locals may wonder what happened to the past 12 months, but the performers obviously aren't complaining.

"His album is still really new," singer Sara Evans says of Urban's "Golden Road," and its third No. 1 country single, "Who Wouldn't Wanna Be Me?"

"I think that is largely due to radio because the singles move so slowly," explains Evans, who co-headlines the Las Vegas Hilton with Paisley today through Sunday.

"For anyone other than George Strait or Tim McGraw or Alan Jackson or Kenny Chesney, it's usually a six-month period from the time you release a single to the time it enters the Top Five. So when you think about four singles, which is not a lot, you're looking at a two-year album or more."

Evans is hoping for similar longevity with her 3-month-old "Restless" album. She and Carter -- singing today and Saturday at Silverton -- are fresh faces to rodeo week and representative of female country stars in the post-Shania Twain climate.

The crossover success of Twain -- who visits the Mandalay Bay Events Center Dec. 20, after the rodeo has left town -- echoes in the visual packaging of both Evans and Carter, if not the music itself.

Carter's "I'm Just a Girl" comes with CD-booklet boudoir photos of the singer in white undies. But the earthy Carter's fans probably embrace it in the same tongue-in-cheek spirit of the album's key song, "Cover of a Magazine."

"I just try to make sure that it doesn't affect the music," Carter says. "I'm aware that we all have a job to do and a level of success that we all want to attain, but at the same time you have to make records that you feel are artistic and creative."

This, after all, is the singer who recorded a holiday album, "Father Christmas," in the sparsest of settings, accompanied only by the guitar of her father, veteran Nashville musician Fred Carter.

Both Carter and Evans wrote and co-produced songs for their current albums as well.

"You have to make sure that it's authentic and cool, and don't let a corporate mentality affect the music," Carter says. "If we're all different and unique, then there's room for all of us. Shania needs to be Shania, and the (Dixie) Chicks need to be the Chicks and I need to be me.

"It's just when Music Row tries to homogenize and copy something that's working because it is unique is when the pipes get all clogged up."

Evans isn't marketed with brazen sex appeal; she is, after all, the wife of Republican politician Craig Schelske (he lost a run for a congressional seat in Oregon last year) and last week was the special guest at right-wing Fox News pundit Sean Hannity's Christmas party in New York.

Still, Evans glammed up to model a Donna Karan coat in the New York Times, and sports a wind-tousled look on the album cover and video for the first single, "Perfect," that's a visual match for a sound that falls somewhere between Shania and vintage Linda Ronstadt.

"To say I'm striving to be a pop artist isn't necessarily true, but also to say I'm avoiding it isn't necessarily true," says Evans. "My voice sounds very country, but there are songs on the album that are definitely more pop. It's just kind of a barrage of the many faces of Sara Evans."

Both singers are testimony to modern country being less inspired by bluegrass and Appalachian mountain music -- the fluke success of "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" notwithstanding -- than by classic rock.

The references are becoming more overt. The new Brooks & Dunn single "You Can't Take the Honky Tonk Out of the Girl" mimics the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Woman." Carter's new song "Me and the Radio" talks about "playing `Refugee' and `Born to Run' and all those Allman Brothers songs."

Evans' new song "Backseat of a Greyhound Bus" echoes a lyric from the Allman's "Ramblin Man," while an earlier song, "The Great Unknown," talks about wanting to be "standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona" in homage to the Eagles.

"I'm a die-hard Eagles fan," she says. "I graduated high school in '89 so that was my thing. The Eagles, REO Speedwagon, Charlie Daniels Band, Journey, that's my music."

Harrah's Las Vegas picked up on the connection for this year's rodeo, tapping Little Feat for special outdoor sets in the Carnaval Court Wednesday and Thursday.

Carter mixes things up musically as well, closing her album with a garage-rock ditty called "Girls' Night" that has her rapping some of the lyrics.

"Nashville has a lot of musical influences. Rock, blues, soul, gospel, jazz," Carter says. "It's a melting pot of music and always has been. I think it's just a natural thing. It's just in my blood naturally to be diverse, because Nashville's a diverse city."

Except you wouldn't know that from the sound-alike country albums that often emerge.

As a native, "I've been real proud of Nashville as a city, and it's cool," Carter says. "The only people who have made it close-minded are the people who have come in and aren't from there."

For now, both women are happy to be holding their own in a country climate that's swung back to male voices, after a Chicks-led revolution by female singers in the late '90s.

"I think for whatever reason country radio decided they didn't like Faith Hill anymore," Evans says. "It seemed to be the common thought among radio programmers that Faith was going to go away, Lee Ann Womack was going to go away, even Jo Dee Messina. Thank God I didn't go away, and I'm very grateful for that."

"When you're confident about what you're doing, it helps everybody feel better," Carter says. "If I'm not focused on who I am, how can I depend on anybody else to focus on who I am?

"I just encourage people to be that way in their lives every day. I just think that's what makes the world beautiful, is to be confident and unique and not be scared. Just don't follow the pack all the time."