Loretta Lynn's upcoming album, Full Circle, finds her revisiting some of her biggest hits and debuting a few fresh numbers. One new composition is "Everything It Takes," a light, folky country song that she tells Rolling Stone is a "woman song — something more for a woman." The lyrics tell a story of another woman who's got designs on her man, so she's warning her lover: "She's got everything it takes / To take everything you've got." Elvis Costello adds plaintive backup vocals to the chorus throughout the song, which will come out with the LP on March 4th.
"I wrote 'Everything It Takes' real fast," Lynn says. "I probably wrote it in 30 minutes. Sometimes I can write a song real fast, and sometimes it'll take me two, three days. And I get so aggravated that I'll probably lay it down and go back to it later. But that song came easy. I'll come up with the title first and, when I come up with the title, I always know I got a good title."
Costello came into the picture when she met him about four or five years ago. "We sat down in the studio to write a song," Lynn recalls. "I had a piece of paper and a pencil, and he had a computer. So we looked at one another like, 'What's going to come out of this?' He was laughing about it, but I didn't think it was funny because that's the way I write all my songs. When I write a song, I don't want to be on a computer." Despite the culture clash, they got along very well. (Note: "Everything It Takes" is not a song Costello wrote with Lynn; Todd Snider is co-writer.)
"The first time I heard Elvis sing since that day was on the record," Lynn says. "I couldn't believe it. I wasn't even there when we did it but we did a good job."
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