LeAnn Rimes Reflects on Having Her Song Rejected by Hollywood at 15 Years Old (And How It Still Made History)

As a teenage country star, LeAnn Rimes had to learn countless industry lessons at a young age—including the one that teaches you that you can record a song, pitch it to a movie, watch the movie execs fall in love with it, and still get shafted by watching the Hollywood bigwigs hire someone else to record a version for the movie instead. Ouch. “No harm, no foul,” Rimes would say decades later in an interview with SmoothRadio. Wise words, certainly, but what actually happened?

A then-14-year-old Rimes was at a Santa Monica restaurant when songwriter Diane Warren approached her and asked if she would be interested in cutting a song she had just written, “How Do I Live”. Warren told the young singer she wrote the song for an upcoming 1997 action thriller, Con Air. “I wasn’t lying,” Warren told Billboard years later. “I did write it for Con Air. Warren added, “I just didn’t tell her that there were 99 other songs being pitched for Con Air.”

Rimes was eager for the chance to get a song she sang in a major motion picture. So, she happily agreed to cut a version of Warren’s track. But when Walt Disney Pictures executives heard Rimes’ rendition, they determined that Rimes’ interpretation sounded too young and innocent. (Which isn’t surprising, given that she was still too young to even drive a car.)

From there, Trisha Yearwood became involved in what Rolling Stone would call an “unusually bitter Nashville battle.”

How the LeAnn Rimes vs. Trisha Yearwood Battle Came To Be

After Walt Disney Pictures executives told Diane Warren that they didn’t want LeAnn Rimes’ version of “How Do I Live” in Con Air, Disney reached out to fellow—and older—country singer Trisha Yearwood to cut the single instead. According to Warren, Disney then began pressuring the songwriter to “forbid Rimes” from putting out her version of the song. When Warren said no, she recalled, “There were lots of unpleasant phone calls.” Nevertheless, Warren stood her ground, and both Rimes and Yearwood went on to release separate versions of the same track. Interestingly, they were disseminated on the very same day.

“How Do I Live” was a hit for both Rimes and Yearwood. However, the two songs seemed to exist in different musical genres. Yearwood’s rendition took off on the country charts. Meanwhile, Rimes’ version proved to be more successful in the pop music realm. In fact, Rimes’ “How Do I Live” broke the record for the longest-charting single at 69 weeks. (25 of which were in the Top 5.) This massive win helped turn Rimes, who had already taken the country world by storm with her 1996 album, Blue, into a bona fide crossover star. No harm, no foul, indeed.

The “Blue” Singer Had a Theory As to Why She Was Passed Up

Even as emotionally mature and resilient a teenager has to be to become a star at such a young age, we don’t doubt that LeAnn Rimes felt stung by having her version of “How Do I Live” passed over for a different artist. (Although we also believe that breaking a Billboard record and becoming a massive crossover success both helped to soothe the blow.) Years later, with plenty of maturity and hindsight under her belt, Rimes offered an understandable theory as to why her rendition was replaced with the one sung by Trisha Yearwood.

“It was one of those things that just worked out the way it was supposed to,” Rimes told SmoothRadio. “I think at the time, you know, with Blue and how big it was, and then the story of me being so young, I mean, that in itself was a movie. People were so invested in that story. I feel like I could have released ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, and people would have been like, ‘Yeah!’ But thank God it was a good song that I’m still singing and loving these days.”

Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images