My co-producer is Matt Rawlings, an amazing pianist, arranger, orchestrator. So in the initial - let’s call them the bag of songs - there were so many and we just threw in everything that we loved. So I thought, ‘All right, then what makes this different and what makes it fresh?’ And when I started thinking about my mom and those connections and well, maybe this is people talking to each other, maybe there’s a conversation here that could be had. I wanted to stay connected to that emotional reaction I had when I heard them when I was younger. I didn’t want to reinvent the melody or reinvent the tempo. And when songs are great the way these are, I didn’t want to mess with them too much. WILSON: Well, I love these songs and I revere the songwriters who wrote them and the original artists who recorded them. Why did you want to transform them in that way?

Remarks have been edited for clarity and brevity.ĪP: Most of these songs were not originally recorded as duets. She talked to The Associated Press about creating a conversation with her duet partners, working with artists who she loved and bridging her love of music and acting.

Now Wilson is doing just that with her favorite '70s songs and turning them into duets for her new record “Rita Wilson Now & Forever: Duets.' Her musical collaborators include Willie Nelson, Smokey Robinson, Keith Urban, Leslie Odom Jr., Jackson Browne, Tim McGraw, Elvis Costello and many more. “I think hearing songs from someone else’s perspective and them hearing it differently is always a great way to hear a song and also says how powerful it is with music because we’re all interpreting them in our own ways,' said Wilson.

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