Somebody's Chelsea

Album: All The Women I Am (2010)
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Songfacts®:

  • McEntire co-wrote this song with Liz Henberger and Will Robinson. She explained to The Boot how a movie sparked the idea for the cut. Said Reba: "When I got the inspiration for that song, I was watching a movie, P.S. I Love You with Harry Connick, Jr. [and] Hillary Swank. And they're sitting at the booth in the café and she's saying how much she loved her husband who passed on. I don't know his name in the movie, it could've been Frank or something. And Harry Connick, Jr.'s like, 'What did I do? What's wrong? How come you won't love me?' 'Well, my husband was this, he was that. He was just so good…' And Harry Connick, Jr. gets up and starts to walk out, and she goes, 'Where you going?' He said, 'I want to be somebody's Frank. I'm going to go find that person.' I'm like, 'What a great idea for a song.'"
  • Robinson continued the story of the song to The Boot: "She got the idea from that movie and had approached Liz with the idea, and Liz emailed her back and said, 'Why don't we bring Will in on this?' I've written a few things for Reba and one was a single 'I Know How He Feels' a few years ago. And so she said, 'Sure.' The trick was finding the right direction, and once we got the direction in, the melody came at 5:00 AM. I woke up with the melody in my head and ran downstairs and put it down, the basic part of it. Usually when I do that and then I go back to bed and wake up a few hours later and then listen to it, it's usually awful. But every now and then, it will hold up even better than I thought, because I'm usually half-asleep. It seemed to fit the mood, and I just kind of went from there. I thought it was such a clever and unusual idea. I'd never heard it like that before. I think the story was a bit different in the movie. It was a younger girl whose husband had died suddenly, so we decided to make it an older man who had been married about 60 years and lost the love of his life. And the singer's thinking, 'I hope somebody loves me like that.' We got chills when we started thinking that this could really be a good song, if we write it right. It was a challenge to write it right because it's an unusual title... that's one reason I liked it so much is that the title intrigued me. Luckily we were able to get the song at the same level as the title."
  • So why was the song's protagonist named Chelsea? Robinson explained to the Boot: "Reba came up with the name Chelsea. It's a relative of hers, and she was attached to it. I thought that's an unusual name, which I like, but I started thinking, 'How are we going to rhyme it?' But if you sing Chelsea, an E-rhyme worked out perfectly to rhyme with Chelsea. At first I was thinking, 'How do you rhyme Elsea?' [laughs] You go through all of those things when you're thinking, 'How are we going to write this?' But it made it all the more challenging trying to keep that name. And now every where I go, I seem to hear that name Chelsea. It's a beautiful name."
  • The song is the first time that Reba co-wrote one of her singles since "Only in My Mind" in 1985.
  • The tear jerking video co-stars legendary actor Ed Asner as the man whom sits next to Reba on the plane.

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