Martina McBride stands on the stage of a rehearsal studio in and East Nashville industrial park. The cavernous building is all exposed poles and girders, but it provides room enough for the singer and her musicians to spread out as if they were on stage at your local basketball arena. It soon becomes clear that McBride is not just the star; she's also the boss. She even has the sleeves of her white shirt rolled up as she gives instructions before yet another run-through of the country-rock arrangements of Bill Monroe's “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and The Everly Brothers' “When Will I Be Loved.”

This interview was done in the midst of putting together Martina's current Gold-selling album, Evolution, and once, twice, McBride is called away to attend to urgent business with her record company and management. Each time she makes the trip between the stage and the phone, she stops by to kiss and coo with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Delaney, who is playing on a couch with a babysitter. As soon as rehearsal is over, McBride heads for the door.

She won't be able to do the actual interview part right now though, she explains, because she has to go to the Money Pit Studio to cut some overdubs. Then she has to go to the airport to pick up her husband, John McBride, who has been working in Ireland as Garth Brooks' production manager. Then, after a quick dinner, she has to go to the Sound Stage Studio for a mixing session. Maybe we could talk after that.

She fixes me with a stare from her intensely blue eyes and says, with a laugh, “Welcome to the circus of my life. It's a three-ring circus right now, because I'm working in two different studios and this rehearsal hall.”

Three rings might be underestimating it a bit. McBride is not just the vocalist on the new album; she's also the co-producer, which means she needs to sit in on every rhythm-track rehearsal and every remix. She's also whipping her road band into shape for a season of steady touring. At the same time, she wants to be the best wife and mother she can. (Speaking of motherhood, McBride recently took a few months off to have a second baby, but expects to be back on the road by June.)

In trying to juggle all these roles, McBride is no different from a lot of women in her generation (she's now 31). She does get extra help in the form of managers, babysitters and assistants, but she also shoulders extra burdens. No one can do vocal sessions or video shoots for her. And most women don't have a reporter chasing them all over Nashville in search of an interview.

It's not until 9:30 that night, after she has finished the mix on “Wrong Again”, that McBride has a moment to sit down and talk. Her reddish-brown hair is cut short, but her high cheekbones and dark eyeliner make her as striking in person after a long day of work as she is on her album covers. And when you finally get her attention, you have it all.

“The only way I can deal with all the things I have to do,” she explains, “is to focus on whatever that one thing is that I'm doing at the moment. If I'm talking to you, I have to concentrate on that, because if I'm thinking about something else, I don't get this done and I don't get the something else done either. So you zero in on one thing, get that done and then move on to the next thing.

“I write a lot of to-do lists. That way you can see what things you've done and crossed off and what things you still have to do. If I sat down and thought about all the things I'm trying to do, though, they'd probably have to put me away. Her pinched face breaks into a big smile. “It helps a lot to laugh at things.”

One reason McBride is so busy is that she takes her role as co-producer very seriously. For her, the title is not just a status symbol won as a contract concession. She didn't get the credit until her second album, but even on her debut, she showed up for every session - from rhythm tracks to oyerdubs to mixes - and was liberal with her advice to producers Paul Worley and Ed Seay.

“It's the only approach that ever made sense to me,” she says. “If I were to just come in and sing my parts and let Paul handle everything else, then how would my record be any different from the other four he produces each year? Plus, it's a lot of fun for me. I'm not a songwriter, so it's my chance to be creative - it's like taking a blank canvas and turning it into something.

“When I was making my first album, I didn't even realize it would be an issue. I just showed up every day at the studio. They'd say, `The fiddle player will show up tomorrow at 2 P.M. to do oyerdubs, but you don't have to be there.” And I'd say, `What do you mean? If I'm not there, how do I know it's the way I want it?” It turns out that because I'm not schooled in the usual way of doing things, I come in with fresh ideas. Luckily I have a producer who's willing and able to turn those ideas into sounds.”

“Still Holding On,” McBride's Grammy-nominated duet with Chat Black, has been a Number One hit, but the version on Evolution is slightly different from the single. “I took the tracks he cut in L.A.,” McBride reveals, “and added a new guitar track and changed the bass line a little to make the song lit in more with my sound. I'm a great admirer of Clint, but we're very different artists. I had had Dan Huff play guitar on every other cut on the new album, so it made sense to use him on this one, too. His sound is a large part of the whole project. And Joe Chemay has been the bass player on all my albums. When they come up with a part, it's not just a normal Nashville part; it's like a second melody line.

“If there's one thing that ties this project together” she adds, (it's that all the songs and all the arrangements are very melodic. I've always been drawn to songs with strong melodies, because that's the first thing to hit you as a listener. Melody is primal. The lyrics come later; they're more cerebral. When they come together, that's when the magic happens.”

“Melodic” is another way of saying “pop,” and Evolution is very pop-oriented. “Happy Girl” quotes Linda Ronstadt's “Poor Poor, Pitiful Me”, “Wrong Again” was co-written by “You've Lost That Lovin” Feelin” author Cynthia Weil; two songs feature vocal harmonies from The Rembrandts” Danny Wilde. “Valentine,” a collaboration between McBride and pianist Jim Brickman, has already been a Number One adult-contemporary hit, and Martina's country remix is moving up the charts as we go to press. Whether the songs are fast or slow, happy or sad, McBride and her musicians push the melody as far as it will go.

“My first album was very traditional country,” she points out, “While the second one had more of a pop flavor and the third one more so. That seems to be what works for me. I've done traditional country, but for whatever reason those aren't the songs fans and radio have responded to. But that's what's different about this generation of country musicians and fans; we grew up in the age of multi-media where you're exposed to so many kinds of music. I grew up on 70”s and 80”s pop-The Babys, John Cougar, Tom Petty-and a little bit of R'n'B, as well as country. That's why we called the album ”Evolution” because it reflects the development of my sound.” To get across that evolutionary concept, the album begins with a low-fi tape of McBride singing the Little Jimmy Dickens” hit, “I'm Little But I'm Loud,” when she was seven years old in 1973. “That was recorded at a 4-H convention in Manhattan, Kansas,” she explains. “My dad was playing guitar, and my mom taped the song from the seats. There were maybe 700 people in the hall, but at that time, it was the largest audience I had ever performed for.

“When I found that tape again, I was surprised that over the years it hadn't gotten lost or destroyed. I'd always meant to put it on an album, and I felt this was the right one, because it shows where I came from - my “evolution” in country music. It was a song I was known for when I was young, because back then I was real little and I was real bud.” She pauses and chuckles. “In fact, I still hear that comment a lot.”

McBride grew up on country music in Kansas; “I didn't eyen know there was another kind of music until I was in high school,” she claims. Like her grandfather and great-grandfather McBride's dad farmed 400 acres of wheat and cow pasture. “Every night,” she recalls, “my sister and I would walk down the lane to the pasture and round up our 30 cows and walk them up the lane to the barn.” After that, there wasn't much to do but music. “we only went to town once a week; we only had three channels on TV; there wasn't a Quick Trip nearby. There were a lot of instruments in the house, however, so that's what we did. Maybe it was isolated and not very worldly, but we grew up never putting on airs, because there was no one to put on airs for.”

When she was seven and still known as Martina Schiff, she joined the family band, The Schiffters, that included her dad on fiat-top guitar, her kidd brother Marty on pedal steel and her mom on the sound board. Martina played keyboards and sang the latest hits and the most popular standards by the hikes of Reba McEntire, Juice Newton, Patsy Chine and Linda Ronstadt; her dad handled the Ernest Tubb and Waylon Jennings numbers. “We'd rent out the old, abandoned high-school gym in Isabel, Kansas,” she remembers, “and throw a big wing-ding. They'd come from all over and just dance for four hours. We had them all - teenagers, little kids, grandparents.”

She stayed in the band until she graduated from high school, and the rehearsals at her dad's carpentry shop in town taught her how to pick a song apart and recognize all the different parts. It was a skill that stood her in good stead when she started co-producing her own records. She and husband John McBride moved to Nashville in 1990 without any specific jobs or contacts. He was an experienced sound technician, though, and soon joined Garth Brooks” tours. Martina signed on as a T-shirt salesman, then graduated to opening net and finally to Brooks” duet partner on her debut album, 1992”s T/w Time Has Come.

She didn't really break through, however, until her second album, 1993”s T/w Way That l Am, and its landmark single, ”lndependence Day.” That Gretchen Peters song told the story of a battered wife who finally took her vengeance. “I knew it would make a difference,” McBride recalls, because women would hear it and know they weren't alone, that someone else had been through the same thing. It's funny, though; sometimes the biggest songs aren't the Number Ones. Everyone assumes it was a Number One hit, but it only went to Number 12.”

McBride returns to a similar theme on Evolution with “A Broken Wing” - and it did go to Number One. This time the problem isn't physical but psychological abuse (“She'd tell him `bout her dreams/He'd just shoot `em down/Lord, he loved to make her cry”), and the solution isn't vengeance but leaving. But when McBride belts out the hook-laden chorus, “With her broken wing, she carries her dreams, man, you ought to see her fly,” it sounds like a day of independence just the same.

McBride herself has been happily wed for more than nine years, and she doesn't want to sound hike an advocate for busting up marriages. In fact, Evolution contains several songs about how to keep a long-term relationship going. “1n `Some Say I'm Running,'” she explains, “it would be real easy for the woman to listen to her friends and her family who are urging her to give up because it's so hard to hang in there. I'm not one for hanging in a relationship if there are serious problems, but any relationship takes work; that's human nature. You have to respect what the other person wants and needs, the way they live their life and who they are. You have to really listen to the other person and not hear what you think they're saying or what you want them to say but what they're actually saying. I've been married nine and a half years, and I know how much work is involved.”

As if on cue, John McBride pops his head in the studio office where we're talking and gives a wordless look that says, “Can I have my wife back now?” Martina gives me a similar look. I glance at my watch; it's 10:30 P.M. It's time for her to move on to the next item on her to-do list. She scoops up the half-asleep Delaney in her arms and walks out with John into the Nashville night. .