By Allan Sculley

In the past four years, Martina McBride has seen her career accelerate behind two CDs - Evolution and Emotion - that have each sold more than two million copies. She has also won the prestigious Country Music Association award last September for Female Vocalist of the Year.

So it wouldn't be a stretch to say McBride could be poised to join artists such as Reba McEntire, Shania Twain and Faith Hill as one of the reigning female solo artists in country. But there's one thing that might keep McBride from reaching that sort of chart-busting, arena-headlining status: McBride herself.

“I really don't have those aspirations,” McBride said. “I just want to be recognized for my talents and hopefully for some great songs and entertaining shows. Whatever comes out of that is really A, out of my control, and B, I don't know. I think those are the most important things. I don't set goals like trying to be the biggest thing. It's not one of my goals.”

For McBride, she's not sure that the trappings that come with super stardom are for her. Happily married since 1988 with two daughters, five-year-old Delaney and two-year-old Emma, McBride clearly doesn't seem enamored with fame and fortune.

“I love my life and I don't know if I would want that for my kids. You know, I like a little privacy,” McBride said. “I'm in a great place now. I'm basically doing what I love to do and what I feel that, by my own definition, I'm successful and happy and it (the career) doesn't control my life. I think sometimes if you are a bigger star or whatever, it can control your life. That's something I wouldn't be happy with.”

It's understandable that McBride would have no complaints about her career at this point. Emotion, released in 1999 has solidified her status as one of the country's most consistent hit makers. Its lead single I Love You (which was also a featured song in the Julia Roberts-Richard Gere movie Runaway Bride) spent five weeks atop Billboard magazine's country singles chart and was McBride's most successful single to date. A second single, Love's The Only House, kept the Emotion CD riding high by reaching number three on the country singles chart.

These achievements came on the heels of the 1997 CD, Evolution, which included the number one hits A Broken Wing and Wrong Again, and three other top ten singles.

The success of the Emotion CD culminated what has been a steady rise through the country music ranks for McBride.

A native of Sharon, Kansas, McBride, 34, got her first introduction to the music business singing in her family's band, the Schiffters. By the late 1980s, she had begun setting her sights on a recording career of her own.

The key move came in 1990 when she and her husband, John, moved to Nashville. A sound engineer she had met in Wichita, Kansas, John McBride quickly landed work as soundman for Garth Brooks, while his wife continued to pursue a record deal.

In 1991, McBride decided to take a job selling T-shirts on Brooks' tour so she could spend more time with her husband. While on the road, she kept the phone lines burning with calls to Nashville. Her persistence paid off in 1992 when RCA signed her. Her first tour, not coincidentally, was opening for Brooks.

McBride's first album, The Time Has Come, failed to make much of an impact, but that changed in 1993, when her record CD, The Way That I Am, yielded two top 10 hits, My Baby Loves Me and Life No. 9.

But it would be another song from that album that really put McBride on the map. Independence Day, a song about domestic violence in which a wife escapes her hellish life by burning down her house - with her abusive husband in it - slowly began to make waves. By 1994, the song was garnering honors such as CMA Video of the Year, followed a year later by CMA Song of the Year.

Even with the success of hits like I Love You and A Broken Wing, McBride still considers Independence Day to be her signature song.

“That was definitely a career song and I don't think anything has come along since that has taken its place,” she said. “That's fine with me.”

Nineteen-ninety-five was also the year that McBride made her major breakthrough at radio with the title song of her third CD, Wild Angels. It became her first number one hit, while Wild Angels went gold. The subsequent success of Evolution and Emotion has since propelled that third CD past one million sales.

Winning the ACM Female Vocalist of the Year award last fall represented a new high point for McBride, and validation of her place as one of the premier vocalists in country music. It was an award, though, that McBride didn't expect to win, considering that she had lost out in years past to artists such as Patty Loveless and Trisha Yearwood and faced stiff competition and her big hits from Evolution had come in the previous year.

“Being nominated for it a few times before and not winning just made that much sweeter,” McBride said. “But what was great about it for me is so many people worked so hard to make this happen. It's not just me out there singing my songs. There are so many people behind the scenes at the record company and management, people who are on the road with me, my family and just everybody who works so hard and gives so much. So really I felt like I was winning it for all of us.”

Interestingly enough, McBride hit new heights with a CD that represented a slight change of pace. Where her previous CDs had featured elaborate production, for Emotion, McBride chose to strip back the sound and keep the instrumental tracks lean and direct.

“It's always been a lot of fun to put a lot of icing on the cake, a lot of layers and a lot of different creative ideas,” McBride said of the fatter sound of her earlier CDs. “So it was, I don't know, just time to try something a little different, see if we had the discipline to make a simpler sound... I really didn't think about it too much. We wanted to see if we could just try it as a different way of producing, and it was really just an experiment.”

Perhaps more notably, the songs McBride selected for Emotion took her sound in more of a crossover pop direction. I Love You, for instance, is a tune whole chiming tones and melody are 100 percent pop. Anything's Better Than Feelin' The Blues is an edgy, keyboard laced pop-rock tune that has a decidedly bluesy edge. The rootsy, harmonica-laced song Love's The Only House wouldn't sound out of place alongside a Sheryl Crow hit.

In fact, the songs on Emotion contain very little steel guitar, fiddle or other instrumentation that is commonly identified with country.

Although artists such as Shania Twain and Faith Hill have enjoyed her greatest success by courting a poppier sound, McBride said there was no grand plan to the musical direction of the Emotion CD.

“I never really set out to make it more pop, definitely,” McBride said. “It's interesting because these songs were written but country songwriters in Nashville. It's the same band I've always used and the same production team that we've always used. I don't know, you have to produce the songs in a way that does justice to the song, the way that these songs really came out the best. Frankly I didn't hear a lot of hard-core country songs that were pitched to me that were really right for this album or right for me. So you have to just go with the songs that you feel strongly about. This collection of songs really stood out to me out of all the songs that I heard.”