HLN’s Robin Meade: Music is ‘My Second Platform’

By Merrill Knox 

Robin Meade is a busy woman. In addition to her day job anchoring “Morning Express with Robin Meade” on HLN, she has spent the past two years co-writing a country music album, “Brand New Day,” which was released last week.

Meade calls balancing it all “a test of patience.” She says she gets most of her thinking and planning done on the four-hour drive between Atlanta, where HLN is based, and Nashville, where she recorded the album. “I would think about the concepts I wanted to write that day,” Meade tells TVNewser. “I was so excited to do this.”

Meade’s challenge was to find inspiration for her music in her news career, and vice versa.

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“We really try to convey the human experience,” she said of “Morning Express.” “This week we had the attack on the Intercontinental Hotel in Afghanistan. You can get a story like that, and you can go on about how many people were killed, and how many stories of the hotel are on fire, and who did it. But we always try to focus on the human experience. So we focused on a student, and he hit the floor of his room and he prayed, ‘I hope I survive this.’ To me, that makes a great story.”

“We are attracted to the human condition,” she continued. “As people, we’re attracted to each others’ wins and losses and trials and experiences. Not because we want other people to lose, but because

you want to know, ‘Is anybody else feeling this?’ A morning show needs a heartbeat. And music should reflect that heartbeat.”

“Brand New Day” includes a cover of Don Henley‘s iconic “Dirty Laundry,” a 1982 song about the salaciousness and shallowness of the news business. “To me, it was a wink-and-nudge way to say, this is what I do for a living, and not to avoid it. It’s my way of saying: I love what I do, but I want to do this, too.”

Despite her passion for country music, Meade has no plans to abandon her journalism career anytime soon. “I really love what I do. I love my team at HLN, and that our bosses allow us to be ourselves while watching the news. But I don’t want this CD to be a one-off,” she said. “I already have plans for the second album. I haven’t started working on it, but I’m thinking about it. I think in today’s world you see so many anchors and hosts doing two shoes — Anderson Cooper, Joy Behar does “The View,” and then she does her show on HLN — you can have more than one platform, I think. And this is my second platform.”

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