Reba McEntire, survivor, unveils her next iconic theme song for her new sitcom 'Happy's Place' Staff, 10/11/2024 Reba McEntire unveils "Happy's Place (Theme Song)" for her new sitcom, co-written with Carole King. Echoing the working-class spirit of "I'm a Survivor," the joyful track invites listeners to a bar that serves as a refuge. Discover the excitement behind this musical partnership and its nostalgic resonance! The country icon unveiled the theme song for her upcoming comedy series Happy's Place, appropriately titled "Happy's Place (Theme Song)." The track, co-written by Carole King, sees McEntire return to singing about the working-class plight that made "I'm a Survivor" from Reba such an enduring classic -- albeit with a little less specificity than in her previous sitcom's theme.
In the song, McEntire sings, "Sometimes it feels like a big old fight/To get through the day and sleep on through the night/You can't complain because no one's here to hear it/But here you'll surely find a place that will lift your spirits." The singer then joyfully welcomes the audience to Happy's Place, the bar that McEntire's character inherits from her father upon his death.
"I'm so happy for the opportunity to write the theme song for Happy's Place with my good friend Carole King," McEntire said in a statement. "It just doesn't get much better than that! I hope my fans will love this song as much as they did the theme song for the Reba show."
NBC also shared a video of McEntire recording the song in the studio with a number of collaborators. "We got the theme song for the Happy's Place sitcom all done up," she says at the end of the video. "I hope everybody enjoys it as much as we enjoyed getting to sing it and play on it. Happy's Place -- yeehaw, part two."
The song's second verse reiterates that the titular bar serves as a respite from anything weighing you down. "So just leave your troubles right outside/Fingers crossed, they'll catch a ride/Raise your glass, raise your glass, celebrate with a toast/Raise your glass to the ones that you miss the most," McEntire sings.
McEntire's previous theme song "I'm A Survivor" remained beloved over a decade after Reba ended in 2007. That song's writers, Shelby Kennedy and Phillip White, discussed its origins in an interview with The Tennessean in 2022. "It was Phillip's idea... thinking about the Survivor television show, it was just kind of one of those things that he kinda mentioned," Kennedy recalled. "I was seeing where he was going. Then we said, 'Do you ever wonder if somebody that was born prematurely, is their whole life out of sync because they came too early? So everything's out of time?' And then Phillip being Phillip, [came up with] 'I was born three months too early. The doctor gave me 30 days.'"
White told the outlet, "I remember it fell out pretty quick. The television show was pretty popular, but I always felt like, survivors were more than what was kind of being seen as survivors during that time."
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McEntire re-recorded the song in 2021 for its 20th anniversary. Last year, she posted a clip from the re-recording to celebrate the song's continued resonance. "I love seeing how much it's connected with people throughout the years," she wrote on TikTok. "That's the power of a great song!"
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