“For me, the ’70s represents the emergence of the singer-songwriter, in writing from a first-person point of view,” Rita Wilson tells Apple Music. “When I started thinking about the music that way, I thought, ‘What if the interpretation of these songs was now a duet, a conversation between two lovers, two people, so that it was a new way of listening and interpreting? How are these songs listened to if you’re listening to them as conversations?’” That thought experiment produced Now & Forever: Duets, a collaborative album of ’70s love songs featuring duets between Wilson and Willie Nelson, Smokey Robinson, Keith Urban, and more. Following Wilson’s 2019 album, Halfway to Home, Now & Forever mines the actor and musician’s musical DNA, compiling 10 tracks that helped inform her artistry and her deep love of music. Urban joins Wilson in a warmhearted take on Van Morrison’s “Crazy Love,” Urban’s soulful croon and bluesy guitar licks playing well off Wilson’s honeyed vocal. Wilson tapped Nelson for Paul Simon’s “Slip Slidin’ Away,” which takes on new gravity as a duet. And up-and-comer Jimmie Allen injects a lighthearted joy into the Jackson 5 classic “I’ll Be There,” which Wilson cites as a defining song in her personal musical canon. Below, Wilson shares insight into several key tracks on Now & Forever: Duets. “Crazy Love” (feat. Keith Urban) “When I was looking at the lyrics, I thought, ‘Oh, this was written by a man to sing to a woman in the ’70s.’ I thought, ‘Gosh. When a woman sings it, it’s a very modern, forward-thinking take on it—that a woman would have needs, and that a woman would go out of town. Maybe she’s working somewhere, and when she comes home, she wants that loving.’ It was empowering to be a woman singing that and being that open about your own desires. Keith, I just thought he brought such soul. Because he’s such an incredible musician himself, I think his voice is also his instrument, and he uses it that way. It’s very immediate and very present. I felt like he was really saying those words to me.” “Where Is the Love?” (feat. Smokey Robinson) “When Smokey sings—I would call it a velvet voice. It just comes out, and he has this range. When he goes into his falsetto, you just feel like, ‘What is going on here?’ I mean, there’s an aching to him and a longing that he connects to when he’s singing ‘Where Is the Love?’ as if he’s really searching for it. He’s really aching for it. He’s written over 4000 songs. Who can say that? But this is a man who loves what he does, and all that love comes through.” “If” (feat. Tim McGraw) “First of all, Tim has an encyclopedic knowledge of music. He can remember any song from any era, from any genre. He knows it all. I felt the intimacy coming from him. When a man sings lyrics that intimate, you can’t help but melt. I love, particularly, when our voices wrap around each other one by one, that section. All of a sudden, this is what I get out of it, these two people who are singing about each other separately then come together in this beautiful way where their voices intertwine. I imagine it as an embrace. Then they’re off with, ‘Ah, now we’re together.’ There’s something very beautiful about that.” “I’ll Be There” (feat. Jimmie Allen) “During the pandemic, I hadn’t met Jimmie, but he called me up, and he asked me to sing on his song ‘When This Is Over,’ from the Bettie James album. I knew his voice. I knew his music. I thought he was such a cool guy. I had ‘I’ll Be There’ in my head. I said, ‘Is there anything that you love from the ’70s that you’d want to sing?’ He said, ‘I’ll Be There.’ My jaw dropped. The Jackson 5 were such a huge part of my growing up. I remember watching them on TV and thinking, ‘Who are these kids singing? How do you get to be a kid and sing?’ I knew they were Motown and a family, but, to me, that was just extraordinary, to see this family of these young kids singing.” “Without You” (feat. Vince Gill) “Everybody associates that song with Harry Nilsson as the writer, but it was actually a Badfinger song. Pete Ham and Tom Evans from that band wrote it. It’s become a song that Harry ‘owns.’ That’s what one hopes for, that you can own a song the way he did. To me, it’s that soaring chorus. It goes from a conversation to an anguished cry. Again, I had never heard that as a duet. Of course, Vince, who can sing anything anywhere anytime, he was kind enough to come on my first album of cover songs, which was Am/Fm. I couldn’t imagine, at that point, anybody singing that song besides him, because of the angst that I know he can communicate and that he does so beautifully in this song. It’s just like you really believe that he cannot live without that person.”