When Reba McEntire performed at the 2026 Grammys, held Feb. 1 at Los Angeles’s Crypto.com Arena, it was, incredibly, her first time ever singing on the Grammy stage. That alone would have made the occasion momentous, but McEntire (along with Brandy Clark and Promise of the Real’s Lukas Nelson, son of Willie) was tasked with one of the evening’s most daunting and important assignments: appearing in the ceremony’s In Memoriam tribute.

And this year, that segment hit especially close to home for Reba.

“I’ve got a lot of friends on that screen tonight. My oldest son, Brandon Blackstock, is also up there. He went on back in August,” McEntire told me on the preshow red carpet, referring to her talent-manager stepson. (McEntire was married to Brandon’s father Narvel Blackstock, for more than 20 years.) “So, it’s going to be a very emotional song to sing. But Lukas Nelson, Brandy Clark, and I will do our best to get through it.”

As the country queen steeled herself to perform a retooled version of “Trailblazer” — a song she cowrote with Clark and the track’s other two recording artists, Lainey Wilson and Miranda Lambert, as a way of “honoring the [country music] ladies who have been before us who have gone on” — she revealed that she could hear the voice of her stepson in her head. She knew that the talent manager, who died last August from malignant melanoma at age 48, would give her just the right tough-love pep talk she needed.

“I know Brandon would say, ‘Suck it up there, Mom! Get up there and do it,’” McEntire chuckled. However, when she was a coach on The Voice, she was used to helping her own contestants power through emotional and deeply personal performances. And she’d remember some advice she received from another dearly departed loved one, her mom Jacqueline, who died in 2020.

“I’ve always had a little trick that my mother told me: When you get a little emotional, look up at the ‘EXIT’ signs, and try to read it backwards,” McEntire revealed. “It gets you out of that moment of heartbreak when you’re just about to choke, and so you switch [in your brain], and then you stand and you can tend to business. That’s why you’re there.”

The Instagram interview video above is courtesy of the Recording Academy.