1985 Reba McEntire Hit Song, About a Woman’s Emotional Affair, Remains the Only Single She Ever Wrote by Herself

In 2026, country music legend Reba McEntire is celebrating an incredible 50-year career that’s as sparkly as the sequins she regularly wore while becoming the most successful female country artist of the 1980s and ‘90s.

Over the years, McEntire has landed 60 top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, including 24 No. 1s. While she’s often found success singing songs written by others, she has co-written some of her hits with fellow country songwriters, including “Climb That Mountain High” and “Somebody’s Chelsea.“

But across five decades, only one song that McEntire wrote completely on her own has been released as a single — 1985’s “Only in My Mind” — and it became an instant hit.

According to American Songwriter, “Only in My Mind” was the second single released to radio stations from McEntire’s ninth studio album, “Have I Got a Deal For You,” and it reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart.

The song, which was featured on McEntire’s first Greatest Hits album in 1987, is a pure country ballad about a complex topic: emotional infidelity. It’s sung from the perspective of a woman whose husband has just asked if she’s ever cheated on him. Her answer? Physically, no — but in her imagination, with someone she knows? Yep.

While she’s proved she has the songwriting chops to pen her own hits, McEntire has been heralded as a champion of other songwriters in Nashville, expertly putting her stamp on their compositions. In fact, in 2018, she received the first-ever Career Maker Award from the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, honoring her commitment to supporting songwriters.

But as she was selecting songs for her 1985 album, McEntire told American Songwriter that she was having a hard time finding tunes that fit the pure country vibe she was going for, which likely led to her including one of her own.

“After two No. 1 records, I thought, boy, now I’ll get the good songs,” McEntire said in 1984. “Well, that wasn’t right.”

Over the years, she’s become an expert at choosing the right songs from other songwriters and collaborating with lyricists and musicians on others. In 2019, she told BUILD that the key to a successful country song is that it’s “gotta have heart; somebody’s got to relate to it.”

“If it touches my heart when I hear the song, then when I sing it, hopefully it’s gonna touch your heart too,” she explained. “That’s a successful song to me.”