There’s a lot of grit in Wynonna Judd’s new album, in her voice, in her lyrics, in the back stories, the ones underfoot and in her past. She’s been places most of us haven’t. Raised with her sister Ashley by a single mum and nurse, Naomi, in the hard-scrabble setting of Ashland in Kentucky, a little town on the banks of the Ohio River.
She had her first No. 1 hit with her mum Naomi in 1984, with “Mama He’s Crazy”. She was just 18, and mother-and-daughter would become a huge multi-Grammy-winning country music-pop success – a success held together by a deep but deeply conflicted personal relationship. After seven albums, 26 singles and 14 No. 1s, Naomi retired in 1991. They worked together again in the 2010s, but an ailing Naomi took her own life the day before she and Wynonna were to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in April 2022. Meanwhile, Wynonna's daughter Grace is currently serving out a sentence at Rockingham County Jail in Harrisonburg, and one of the songs is about Wynonna's regular drives to visit her.
All that back story adds to the weight and breadth of the songs on Hard Truths. It’s her first album in a decade, and the first album on which she co-wrote the songs. Some focus on her relationship with her mother, on fame, success and struggle, others on her own mother-daughter dynamic with Grace. Guests on the set include husband-and-wife duo the War & Treaty, adding soulful vocals to “All Downhill from Ashland” while Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers plays on “Everything” a co-write with Judd on the rigours of early fame.
“Broken and Blessed,” and “Hear Me Now,” co-written with Sam Beam of Iron & Wine, are songs to her late mother, while “Kentucky Queen” is a raucous paean to a small-town homecoming as conquering heroine, while “Drive” chronicles her latter-day relationship with Grace, and the three-hour commute to see her in jail.
It’s a raw, acoustic band mainlining the music behind her, plenty of fiddle alongside the guitars, pedal steel, mandolins, keyboards and touches of brass, and her mature, lived-in voice is built for songs of experience, not innocence, and Hard Truths is an album that carries all those experiences with tenderness, resilience and heart.
