Lee Ann Womack - The Way I’m Livin’
Sugar Hill Records
In a year already generous with good country albums comes Lee Ann Womack’s latest release, and it may be the best of all. She has returned with a passion after six years of sitting it out. Yes, hard as it may seem, it was way back in October 2008 that Lee Ann released her criminally-overlooked CALL ME CRAZY. She actually recorded this album during 2010-2011 for MCA, when label chief Luke Lewis gave her the green light to follow her muse. When she turned the album in, the regime had changed and Mike Dungan was now in charge. Not wishing to mess with the tracks she had recorded—with Dungan’s blessing—she opted to take the album with her to another label. Rather than join one of the Nashville majors, Lee Ann signed with Sugar Hill, a label that looks way beyond the charts and here-today-gone-tomorrow commercialism. Unshackled from the pressure of trying to please everyone except herself, Lee Ann has pushed the envelope, tilted at the windmills and otherwise thumbed her nose at current convention in forging a steely work of true artistry. She’s done it by skipping the formula, using some of the left-of-centre writers like Hayes Carll and Bruce Robison, and adding edgy instrumentation and bold production. THE WAY I’M LIVIN’ is more than just an album, it’s Lee Ann’s mission to reconnect with the single most important element of her music career: her art. She’s shifted her mind and creative energy to rediscover the pure motivation for creating her music and chosen songs that mirror the country roots of her childhood listening to her father’s records of Ray Price, Willie Nelson and George Jones. From the exquisite When I Come Around to the bare-boned lament of Send It On Down, this album marks a return to the unalloyed, hard country that has been sadly missed by so many country traditionalists. Like me, they’ll be salivating as this disc spins in the player with one classic song and performance following another. You can’t help but be moved by Nightwind, a tale of break-up, which in a few short minutes reveals the pain and loneliness love can bring to an individual. Then there’s brutal confession of the alcoholic portrayed so forthrightly in Sleeping With The Devil, or the heartache of how to get over an old love in the fiddle-and-steel driven Not Forgotten You. The biggest surprise for me, though, was Lee Ann’s revival of Roger Miller’s little-known Tomorrow Night In Baltimore. I first heard this song way back in 1971 on Waylon Jennings’ CEDARTOWN, GEORGIA album and it’s been one of my favourites ever since. Lee Ann turns the song around to the female perspective perfectly and completely owns a song that is quite different to what she would usually tackle.
This collection of honest, passionate songs, which avoids mainstream’s manufactured sentiment, is characterised by the sound of weeping steel, crying fiddles, electric guitars, piano, occasional string sweetening, high-harmonies and sad-edged lyrics that might be too much for some listeners to take, but that’s the reality of country music. It’s all about real lives full of hardship and break-up, regret and pain. And Lee Ann delivers it all with a voice of experience that cuts right to the very heart of country music. She is the kind of artist whose music makes you stop, think and then say: ‘that is so true.’ She is to be commended for taking a courageous step off her lucrative beaten path to progress to a road less travelled. This album certainly underlines the fact that this is the time for women in country music, despite the fact that America’s mainstream country radio stations or even the CMA, whose tail is wagged by those radio stations, have yet to embrace that fact.
www.leeannwomack.com
In a year already generous with good country albums comes Lee Ann Womack’s latest release, and it may be the best of all. She has returned with a passion after six years of sitting it out. Yes, hard as it may seem, it was way back in October 2008 that Lee Ann released her criminally-overlooked CALL ME CRAZY. She actually recorded this album during 2010-2011 for MCA, when label chief Luke Lewis gave her the green light to follow her muse. When she turned the album in, the regime had changed and Mike Dungan was now in charge. Not wishing to mess with the tracks she had recorded—with Dungan’s blessing—she opted to take the album with her to another label. Rather than join one of the Nashville majors, Lee Ann signed with Sugar Hill, a label that looks way beyond the charts and here-today-gone-tomorrow commercialism. Unshackled from the pressure of trying to please everyone except herself, Lee Ann has pushed the envelope, tilted at the windmills and otherwise thumbed her nose at current convention in forging a steely work of true artistry. She’s done it by skipping the formula, using some of the left-of-centre writers like Hayes Carll and Bruce Robison, and adding edgy instrumentation and bold production. THE WAY I’M LIVIN’ is more than just an album, it’s Lee Ann’s mission to reconnect with the single most important element of her music career: her art. She’s shifted her mind and creative energy to rediscover the pure motivation for creating her music and chosen songs that mirror the country roots of her childhood listening to her father’s records of Ray Price, Willie Nelson and George Jones. From the exquisite When I Come Around to the bare-boned lament of Send It On Down, this album marks a return to the unalloyed, hard country that has been sadly missed by so many country traditionalists. Like me, they’ll be salivating as this disc spins in the player with one classic song and performance following another. You can’t help but be moved by Nightwind, a tale of break-up, which in a few short minutes reveals the pain and loneliness love can bring to an individual. Then there’s brutal confession of the alcoholic portrayed so forthrightly in Sleeping With The Devil, or the heartache of how to get over an old love in the fiddle-and-steel driven Not Forgotten You. The biggest surprise for me, though, was Lee Ann’s revival of Roger Miller’s little-known Tomorrow Night In Baltimore. I first heard this song way back in 1971 on Waylon Jennings’ CEDARTOWN, GEORGIA album and it’s been one of my favourites ever since. Lee Ann turns the song around to the female perspective perfectly and completely owns a song that is quite different to what she would usually tackle. This collection of honest, passionate songs, which avoids mainstream’s manufactured sentiment, is characterised by the sound of weeping steel, crying fiddles, electric guitars, piano, occasional string sweetening, high-harmonies and sad-edged lyrics that might be too much for some listeners to take, but that’s the reality of country music. It’s all about real lives full of hardship and break-up, regret and pain. And Lee Ann delivers it all with a voice of experience that cuts right to the very heart of country music. She is the kind of artist whose music makes you stop, think and then say: ‘that is so true.’ She is to be commended for taking a courageous step off her lucrative beaten path to progress to a road less travelled. This album certainly underlines the fact that this is the time for women in country music, despite the fact that America’s mainstream country radio stations or even the CMA, whose tail is wagged by those radio stations, have yet to embrace that fact.
www.leeannwomack.com