Lee Ann Womack

Upholding the classic Nashville standards of earlier generations, singer/songwriter Lee Ann Womack became one of the breakout contemporary country stars of 1997 with her eponymous debut album, which reached the Top Ten on the country chart. The massively popular I Hope You Dancefollowed in mid-2000. Something Worth Leaving Behindappeared in mid-2002, and it was a sure fit for Womack to move into the country mainstream for good. Womack’s latest album The Lonely, The Lonesome & The Gone was released in October of 2017.

Artists don’t really make albums like Womack’s The Lonely, The Lonesome & The Gone anymore. Albums that possess both a profound sense of history and a clear-eyed vision for the future. Albums that transcend genres while embracing their roots. Albums that evoke a sense of place and of personality so vivid they make listeners feel more like participants in the songs than simply admirers of them. Anybody who has paid attention to Womack for the past decade or so could see she was headed in this direction. The Lonely, The Lonesome & The Gone (ATO Records) — a breathtaking hybrid of country, soul, gospel and blues — comes from Womack’s core. “I could never shake my center of who I was,” says the East Texas native. “I’m drawn to rootsy music. It’s what moves me.”

Recorded at Houston’s historic SugarHill Recording Studios and produced by Womack’s husband and fellow Texan, Frank Liddell (fresh off a 2017 ACM Album of the Year win for Miranda Lambert’s The Weight of These Wings), The Lonely, The Lonesome & The Gone marks the culmination of a journey that began with Womack’s 2005 CMA Album of the Year There’s More Where That Come From, moving her toward an authentic American music that celebrates her roots and adds to the canon. It also underscores the emergence of Womack’s songwriting voice: She has more writing credits among this album’s 14 tracks than on all her previous albums combined.

Womack had brought a handful of songs to record, including the gospel-inspired original “All the Trouble”; the poignant “Mama Lost Her Smile,” in which a daughter sorts through her family’s photographic history looking for clues to a long-secret sorrow; and the love-triangle conversation “Talking Behind Your Back,” which she penned with Dale Dodson and Dean Dillon, the writer of several George Strait classics.

Capturing the reality of East Texas music isn’t always easy. Being in Houston and at SugarHill helped make that happen, inspiring an approach to the recording process that everyone embraced from the first note played. “Music down there —  including Houston, Beaumont, Port Arthur and all the way through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama — is this huge melting pot,” Womack says. “I love that, and I wanted that in this record. I wanted to make sure it had a lot of soul in it, because real country music has soul, and I wanted to remind people of that.”