Wynonna

A star her entire adult life, Wynonna’s first number one hit, “Mama He’s Crazy,” was released while she was still a teenager. It was the first of eight consecutive number one singles she released with her mother Naomi, performing as The Judds.

When Wynonna set out on her own in 1991, her first three solo singles likewise consecutively topped the country charts. Since then, she’s had multiple solo albums reach multi-platinum sales. She has performed everywhere from Oprah and the Kentucky Derby to the Super Bowl halftime show.

Her spectacular voice still flaunts a power as limitless as her horizons. But this time, listeners will hear that voice stripped down, with no effects, as she dives deep and delivers up her soul.

Wynonna was shaped by the stubborn dirt and sharp winds of Ashland, Kentucky. Combined with support from her extended family, they provided the strength needed to survive her childhood. Before The Judds’ debut, Naomi worked as a nurse and a single mother to raise her daughters. Wy and her sister Ashley spent parts of their childhood in secondhand clothes, living without electricity or indoor plumbing during extended stays with relatives.

Stepping into the spotlight brought Wynonna fame and fortune, but life also delivered hard punches. She went from being a suicidal seventeen-year-old to earning a record contract with her mother at eighteen. The demanding, exquisite Naomi knew her daughter’s voice was the path by which she could save the family while making her own dreams come true. “I remember her telling me to learn songs,” Wynonna says. “And her harmonizing with those songs. It was very apparent to me that she wanted to be famous.”

Though their professional partnership was a roaring success, they clashed personally. From wardrobe mishaps (“I felt like a wardrobe mistake,” Wy recalls) to fights over her freedom, she had to repress her true self to perform with a mother she loved but often didn’t like. Grateful for her success and knowing how many people were depending on her, she says, “I often felt like so much was given to me that I had no way to pay it back.”

In 1991, Naomi had to retire from touring due to a diagnosis of hepatitis. The Judds disbanded. More than three decades later, the day before the duo’s induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Naomi ended her life, the final page of her long struggle with mental illness. At the hospital, Wynonna closed her mother’s eyes to let her rest in peace.

For the first thirty years of their life together, her mother had kept a deep secret from her, something everyone else in the family knew. The man Wynonna had grown up with was not her biological father. The father she’d never known died before they could meet in person.

Appalachia holds its children close, but sorrow repeats across generations like a refrain. Wynonna’s second child, a precocious daughter, wound up devoured by the drug habit she developed as a teenager. Desperate efforts to find the next treatment facility that might save her were seen as attempts to send her away. Mother and daughter found themselves as alienated as Wynonna had ever been from Naomi, but this time due to the scourge of addiction.

The first half of The Hard Truth centers on Wynonna’s bittersweet relationship with her mother and the struggle to find herself, remaining locked outside a life of her own even in the spotlight. Featuring soulful backing vocals from husband and wife duo the War & Treaty, “All Downhill from Ashland” is a brutal take-no-prisoners acknowledgment of the family members who sheltered Wynonna and her mother in her early years, even as small-town life felt like a trap to the ambitious Naomi. Their departure from home and their blood harmonies carried them to success, but as the keening fiddle’s plaintive whine partners up with mandolin, Wynonna confides, "there are some things you can't rise above."

The powerhouse opening gives way to soulfulness. “Everything,” co-written with Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers, lays down a groove for the story of a life in the spotlight that came early for Wynonna. She admits that "there's a cost that ‘just fine’ brings" while Hood chimes in wryly, “Don't forget to smile, Wy.”

The lilting surprise of the Bacharach-inflected “Am I Missing Out” is sung from the perspective of a young Wynonna realizing some essential part of herself was eclipsed in a world where she had to grow up overnight. The warm sonic palette that recalls early ’70s production reveals the sophistication of these arrangements behind the voice they’re built to frame.

Next comes the elegiac “Broken and Blessed,” a song Wynonna wrote in the wake of her mother’s death. Above the strains of steel guitar, she comes to realize that “in love and distress,” somewhere between “hell and hallelujah” sits a life worth living. On “Hear Me Now,” co-written with Sam Beam of Iron & Wine, jazz chords and rhythms summon the spirit of Joni Mitchell. "Whatever I tell myself,” Wynonna sings to the mother she lost, “we all get torn apart."

The second half of The Hard Truth looks at the life and the self that Wynonna has worked to build on her own. Also featuring The War & Treaty, “Hopeful Lie” rises into a rootsy, raucous anthem of wanting so much to believe someone has changed that you embrace their dishonesty. As the song unfolds, it becomes clear Wynonna is singing not about romance but about her child’s addiction. Ignoring grim reality becomes "a strange transaction that nobody wins / but I buy in."

“Kentucky Queen” parallels “All Downhill from Ashland,” returning to Wynonna’s roots. But this time, she heads back as adult in triumph, recalling her aunt’s warning to “watch where the devil hides,” whooping with delight as she reclaims her home state and the parts of the past that saved her. The song highlights the traditional instruments that shape the record as a whole, as Wy’s voice soars over the steam-engine rhythm section carrying listeners along.

On “Girl Who Could Sing,” the discovery of her father’s identity in adulthood gives way to a haunting fury, the vocals an almost-tangible force embodying everything they lost by never meeting. A drawer full of newspaper clippings about Wynonna found in his home after he died leads her to wonder, “Did you hear the same lies that kept me away?”

With a return to mother-daughter relations, “Drive” narrates Wynonna’s three-hour commute each way to Henning, Tennessee to visit her daughter in prison. The pain of their fraught relations in the present takes every ounce of her strength, bringing her swooping voice back to earth and leaving the “past and future… just passengers.”

Wynonna finishes by returning to anthemic form with the horns and stomping rhythms of “Love Ain’t Got the Best of Me.” Admitting that pain is part of the cost of caring, she welcomes love anyway, surrendering in ecstasy: “Too much of a good thing / is a good thing.”

Since their marriage in 2012, Cactus has worked with Wy on the road and in the studio. Seeing Wynonna as a maverick working to find her own way in an industry prone to discouraging that impulse, he envisions The Hard Truth as a new North Star, by which she’s setting a direction for the next stage of a storied career.

We live in a hard and glittering world. It’s a place Wynonna has come to treasure despite everything. “The next chapter,” she says, “is me celebrating my survival of all this.”