On her latest album, The Lonely, the Lonesome & the Gone (ATO), country singer Lee Ann Womack brings nuance, depth, and emotional range that comes with age, dispatching the sort of bromides Nashville has proffered over the last couple of decades since she started making records. On album opener “All the Trouble”—a sober, gospel-steeped song about reckoning with reality that she cowrote with Waylon Payne and Adam Wright—the narrator wails, “Make it up that mountain, you’re standing big and tall / Well, the trouble with a mountain, there’s a million ways to fall.” The title track references the heartbreak in the songs of Hank Williams, but acknowledges that even though much about contemporary country music and the consumption of it might be worlds apart from how it was in Williams’s day, the sentiment found in it today often extends the truth in his tunes.…
On her latest album, The Lonely, the Lonesome & the Gone (ATO), country singer Lee Ann Womack brings nuance, depth, and emotional range that comes with age, dispatching the sort of bromides Nashville has proffered over the last couple of decades since she started making records. On album opener “All the Trouble”—a sober, gospel-steeped song about reckoning with reality that she cowrote with Waylon Payne and Adam Wright—the narrator wails, “Make it up that mountain, you’re standing big and tall / Well, the trouble with a mountain, there’s a million ways to fall.” The title track references the heartbreak in the songs of Hank Williams, but acknowledges that even though much about contemporary country music and the consumption of it might be worlds apart from how it was in Williams’s day, the sentiment found in it today often extends the truth in his tunes.…