By Tom Geddie
Lee Ann Womack is back. Not with a vengeance but with what may be her best collection of songs ever. The Jacksonville native took six years to make and finally release an album it seems like she always wanted to make: The Way I’m Livin’.
The dozen songs on the new album are special to Womack, even after years of hits including “I Hope You Dance,” “Never Again, Again,” “The Fool,” “A Little Past Little Rock,” “Does My Ring Burn Your Finger,” and “I’ll Think of a Reason Later.” Her first single — “Never Again, Again” — hit the music-buying public so hard, she said, that “that’s when I knew I was going to be able to accomplish what I wanted to: to make a good living playing the kind of music I like to play.”
Even with two Grammy awards, five Academy of Country Music awards, five Country Music Association awards, and four gold records, it took a while to make exactly the album with that music on it, exactly the way she wanted to record it.
Womack once said her classic sound is “probably not as authentic as even I would like to be.”
That’s because she had a set of rules —modern country music is based on those rules — she had to follow.
“The label can’t get too country or they can’t get it played, and then they couldn’t sell it,” she said several years ago. “So I have to follow a certain formula. I can’t get too far outside the boundaries. I don’t pick the singles for airplay. The label does. They usually don’t pick the more traditional stuff. I love the real traditional stuff that I grew up listening to in East Texas.”
Six years between album releases and a new label, Sugar Hill, have changed that for the quiet superstar who some people consider to be a “female George Strait” for the respect her work gets.
“There’s always been this cloud of commercialism,” she said recently, “labels saying here’s what we need, shoving songs at me by people who were having a lot of success at the time. Now I’m really having a good time thinking about nothing but the music.”
She began working on the album six years ago with recording company executive Luke Lewis; it survived through labels mergers and commercial temptations and, finally, the contract with Sugar Hill. She began with one noted producer, Tony Brown, and finished with another noted producer, her husband Frank Liddell who has won three Academy of Country Music album-of-the-year awards for his work with Miranda Lambert.
“Luke was very generous, allowing us to do this. He let Frank and I create the record I’d always wanted. We got to do things differently, to not think about anything except what’s best for the songs and the feelings inside them.”
First, always, is Womack’s perfect country voice. A close second is her choice of songs. On the new, mostly traditional album, the words we get come from Chris Knight, Mindy Smith, Buddy Miller, Mando Saenz, Hayes Carll, Neil Young, Bruce Robison, Adam Wright, Mindy Smith, and Roger Miller.
Womack’s delivery and the basically stripped down production by the Houston-born Liddell, who she’d never before done a full album with, put the emphasis on the stories.
Womack shares the words in slow, contemplative songs, in a sort of Southern gospel, and somehow hopeful, some blues-oriented country, and a lot of real country weepers. On the often comic Roger Miller’s obscure, disturbing “Tomorrow Night in Baltimore” which begins “Her head rolls back and forth / Against the billows of her long black shiny hair / As she contemplates the ecstasy / Of some other love that now she wished was there” while a man basically stalks her.
She is pleased that “these songs were written to be performed, not pitched,” which sets a high bar for honoring them.
“Every songwriter wrote intending to sing them, to tell these stories, show these postcards, and you can feel the way they built the characters. Bringing that to the music was just so incredible for everyone on the sessions.”
The writers tell us: “I wish I could fly with you just like the angels do”…”I will one day hold hands with my eternal family”… “chances are I took the wrong turn every time I had a turn to take, and I guess I broke my own heart every time I had a heart to break” . . . the devil “smiled, reached into his coat, he gave me a bottle full of something sweet, said I’ll fill it up every time we meet” … “now a million lovers couldn’t set me free, he haunts me”…”I am a far cry, you are a whisper”…”go tell my baby that I am happy and that I’m never coming home, make up some reason I had to leave him, the only true love I’ve ever known” …”Sunday morning singin’, chicken gettin’ fried, I missed it all by sleepin’ in and I feel no light inside” and more.
Choosing songs for the new album was a pleasure for Womack, who many people forget that she spent the better part of a decade paying her dues as a contract songwriter in Nashville, placing her own songs with Bill Anderson, Ricky Skaggs, and others.
“I look for songs that move me in some way, music that can make you happy or can put you in touch with a more melancholy part of your personality or make you want to dance or sit down to have a drink,” she said. “I love singers who don’t sound like they’ve thought about what they are going to do, but it sounds like they just open their mouths and something real comes out.
“It is very, very important for me to take chances on different songs that really appeal to me,” she said. “I have to do that. Otherwise, I might as well go sell real estate or do something totally, totally different.”
Womack understands the comparison to fellow Texan Strait, who she’s toured with, and feels a strong, traditional connection to a third Texan, George Jones, as she grew up in Jacksonville.
“That’s where I really learned to sing, on Jones’ records, trying to sing like him. East Texas has that soul that sorta fits with a western type of country music and also a lot of that soulful thing that goes on in Louisiana that kinda floated over into East Texas. I think George Strait and I learned from a lot of the same people: Jones, Merle Haggard, that sort of thing.
“There’s something in the water or the dirt in East Texas that all of these artists — and I hope I’m one of them — help create this thread of soulful country music.”
She spent much of her childhood sitting on the living room floor playing her dad Aubrey’s old records and at the radio station where he worked when he wasn’t being a high school principal.
“I can remember picking out my favorite records and bringing them to him and he would play them for me. Sometimes he’d let me talk on the microphone. The whole thing made me fascinated with the microphone and having people hear me.”
In August, Womack finished recording some bonus tracks in her living room that take her further away from today’s version of country music; these new recordings will be available through different outlets to be determined. They include Jones’ “A Cup of Loneliness” from the 1950s, “Satisfied Mind,” and “a Lightnin’ Hopkins song and some Lefty Frizzell, of course.
In the meantime, she surrounds herself with music, even at home in Nashville with Liddell and daughters Anna Lise, 15, and Aubrie, 23.
“We constantly have writers and pickers over for jam sessions. Our two daughters are running back and forth to guitar lessons and piano lessons. Their friends who play music are over here.
“So even if it seems I’ve been out of music for six years, really I’ve been more into it than I was before. Part of the fabric around here is that we try to teach them to focus on the music and not on the other stuff that goes on around the business.”
Womack is also free to indulge — if that’s the word for a passion – in books. Right now, she’s re-reading The Hot Zone, a book about the Ebola virus when it first hit about 20 years ago. Before that, she read J.K. Rowling’s mystery The Cuckoo Calling and she just started The House That Country Music Built which tells the story of Star Day Recordings in Houston, the studio and record label in Houston where George Jones recorded all of his first records.
“I usually have several books going at once,” she said.
Life is good, it seems, for a traditional country music star unconstrained by commercial demands. So is The Way I’m Livin’.