"It's time to tell my story," Wynonna Judd wrote this month, and the result is The Hard Truth, her first solo studio album in a decade. It arrives October 2 on ANTI- Records, with lead single "Kentucky Queen" already out. It is the first album of her four-decade career that she co-wrote, and she is calling it the most personal record she has ever made.
"This is my book," she said during a release-day livestream with her husband and producer, Cactus Moser. "This is my telling, and it's time."
The record was five years in the making, written and recorded at the couple's home studio in Leiper's Fork, Tennessee. It sets aside the lush production of her biggest hits for something rawer and closer to live, built around the takes where the feeling broke through rather than the ones that were technically clean. Wynonna has long described herself as a perfectionist who would sing a line until a producer begged her to stop. This time, she says, Moser pushed the other way, keeping the takes where her voice cracked because that was the truth of it. She calls it the most perfectly imperfect album she has made.
She has framed it as a winter record, one that goes into dark places and comes back out. "There's a lot of joy after the darkness, a lot of light," she said. "So you're going to get both." The songs move through the loss of her mother, Naomi Judd, who died in 2022, and through parts of her own life she had long kept private. "Girl Who Could Sing" reckons with the father she grew up never knowing, a family truth she only learned as an adult. She has called this her peace, the record she needed to make while she could, and she has taken to telling crowds she is somewhere between hell and hallelujah.
She did not make it by herself, and the company she kept changed how the songs got written. Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers came in first and pushed them to build each song as its own small movie, a story told all the way through rather than a catchy idea about love. Sam Beam of Iron & Wine, whose ethereal writing Moser likens to Wynonna's hero Joni Mitchell, spent two days at the farm trading lyrics. The roots duo The War and Treaty turned up and sang, which Wynonna remembers as pure goosebumps. What the guests brought, she said, was "life." They "breathe into the microphone," and what comes back out is powerful. Moser calls producing it the most important work he has known, an album that captures her story "with a level of honesty she's never experienced."
The story behind that voice is one of the biggest in country music. As half of The Judds, Wynonna and Naomi sold tens of millions of records and entered the Country Music Hall of Fame. On her own, in the early '90s, her first solo singles all went to number one, among them "No One Else on Earth."
"Kentucky Queen" came out the same day the album was announced, and it sets the tone. The song carries Wynonna back to the Kentucky holler where she came up, to the dirt and the roots she came from. The video films her on a throne in a formal garden as a bugler sounds a fanfare, then barefoot in the creek that runs through it. She first sang it at the Stagecoach festival in April, her first new song in years.
Wynonna will spend the summer on a co-headlining run with Melissa Etheridge, then bring the album home with a short Kentucky tour that ends October 2 in Ashland, her hometown, on the day the record arrives.
Her hope for it is plain. She wants the songs to connect and to help someone feel a little less alone, and she has made her peace with the cost of telling it. As she put it, every hard truth was worth telling.
The Hard Truth is out October 2 on ANTI- Records. "Kentucky Queen" is out now.
The Hard Truth track list:
- "Prelude (All Downhill From Ashland)"
- "All Downhill From Ashland"
- "Everything" (feat. Patterson Hood)
- "Am I Missing Out"
- "Broken and Blessed"
- "Hear Me Now" (feat. Iron & Wine)
- "The Hopeful Lie" (feat. The War and Treaty)
- "Kentucky Queen"
- "Girl Who Could Sing"
- "Drive"
- "Love Ain't Got the Best of Me"
