On an album recorded in her native Texas, the country music veteran demonstrates what she\u2019s learned from her mainstream tenure while casting off its restraints.<\/b>
\nNASHVILLE \u2014 Lee Ann Womack reclined on a couch at the offices of Carnival Music and surveyed the action on Music Row, one of the many parts of this city swept up in a flurry of real estate development. When the floor rumbled, she simply noted, \u201cBlasting. You know, the builders.\u201d
Roughly half a century ago, the country music industry consolidated its presence and power here, on 16th and 17th Avenues. Ms. Womack, a Texas-bred traditionalist and one of her generation\u2019s most acclaimed vocalists, arrived on the scene in the late 1990s with the aim of following her gut. She quickly grasped that success would also require acclimating to the commercial forces of the radio-driven country world.
In the current phase of her career, Ms. Womack\u2019s artful adaptation of establishment sensibilities has come into clearest focus. She has released seven albums on two major labels with Nashville in their names and one on the Nashville-based indie Sugar Hill Records. But on her new record, \u201cThe Lonely, the Lonesome & the Gone\u201d \u2014 out Friday on the New York independent label ATO \u2014 she applies wisdom gleaned from her mainstream tenure while simultaneously casting off its restraints. It\u2019s also something of a family affair: She once again worked with her husband, the producer Frank Liddell (who helped found Carnival), and the album features guitar playing by their daughter, Anna Lise Liddell, who graduated from high school in the spring.
To record it, Ms. Womack, 51, decamped to Houston with a select group of Nashville players and reimagined country sentimentality in a bracing, unencumbered fashion. She was equally drawn to the mythology of East Texas as a melting pot of unvarnished musical expression and the idea of getting some distance from industry culture. SugarHill Studios, where she and Mr. Liddell set up shop, was also where George Jones, one of her favorite singers, cut wild-eyed records in his pre-Nashville days. \u201cWalkin\u2019 around the halls of that studio, you don\u2019t hear people talking about the charts,\u201d Ms. Womack said. \u201cYou don\u2019t hear people talking about business meetings. It\u2019s a totally different vibe. It\u2019s just music.\u201d
At a young age, when many of her peers were taken with television\u2019s chipper singing characters, Ms. Womack gravitated to the country records by Jones, Ray Price and Dolly Parton that her radio D. J. father brought home. \u201cWhen I heard her sing, I might not have understood what she was singing about, but something, the quiver in her voice, the emotion in her voice, sucked me in,\u201d she said of Ms. Parton.
Ms. Womack started recording during a decade ruled by megawatt divas, and she\u2019s fond of pointing out that she insisted on a debut single, \u201cNever Again, Again\u201d \u2014 a rueful, waltz-time ballad with robust, bluegrass-style harmonies \u2014 that conveyed her artistic inclinations. Aubrie Sellers, Ms. Womack\u2019s daughter by a previous marriage who is carving out her own career as a recording artist, said that growing up, she came to understand her mother as \u201ca modern woman who sang traditional country music.\u201d
Ms. Womack credited her former label Decca Nashville with allowing her the leeway to go against the format\u2019s glossy grain, but also recognized her responsibility to \u201cgive them something they could work with.\u201d Her 2000 blockbuster album contained the billowy inspirational ballad \u201cI Hope You Dance\u201d and the country rock of \u201cAshes by Now,\u201d along with \u201cDoes My Ring Burn Your Finger,\u201d a searing, Appalachian-sounding number by the future Americana luminaries Buddy and Julie Miller. \u201cI Hope You Dance\u201d became her biggest hit, a country chart topper that also crossed over to the pop Top 20, though its message-driven appeal was a departure.
\u201cI told Frank one time, \u2018I think they expect me to be Billy Graham now.\u2019 And I wasn\u2019t comfortable with that,\u201d Ms. Womack said.
Much of Ms. Womack\u2019s catalog has pushed against the perception of countrified emoting as a maudlin affair, but she\u2019s never been one to intellectualize her approach. She gave a characteristically concise summary of her vision for \u201cThe Lonely, the Lonesome & the Gone\u201d: \u201cCountry music to me was always music that spoke to the common man, and in earlier times, people who were going through hard times and troubles,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat is called country music today to me has gotten quite a bit far away from that, especially on the emotional end. So I wanted to do that.\u201d
In the elegantly brooding title track, she laments, \u201cI don\u2019t know why no one sings\/about drowning in pitchers and half-priced wings\/and trying to wish back everything they\u2019ve lost.\u201d
Ms. Womack has called the new album \u201ccountry blues,\u201d but that\u2019s as much a tonal description as a stylistic one. She spends 14 tracks embodying the most delicate and desperate extremes of melancholy, inscribing countrypolitan and torchy pop arrangements with sighing silences, and launching into anguished, note-bending runs during the roiling, down-home numbers. The liberal use of reverb, particularly on the steel guitar and her voice, has a haunting effect.
\u201cI\u2019m not the one that goes, \u2018Here\u2019s the mic we need to use,\u2019 or \u2018Here\u2019s where we need to put it,\u2019 but I know who to hire that will understand what I\u2019m going for,\u201d Ms. Womack said.
Mr. Liddell added, \u201cI think this particular time, we just did our best to let her sing and find some things and not worry so much about \u2014\u2014\u201d
\u201cGlossin\u2019 over things,\u201d Ms. Womack completed the thought.
That\u2019s what the other music makers in her family are aiming for too, in their own ways. An \u201cindependent spirit,\u201d she said, is \u201ca big part of who we are.\u201d
As a producer, Mr. Liddell has contributed to the singularity of Miranda Lambert\u2019s albums. While making \u201cBeginning of Things\u201d with Charlie Worsham, he captured un-self-conscious performances. Mr. Worsham said that when he catches himself thinking he should record something with radio in mind, \u201cI\u2019m like, \u2018I can\u2019t do that and then go see Frank and feel good about myself.\u2019\u201d
As a publisher, Mr. Liddell has signed some of Nashville\u2019s country-tweaking songwriters, including his stepdaughter, Ms. Sellers. She spent half a decade fleshing out a sound she termed \u201cgarage country\u201d before releasing her first album, \u201cNew City Blues,\u201d which Mr. Liddell produced, last year. \u201cI took all the things that I loved and tried to create my own identity,\u201d she said, adding that she\u2019s careful to separate her career from her mother\u2019s.
Ms. Womack\u2019s youngest, Ms. Liddell, currently splits her time between writing and assisting in an East Nashville recording studio. She envisions making her own albums, but only after she\u2019s found a sonic stamp. \u201cIf I just put on a personality, I wouldn\u2019t feel it and I\u2019d be worried that other people weren\u2019t feeling it,\u201d she said.
After 20 years of releasing albums, Ms. Womack has her own unique position in the country landscape. She has the name recognition and endorsement juice of a fairly recent hit maker, along with the motivation to pursue musical priorities that predate her commercial peak. The business apparatus around her has grown more modest in scale, but her artistic aspirations are grander than ever. And she doesn\u2019t feel the need to disavow her past accomplishments in order to own her present efforts.
\u201cI moved here years ago, and Frank did too, and we just got caught up in a few square blocks,\u201d Ms. Womack said. \u201cYou get out of there and you start realizing that things are much different than they seem when you just hang out right here in this scene all the time.\u201d
She added, \u201cI\u2019m lucky to have gotten to learn from both of those scenes, and be a part of both.\u201d<\/p>\n

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