Wynonna Judd has released her first album in a decade, The Hard Truth, a deeply personal collection that confronts the death of her mother Naomi and her own long-running personal battles. The record marks a departure from polished Nashville production in favour of a raw blend of country, blues and soul, with Judd co-writing nearly every track.
A Decade Away and a Return to Healing
Judd, who Rolling Stone once called “the greatest female country singer since Patsy Cline,” says she is “in a good place” after years of chaos. “My life has been chaotic. I’ve had a lot of success and a lot of failure, and it’s music that keeps me going. Always,” she said. “I went into a deep, deep hole and what I do when I’m in that hole is to sing. So making this record was my approach to healing. This is a labour of love.”
The Hard Truth, released on the Los Angeles indie label Anti-, strips away the slick sound of Nashville and the work of professional songwriters. Judd described the result as “very vulnerable and also very free.” She added: “I feel it’s time to give my testimony. There’s a lot of love and pain on this record. It’s very raw and very real – I’m telling my truth.”
From Poverty to Stardom
Judd first reached No 1 on the country charts at age 20 in 1984 as part of the Judds, the mother-daughter duo with Naomi Judd that scored 14 country No 1s and sold 20 million albums. Her solo career began after Naomi retired in 1990 following a hepatitis C diagnosis, and her first three singles topped the US country charts while her 1992 debut album sold 5 million copies.
But her personal life unravelled amid arrests for drink driving, two failed marriages, an eating disorder and a troubled adult daughter. The family’s early years were marked by poverty. “When you grow up on welfare, you go hungry,” Judd recalled. “We had no TV, no phone. We literally grew up playing outside in the dirt, eating soup beans and cornbread – an Appalachian staple.”
Loss and Legacy
Naomi Judd took her own life on 30 April 2022, aged 76, the day before the duo were to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. The Hard Truth’s opening song, All Downhill from Ashland, addresses her mother directly. Other tracks reckon with personal history: Girl Who Could Sing is about the biological father she never knew, who died before she could meet him, and The Hopeful Lie concerns her incarcerated adult daughter Grace.
Judd is now raising her four-year-old granddaughter. “I have a daughter who is a drug addict,” she said. “It’s so hard to see your child get lost in addiction and keep making the wrong decisions, but this is where we are at. Right now, I’m raising her daughter. Having a four-year-old girl living with us is a blessing. It’s a reason for me to get up every morning and look forward to the new day.”
The Hard Truth is out now on Anti-.
