Second chances... While they make great fodder for country songs, they also make for a good tagline for the latest Lee Ann Womack album- Call Me Crazy.Lee Ann Womack's 2005 disc, There's More Where That Came From, was the most celebrated album of her career. It won her three CMA awards, including album and single of the year, and was praised by critics across all country genres. But when Womack began recording the follow-up album the next year, something was missing. Something didn’t feel right.
In an interview with the Washington Post, she says, “I wasn’t sure if my heart and my mind and everything were all in the right place. I changed my mind a lot and was overthinking things. We put a single out and it wasn’t performing that well, and I was frustrated and tired.” As a result, the project was shelved. Three years later, Call Me Crazy hits the shelves (it actually arrives in stores today) and for that we should all be grateful. It’s a phenomenal album filled with classic Womack-type songs and even a few surprises thrown in.
Lee Ann Womack lives in polar opposites with many of her songs. Like Martina McBride, she can inspire us with great uplifting songs. Womack’s mega-smash I Hope You Dance has a karmic match in the new album’s Story Of My Life. But on the flip side, she can sing the darkest of songs like Kathy Mattea. Her previously released A Little Past Little Rock can share its mental anguish with the new album’s first release to radio, Last Call. Interestingly, the ends of the spectrum are where Womack does her very best work. Her music isn’t about huge power ballads, it’s all about emotive lyrics that draw you into each song. She sings to us, she doesn’t holler. To clarify that, it’s not about the range of her voice or the high notes that she can hit. It not that her voice isn’t beautiful, it’s that she uses it in an understated way to convey the most meaning. Instead of layering her voice over and over in production, her back-up is a trailing steel guitar. It creates an intimate album that’s both lonely and inspiring at the exact same time.
Each of the albums songs are unique in their own way. On Solitary Thinking, producer Tony Brown employs a New York nightclub type of sound with a unique percussion beat. My favorite song on the album, New Again, has beautiful lyrics about finding a new start in love that’s polished with incredible fiddle and acoustic guitar play behind her vocals. Another great tune, The Bees, utilizes a synthesizer accordion as she and guest vocalist Keith Urban sing about an orphan finding a family of her own. I Think I Know is traditional honkytonk country and shows Womack’s respect of those that came before her with references to Keith Whitley and Hank Williams in the lyrics. Everything But Quits is a piano-based Texas slow dance duet with King George Strait- complete with a happy ending.
It’s the last song on the album called Story Of My Life, however, that reveals the most about Womack’s soul between the release of her last album and Call Me Crazy. It shows the reason for the postponed album. In the lyrics she sings:
“From now on this is how I want to write
The story of my life
I want to turn the pages of the past
And take what I’ve learned
And then never look back
But I still I never wanna get too far ahead
Or worry about how the story ends
Choose every word carefully
Color it with love
And fill it up with meaning”
That’s what makes this album so special. Every note, every syllable and every sound is believable and draws you in and makes you want to listen. Lee Ann Womack conveys and breathes it in a way that make heartbeats and heartaches collide into one album. Call Me Crazy is beautiful and one that I recommend very very highly.
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