Kellie Pickler To Release New Album The Woman I Am On 11/11

Kellie Pickler went to Facebook yesterday to announce that her new album, The Woman I Am, will have an official release date of 11.11.13.

I'm so excited to announce that my album 'The Woman I AM' is actually coming out one day earlier than expected...so don't forget to mark 11-11-13 on your calendar!!!

Producers Frank Liddell and Luke Wooten, the same gentleman that produced the critically acclaimed 100 Proof are back to helm this record. "They have a way of bringing out the best in me and I think they really helped me discover the artist in myself," she explains. "They've helped me find my own sound."

From Rolling Stone: On a dozen new tracks tracks, that sound spans the sonic country landscape between the lead-off single, the pining ballad "Someone Somewhere Tonight," and its breezy, country-rock follow-up, "Little Bit Gypsy." The guitar-heavy, shuffling song, which Pickler says is the record's poppiest moment, sounds like her take on Tom Petty covering Elvis Costello's "You Belong To Me."

Included on Woman is an up-tempo rocker called "Bonnie and Clyde," a tune Pickler co-wrote with Jacobs and Liz Rose — the songsmith behind a handful of Taylor Swift cuts, including Swift's debut single "Tim McGraw." She also finds herself in a lighthearted mood on "Ain't No Cure for Crazy," and exploring her roots on "Selma Drye," a song she wrote with Phillip Lammonds and Billy Montana, that was inspired by its namesake: her tobacco-chewin', pistol-packin' "hillbilly" great-grandmother. "She was a spitfire," Pickler recalls. "She lived in this little trailer in front of [my grandparents' house] for over 40 years. She never drove a car, never had a driver's license – that was the devil. She was just a strong woman and that song is really about her and her generation of women, and how they were raised."

Many of Pickler's family memories offer little in the way of fond nostalgia for the singer, who was raised by her paternal grandparents after her mother abandoned her at a young age and her father drifted in and out of prison. Pickler sang about that difficult background on 100 Proof's heartbreakingly personal centerpiece "Mother's Day," and touches on it again on Woman's equally personal "I Forgive You," a song she'd kept in her back pocket ever since the Small Town Girl sessions.

 

"It just wasn't meant to be at that time," she says, explaining why the song is only just now seeing the light of day, admitting that it she wasn't ready, both in her family relationships and emotionally, to do it justice.
"I love this song because there's so much closure and healing [in it]," she says. "I think there's so much grace in the words 'I forgive you.' I think people are really going to identify with that and I hope that song helps a lot of people."