Already Great
Inside Loretta Lynn’s excellent new LP
Loretta Lynn’s title as the Queen of Country Music goes uncontested with the release of her newest studio album, Wouldn’t It Be Great. An intensely personal, introspective record, Loretta opens up and displays an innate spirituality, rooted in the lessons learned, the valleys crossed, and the resilience gained throughout her life.
“This new record means so much to me, but this last year, I had to focus on my health, and I decided to hold up the release,” Loretta says. “I’m feelin’ good and look forward to it comin’ out. It was really important to me to be a part of it being released, and I’m excited to celebrate with everybody!”
Comprised entirely of songs written or co-written by Loretta and produced by her daughter, Patsy Lynn Russell, and John Carter Cash at Cash Cabin Studio in Hendersonville, TN, Wouldn’t It Be Great takes listeners on a journey of heartbreak and healing, combining soulful renditions of longtime favorites with new stories to tell and new songs to sing. The lead single and title track, “Wouldn’t It Be Great,” is the last song Loretta wrote for her late husband, Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn before he passed away. “My husband liked to drink a lot, and that’s where that song comes from…‘Say you love me just one time, with a sober mind.’ I always liked that song, but I never liked to sing it around Doo,” she says of the song.
“That song just always meant so much to me,” Patsy Lynn Russell goes on to say. “It was just so powerful and was a song that needed to be recorded for this album with Loretta. It shows just how masterful my mom is with writing down her feelings.”
Following her critically acclaimed, Grammy-nominated 2016 album Full Circle, Wouldn’t It Be Great centers around heartbreak and the human experience, love and its ability to heal, and the abiding, intangible connection between music and the soul. Loretta’s incomparable songwriting skill is displayed profoundly in new tracks like “Ruby’s Stool,” “Ain’t No Time To Go,” and “I’m Dying for Someone to Live For,” as well as in the recently re-recorded “God Makes No Mistakes,” from her 2004 Grammy-winning collaboration with Jack White, Van Lear Rose, and the Loretta Lynn song that everyone knows, even if they don’t know any Loretta Lynn songs: “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”
With a career spanning almost six decades, Loretta Lynn is one of the few country singer-songwriters who has set — and maintained — the bar. Relying on nothing but her voice, her masterful songwriting skills, and her storytelling abilities, Wouldn’t It Be Great promises to set the standard once again, all the while sharing the intimate and often difficult lessons learned over a lifetime of music, motherhood and love.
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