A bass drum hammers its way onto the bridge in waltz time as a voice gathers force, becoming so guttural it transforms into a wail beyond song. “How could a headstone on Pine Hill know you / better than me?” it moans, punching out each word. “Was I ever really your daughter?”
Pain threaded with joy is the sound of survival. On The Hard Truth, Wynonna isn’t letting go of either one, carrying everything she’s endured and reinventing herself as an artist. This ten-track tribute to deep sorrow and dogged persistence strips away layer after layer of the lush production that defined Wynonna’s previous recordings, delivering in its place her most personal and powerful work yet. ANTI- is proud to continue its tradition of embracing American legends and giving them a platform to reach new heights.
The Hard Truth has a major contributor in the form of producer Cactus Moser, Wynonna’s partner in music and life. The two first became friends after meeting on her 1990 tour, when Moser’s band Highway 101 opened for her. Recalling that tour, he says, “At sound check, I’d watch her singing those songs more freely and less like the records, and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’”
Wynonna and Moser shared songwriting duties on The Hard Truth, and the resulting tracks were recorded to capture and compliment the raw power he’d witnessed decades ago. What they’ve created together is an unvarnished elegy to the dead and the missing, an album that pays tribute to choosing love in the face of suffering. Through instrumentation and arrangements unlike any record in Wynonna’s four-decade career, The Hard Truth rolls in like a night train hitting listeners on the blind side.
A star her entire adult life, Wynonna’s first number one hit, “Mama He’s Crazy,” was released while she was still a teenager. It was the first of eight consecutive number one singles she released with her mother Naomi, performing as The Judds.
When Wynonna set out on her own in 1991, her first three solo singles likewise consecutively topped the country charts. Since then, she’s had multiple solo albums reach multi-platinum sales. She has performed everywhere from Oprah and the Kentucky Derby to the Super Bowl halftime show.
Her spectacular voice still flaunts a power as limitless as her horizons. But this time, listeners will hear that voice stripped down, with no effects, as she dives deep and delivers up her soul.
Wynonna was shaped by the stubborn dirt and sharp winds of Ashland, Kentucky. Combined with support from her extended family, they provided the strength needed to survive her childhood. Before The Judds’ debut, Naomi worked as a nurse and a single mother to raise her daughters. Wy and her sister Ashley spent parts of their childhood in secondhand clothes, living without electricity or indoor plumbing during extended stays with relatives.
Stepping into the spotlight brought Wynonna fame and fortune, but life also delivered hard punches. She went from being a suicidal seventeen-year-old to earning a record contract with her mother at eighteen. The demanding, exquisite Naomi knew her daughter’s voice was the path by which she could save the family while making her own dreams come true. “I remember her telling me to learn songs,” Wynonna says. “And her harmonizing with those songs. It was very apparent to me that she wanted to be famous.”
Though their professional partnership was a roaring success, they clashed personally. From wardrobe mishaps (“I felt like a wardrobe mistake,” Wy recalls) to fights over her freedom, she had to repress her true self to perform with a mother she loved but often didn’t like. Grateful for her success and knowing how many people were depending on her, she says, “I often felt like so much was given to me that I had no way to pay it back.”
In 1991, Naomi had to retire from touring due to a diagnosis of hepatitis. The Judds disbanded. More than three decades later, the day before the duo’s induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Naomi ended her life, the final page of her long struggle with mental illness. At the hospital, Wynonna closed her mother’s eyes to let her rest in peace.
For the first thirty years of their life together, her mother had kept a deep secret from her, something everyone else in the family knew. The man Wynonna had grown up with was not her biological father. The father she’d never known died before they could meet in person.
Appalachia holds its children close, but sorrow repeats across generations like a refrain. Wynonna’s second child, a precocious daughter, wound up devoured by the drug habit she developed as a teenager. Desperate efforts to find the next treatment facility that might save her were seen as attempts to send her away. Mother and daughter found themselves as alienated as Wynonna had ever been from Naomi, but this time due to the scourge of addiction.
The first half of The Hard Truth centers on Wynonna’s bittersweet relationship with her mother and the struggle to find herself, remaining locked outside a life of her own even in the spotlight. “All Downhill from Ashland” is a brutal take-no-prisoners acknowledgment of the family members who sheltered Wynonna and her mother in her early years, even as small-town life felt like a trap to the ambitious Naomi. Their departure from home and their blood harmonies carried them to success, but as the keening fiddle’s plaintive whine partners up with mandolin, Wynonna confides, “there are some things you can’t rise above.”
The powerhouse opening gives way to soulfulness. “Everything,” co-written with Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers, lays down a groove for the story of a life in the spotlight that came early for Wynonna. She admits that “there’s a cost that ‘just fine’ brings” while Hood chimes in wryly, “Don’t forget to smile, Wy.”
The lilting surprise of the Bacharach-inflected “Am I Missing Out” is sung from the perspective of a young Wynonna realizing some essential part of herself was eclipsed in a world where she had to grow up overnight. The warm sonic palette that recalls early ’70s production reveals the sophistication of these arrangements behind the voice they’re built to frame.
Next comes the elegiac “Broken and Blessed,” a song Wynonna wrote in the wake of her mother’s death. Above the strains of steel guitar, she comes to realize that “in love and distress,” somewhere between “hell and hallelujah” sits a life worth living. On “Hear Me Now,” co-written with Sam Beam of Iron & Wine, jazz chords and rhythms summon the spirit of Joni Mitchell. “Whatever I tell myself,” Wynonna sings to the mother she lost, “we all get torn apart.”
The second half of The Hard Truth looks at the life and the self that Wynonna has worked to build on her own. The “Hopeful Lie” rises into a rootsy, raucous anthem of wanting so much to believe someone has changed that you embrace their dishonesty. As the song unfolds, it becomes clear Wynonna is singing not about romance but about her child’s addiction. Ignoring grim reality becomes “a strange transaction that nobody wins / but I buy in.”
“Kentucky Queen” parallels “All Downhill from Ashland,” returning to Wynonna’s roots. But this time, she heads back as an adult in triumph, recalling her aunt’s warning to “watch where the devil hides,” whooping with delight as she reclaims her home state and the parts of the past that saved her. The song highlights the traditional instruments that shape the record as a whole, as Wy’s voice soars over the steam-engine rhythm section carrying listeners along.
On “Girl Who Could Sing,” the discovery of her father’s identity in adulthood gives way to a haunting fury, the vocals an almost-tangible force embodying everything they lost by never meeting. A drawer full of newspaper clippings about Wynonna found in his home after he died leads her to wonder, “Did you hear the same lies that kept me away?”
With a return to mother-daughter relations, “Drive” narrates Wynonna’s three-hour commute each way to Henning, Tennessee to visit her daughter in prison. The pain of their fraught relations in the present takes every ounce of her strength, bringing her swooping voice back to earth and leaving the “past and future… just passengers.” Wynonna finishes by returning to anthemic form with the horns and stomping rhythms of “Love Ain’t Got the Best of Me.” Admitting that pain is part of the cost of caring, she welcomes love anyway, surrendering in ecstasy: “Too much of a good thing / is a good thing.”
Since their marriage in 2012, Cactus has worked with Wy on the road and in the studio. Seeing Wynonna as a maverick working to find her own way in an industry prone to discouraging that impulse, he envisions The Hard Truth as a new North Star, by which she’s setting a direction for the next stage of a storied career.
We live in a hard and glittering world. It’s a place Wynonna has come to treasure despite everything. “The next chapter,” she says, “is me celebrating my survival of all this.”
Joe Russo's Almost Dead is Marco Benevento, Dave Dreiwitz, Tom Hamilton, Scott Metzger and Joe Russo. We're a Grateful Dead cover band.
Join us for McCarter at the Museum - renowned performing artists in one-night only events at the Princeton University Art Museum.
Jason Robert Brown is a four-time Tony Award-winning composer and lyricist of The Last Five Years, Parade, Songs for a New World, 13, The Bridges of Madison County, Honeymoon In Vegas and The Connector, has performed as a soloist or with his band in venues around the world, including sold-out shows at the London Palladium and Carnegie Hall. His albums as a singer-songwriter include Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes and How We React and How We Recover on Ghostlight, and Coming From Inside the House and Live In Concert with Stephen Sondheim on Concord.
With Special Guest Tony nominee Betsy Wolfe. Tony Award-nominated actress Betsy Wolfe is currently starring as Audrey in the acclaimed Off-Broadway production of Little Shop of Horrors, following her recent Broadway run as Madeline Ashton in the hit musical Death Becomes Her. She previously originated the title role in Joy, the new musical inspired by inventor Joy Mangano, and earned a 2023 Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her celebrated performance as Anne Hathaway in & Juliet. Other Broadway credits include starring as Jenna in Waitress, Cordelia in the acclaimed revival of Falsettos, Bullets Over Broadway, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Everyday Rapture, and 110 in the Shade, as well as her critically acclaimed performance as Cathy in the Off-Broadway revival of The Last Five Years. Wolfe made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Die Fledermaus and has appeared as a guest artist with more than 65 symphony, pops, and philharmonic orchestras worldwide, including the New York Philharmonic and BBC Symphony Orchestra, with performances at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. Her screen credits include First One In, Estella Scrooge, CBS’s Instinct, and the film adaptation of The Last Five Years. Wolfe is also the co-founder of BroadwayEvolved, the acclaimed musical theatre training program she launched in 2018 to train and mentor the next generation of theatre artists.
A limited number of early access tickets for McCarter Director’s Circle members and members of the Museum’s Partner Circle are available, on sale Wednesday, September 16, 2026 at 12:00 PM. General public on sale begins Friday, September 18, 2026 at 12:00 PM.
Please be aware there is no public drop-off or parking at the Museum. For visitors with mobility needs, please contact the Museum at least three business days in advance of your visit to request special access to the Museum via Elm Drive. Call 609-258-3788 and select option 1 to speak to a visitor services staff member, or email Louise Barrett at [email protected].
Celebrate 100 years of Miles Davis! The GRAMMY®-nominated trumpeter and bandleader Jon Faddis carries on the legacy in this anniversary tribute. He’ll spotlight Davis’s game-changing 1957 album Birth of the Cool and his 1959 modal masterpiece Kind of Blue. The all-star ensemble includes both new and familiar faces to NJPAC jazz audiences: Erena Terakubo (alto sax), Gary Smulyan (bari sax), Steve Turre (trombone), John Clark (French horn), Bob Stewart (tuba), Mike LeDonne (keys), Todd Coolman (bass) and John Riley (drums).
The legendary Rhode Island multi-platinum rock’n’roll group JOHN CAFFERTY & THE BEAVER BROWN BAND began their career in 1973 and achieved mainstream success in the 1980s with the “Eddie & The Cruisers – Motion Picture Soundtrack”. The hit single “ON THE DARK SIDE” held the “#1” position on the Billboard Rock charts and the MTV video charts for five consecutive weeks.
Celebrate America’s 250th Anniversary with New Jersey Ballet in a powerful evening of dance that captures the spirit, energy, innovation and resilience of the nation through the language of ballet. Red, White and Blue brings together iconic masterworks and bold contemporary voices in a program that reflects the many dimensions of the American experience while honoring New Jersey’s essential role in the fight for independence and the shaping of the nation.
“If you are looking to be blown away by raw talent, then look no further than Griffin House.” —American Songwriter
Written by and starring Vicki Lawrence
Two Performances Only
Vicki Lawrence, the legendary actress, comedian, and singer, brings her signature wit and charm to the stage in Vicki Lawrence and Mama: A Two-Woman Show. Best known for her iconic role as Thelma Harper, or "Mama," from The Carol Burnett Show and Mama’s Family, Lawrence delivers a hilarious and heartfelt performance that takes audiences on a journey through her extraordinary career. From her Emmy-winning years alongside Carol Burnett to her chart-topping hit, “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” she shares behind-the-scenes stories, comedy, and music—all with her trademark humor. Whether reminiscing about her Hollywood adventures or embodying the feisty Mama, Lawrence proves that laughter is timeless.
Music and lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison
If you’re feeling all alone in the universe – or even if you’re not – Triangle’s newest musical comedy is for you! Join us as Triangle explores what it means to have friends in high – or should we say “sky”? – places. Extraterrestrial visitors, crazy conspiracy theories, and intergalactic shenanigans power this year’s annual laugh-fest of witty jokes, lavish production numbers, and, of course, Triangle’s famous kickline. Can interplanetary goodwill blossom in the dystopian desert of our current times? Get your Triangle tickets now and learn if Roswell That Ends Well!
Catch the next generation of great jazz artists who hail from New Jersey. High school performers from across the state have been selected through a competitive audition process to participate in the NJMEA All-State Jazz Band and All-State Jazz Choir. They’ll show off their jazz prowess in this intimate (and exciting) concert co-presented by NJPAC and the New Jersey Music Educators Association.
(PLAINFIELD, NJ) -- Ferrell Studios presents Carrie, the Musical at the Plainfield Performing Arts Center from November 12-15, 2026. Based on the classic novel by Stephen King, the musical poses the question: What happens when someone is pushed too far?
(HACKETTSTOWN, NJ) -- Centenary Stage Company's Fringe Festival continues with Ghost Dance: Picture of a Madman, a captivating one-woman play written and performed by Erica Knight. Running November 12–15, 2026, in the Kutz Theatre at the Lackland Performing Arts Center on the campus of Centenary University. The production explores the turbulent life and legacy of Ralph Albert Blakelock, one of America's most celebrated yet tragically overlooked nineteenth-century painters.
(HAMMONTON, NJ) -- Fool Moon Theatre Company presents a special, one-night-only presentation of the hit play Love, Loss and What I Wore on Thursday, November 12 2026 at Eagle Theatre. This exclusive event is a benefit for the Funny Farm Rescue & Sanctuary in Mays Landing. Showtime is 7:30pm.
(TRENTON, NJ) -- The James R. Halsey Foundation of the Arts (JRH), a 501c3 non-profit agency dedicated to providing quality arts education and mentoring to youth in the City of Trenton and greater New Jersey area presents the 2026 Student Film Showcase. Taking place on November 12th at the New Jersey State Museum Auditorium from 5:00pm - 8:00pm, this event features three films, written, directed, and produced by students, as well as a documentary focused on raising awareness on men's mental health, featuring authentic student voices and professional interviews.
(EDISON, NJ) -- Middlesex College Visual, Performing and Media Arts presents She Kills Monsters by Qui Nguyen from November 12-18, 2026 at the Performing Arts Center - Studio Theater in Edison. She Kills Monsters tells the story of Agnes Evans as she leaves her childhood home in Ohio following the death of her teenage sister, Tilly.
