The Lonely, the Lonesome & the Gone

On her early albums, Lee Ann Womack made her home in the country mainstream, but her sound has grown increasingly idiosyncratic over the years. Here, she's closer to the bone than ever before. Sometimes she's downright ominous, on dark, gritty cuts like "All the Trouble." Sometimes she taps her inner Bobbie Gentry on R&B-tinged tunes like the luxuriantly grooving "He Called Me Baby." And when she leans those golden pipes into a spare, intense version of the country classic "Long Black Veil," she shows she's holding her roots closer than ever.