Shannon McNally The Waylon Sessions (CD)

Recorded with an all-star band and featuring special guests Jessi Colter, Buddy Miller, Rodney Crowell and Lukas Nelson, Shannon McNally's extraordinary new collection, The Waylon Sessions, is not so much a tribute to Waylon Jennings as it is a recontextualization: a nuanced, feminine rendition of a catalog long considered a bastion of straight masculinity. That's not to say that McNally's interpretation of the songs of Jennings and his fellow outlaws is softer and gentler; quite the opposite.

Time and again, she manages to locate a smoldering intensity - a searing pain buried deep within the music's deceptively simple poetry - and she focuses it with surgical precision.
McNally doesn't switch pronouns or paraphrase her delivery with a wink; she's simply honest, singing her truth as a divorced single mother in her 40s in all its beauty, pain and power.

The result is a rare covers record that furthers our understanding of the originals, an album of classics that challenges our perceptions and assumptions about what made them classics in the first place.