Artist:     Loretta Lynn

Album:     Full Circle

Label:     Legacy Recordings

Release Date:     03/04/2016

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Loretta Lynn is surely one of country music’s greatest stars. A genuinely astonishing writer, player and singer, Lynn has weathered countless storms in her own, well-documented personal life and the fickle nature of musical whimsy. With Full Circle she shows just why she remains an important, rushing, gushing force in the country world.

This is simply a beautiful album. I’ve had the good – nay, great fortune to catch her live when she turned up unexpectedly out in NC as a last-minute stand-in for a beleaguered John Hiatt – a substitute you’d struggle to grasp musically – and yet where she pulled off a superb set of genuine old-time country music. With this release, she again lifts country music up by its bootstraps, and, with a delightful fifties feel at times, produces a fourteen-tracker of sublime quality.

Joined by Elvis Costello on one track and Good Ole Willie Nelson on another, she also does a strikingly strong cover of his own battle-hymn, “Always On My Mind” while also producing sterling takes on her old standard “Secret Love” and I Never Will Marry.” Put simply, this is what country music is all about. And it is country music at its very best.

Lynn is one of those old-timers whose career goes back to early Johnny Cash, to Patsy Cline, to the very heart and soul of the oft-overlooked – if not downright dismissed – Country & Western music. The original Coal-Miner’s Daughter, Lynn shows with this album that heartache and heartbreak, love and loss will always be winning combinations.

– Iain Patience