Artist:     Ruby Lovett

Album:     It’s a Hard Life

Label:     Puff Bunny

Release Date:     10.18.2019

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Ruby Lovett is a country traditionalist with a social conscience. On the back of the album jacket, Nanci Griffith speaks to Lovett’s inspiration for making It’s a Hard Life – “If we poison our children with hatred, then a hard life is all that they’ll know…” That title track, penned by Griffith, opens the album and is rendered so emotionally by Lovett that she may have made it more memorable than the original. Lovett also contributed many of her own, collaborating with other writers, most notably label co-owner and Texas legend K.S. Taylor Pie, who also plays multiple instruments throughout. Other writing collaborators are Bob McDill, Allen Reynolds, Carl Jackson, Jim Rushing and Herb McCullough. Also, if we’re to judge one’s value by the company they keep, Lovett invites some of the best. Along with Taylor Pie, stellar musicians supporting her include multi-instrumentalist Jeff Plankenhorn, fiddler Gene Elders, bassist Dave Pomeroy, and pedal steel ace Russ Pahl.

Lovett’s own life, growing up poor, abandoned at age seven, and adopted by older parents certainly speaks to a “hard life.” Lovett found refuge and solace through music, forming a country band at age 13 and playing constantly during her teenage years. She came of age when country radio played Merle Haggard, George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton. These artists had a huge impact on her, and after a break from a Nashville songplugger, she was soon commuting to Nashville, later sharing stages with Bill Monroe and others. Her eponymous debut album, produced by Garth Brooks and Allen Reynolds, was released in 1998 to wide acclaim and this, coming more than 20 years later, appears to be only her second.

Lovett says, “The music I make is real country music. It’s pure and unpolished. It’s the country music I love, and I believe there is an appetite for it.” Her first album has a hit song “Look What Love Can Do,” a self-penned song about her experiences as an adopted child. Here she offers a touching tribute to her adopted father in “A Father’s Love,” one of the four songs written with Taylor Pie. Lovett is honest, emotive and has authentic twang. She is as unpretentious as they come. Even when she sings the Reynolds/McDill tune “Catfish John,” it’s as if she knew the character first-hand. Among other highlights are the gentle waltz written with Taylor Pie and Herb McCullough “The Blues You And Me,” with terrific fiddle from Elders; “They Don’t Know,” also written with Taylor Pie and driven, in part, by Pahl’s weeping pedal steel; and the quiet closer, from McCullough and Taylor Pie , “Walkin’ On the Moon,” about taking confidence in dreams and aspirations.

Lovett is right. This is real country music and it’s so coolly refreshing to hear it done the right way.

—Jim Hynes