With its in-depth storytelling and emotional subject matter, country music is a genre ripe for comeback albums. Whether an artist stepped away amid controversy, for health reasons, or to reevaluate their life, it made it all the sweeter when they returned with a great LP. That’s certainly true in the case of the three artists below.
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The Chicks’ ‘Gaslighter’
Gaslighter was The Chicks’ first album in 14 years. Produced by Jack Antonoff, Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire, and Emily Strayer reunited for a masterpiece.
Ahead of the release, Maines said that she was inspired to pen many of the album’s 12 tracks amid her divorce from Adrian Pasdar.
“When I started getting a divorce, I had a lot to say, so that kind of sparked me being ready [to make new music],” Maines said on the Spiritualgasm podcast. “Songwriting is really hard for me, and I think, for many years, I didn’t want to analyze my life or my relationship. Our last album was the most personal and autobiographical we’d ever been, and then this one is, like, ten times that.”
Upon its 2020 release, Gaslighter topped Billboard‘s Top Album Sales and Top Country Albums charts and came in at No. 3 on the Billboard 200.
Johnny Cash’s ‘American Recordings’
Johnny Cash started his long-awaited comeback with American Recordings in the early 1990s. While Cash was still a respected musician when the album debuted in 1994, his record sales hadn’t been up to par in the previous two decades, and the public’s view of him was low.
That all began to change with American Recordings. In fact, in a 2010 album review, the BBC noted that Cash’s “final road to redemption and artistic fulfillment” started with the album.
The album came to be largely thanks to producer Rick Rubin, who encouraged Cash to get back in the studio and put out a record. Notably, American Recordings was largely recorded in Rubin’s living room.
“Johnny had made so many albums in the recording studio that it reframed the experience of recording, and it really was just he and I sitting on a couch and him playing these songs. And it had a more personal and intimate and internal feeling about it,” Rubin told NPR in 2010. “I think catching the casual—his real, true, casual personality was something that we were able to do better in the living room environment than in a studio environment.”
Shania Twain’s ‘Now’
After taking the world by storm in the 90s and early aughts, Shania Twain disappeared from the scene after she released Up! in 2002.
Fifteen years later, Twain made her long-awaited return when she released Now. Her big comeback came after her divorce from Robert John Lange and following her health and vocal struggles, which were caused by Lyme disease. All of those life experiences, Twain told NPR, can be heard on the record.
“There’s a lyric on my album that is my favorite lyric on the whole album. And it says, ‘I’m still myself, but I’ve changed.‘ It says everything,” she said. “I am still myself. But I’m so different and in many ways. And that’s a lot. That’s a big part of the reason why I called the album Now, as well, because it’s me, but it’s me now.”
Twain wrote and co-produced every track on the album, which is likely why it was such a success. It hit No. 1 on both the Billboard 200 and the Top Country Albums charts.
Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Stagecoach
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