The Waylon Sessions

Featuring special guests Jessi Colter, Rodney Crowell, Buddy Miller and Lucas Nelson. Recorded with an all-star band and featuring special guests like Jessi Colter, Buddy Miller, Rodney Crowell, and Lukas Nelson, Shannon McNally’s extraordinary new collection, THE WAYLON SESSIONS, isn’t so much a tribute to Waylon Jennings as it is a recontextualization: a nuanced, feminine rendering of a catalog long considered a bastion of hetero-masculinity. That’s not to say McNally has a softer, gentler take on the songs of Jennings and his outlaw compatriots here; in fact, just the opposite. Over and over again, she manages to locate a smoldering intensity — a searing hurt buried deep within the music’s deceptively simple poetry — and she hones in on it with a surgical precision. McNally doesn’t swap pronouns or couch her delivery with a wink; she simply plays it straight, singing her truth as a divorced single mother in her 40’s in all its beauty, pain, and power. The result is that rare covers