Connie Smith The Cry Of The Heart LP

TAS Rated 4.5/5 Music, 4.5/5 Sonics in the December 2021 Issue of The Absolute Sound!

Pain and heartbreak have permeated Connie Smith's timeless country sound and they pulse through The Cry of the Heart, Smith's first album in a decade and her third collaboration with her husband, Marty Stuart (who also produces the effort). Smith asks, "How many teardrops have I cried over you?" on album opener "A Million and One," reintroducing listeners to her radiant, textured voice. Smith and Stuart contributed two original tracks written together as well, the soaring "Here Comes My Baby Back Again" and weeper "Spare Me No Truth Tonight." Other songs on The Cry of the Heart include "I Don't Believe Me Anymore" the 72nd song Smith has recorded written by Hall of Fame songwriter Dallas Frazier, and Merle Haggard's "Jesus Takes a Hold," which is a reflection of Smith's boundless faith in the midst of troubled times. Grammy Award-winning producer and songwriter Carl Jackson pens "To Pieces" and "I'm Not Over You," the latter composed with classic country singer Melba Montgomery.

At age 80, Connie Smith's husky, plaintive voice betrays even more of the unvarnished real-world experience in matters of the heart than it did so powerfully in her hitmaking heyday in the 60s and 70s. On The Cry of the Heart, her third collaboration with her husband (and producer) Marty Stuart, Smith leans into songs steeped in all aspects of love, penned by towering country writers, largely of an earlier era. Stuart surrounds Smith with a tough, basic band (largely his own unparalleled Fabulous Superlatives) in fashioning a rich classic country ambience enhanced with touches of vintage Nashville Sound. A Billy Sherrill-like wash of strings and pop-ish background choruses, for instance, support Smith's powerhouse cry of anguish on album opener 'A Million to One' (a huge hit for Billy Walker in 1961) along with the signature weeping steel guitar sound first crafted into legend by Weldon Myrick and now expertly deployed by Gary Carter. The depth of heartache she plumbs here clearly is frightfully hard earned, whether it's in the searing steel-drenched breakup cry, 'Spare Me No Truth,' one of two Smith-Stuart co-writes, or the classic driving shuffle of Carl Jackson's equally devastating 'To Pieces.' In the end, it keeps right on a-hurtin'....so good.