Came out in August. How did we miss this? I heard some today and it’s amazing.
“While I’m Livin’ ” might be the best record of Tucker’s career; it is certainly one of the albums of the year. Tucker’s first studio album since “My Turn”—a marvelous collection of country standards that she released in 2009—and her first album of new material since “Tanya,” from 2002, “While I’m Livin’ ” is full of gut-punch numbers, single-size story songs that somehow assume universal proportions. The record should help remind people why Tucker has, over the years, inspired so many rebellious country women—from the Dixie Chicks to Miranda Lambert and Gretchen Wilson, who, on her signature tune, “Redneck Woman,” sings, “I know all the words to every Tanya Tucker song.” Tucker doesn’t consider her new project a comeback, though. “I never went nowhere,” she recently told the Associated Press. “I prefer to call it a relaunch.”