Right now Wynonna, 31, has a particular need for attention. It’s not that she’s two months pregnant with her second child–heck, aside from staying off her Harley, she hasn’t altered her life much yet. And it’s not that her marriage to Arch Kelley III, a Nashville businessman and the father of baby-to-be plus her 1-year-old son, Elijah, is imminent. (It happened one week later, on Jan. 21.) No, the thing that is bothering Wynonna is quite simple and small. She has a cold. A pesky, meddlesome, sit-in-your-throat kind of cold. Not bad enough to keep her home in bed, but certainly worth reminding people about, if only to elicit a little extra sympathy. She cruises toward one of her handlers, who’s watching from the wings. “Can you get me some of those mints, for my throat?” she asks. He bustles off to do her bidding. She grabs her nose with both hands and tempestuously shakes her head. “I can’t stand the pressure!” she says. “In my nose.”
Long absence: Cold or no, Wynonna’s smart enough to realize the pressure isn’t only in her nose. On Feb. 13, she will release “Revelations,” her first new album in three years and third since splitting from her mom, Naomi, her partner in the trashy, glorious ’80s superduo, the Judds. In a genre where artists tour nine months of the year and crank out anew album in the time that’s left over, three years is a mighty long absence–country doesn’t trust words like time off, with their discomforting, un-working-class feel. “Revelations” is practically a comeback, Wynonna reintroducing herself after a drastic upheaval in her career. In May of 1994, she announced that she was pregnant out of wedlock, and would keep the baby but not marry Arch, the father. Then, just when that sin was forgiven, she got pregnant again (she claims she and Arch decided to marry before she found out). No big deal, you say? This is the ’90s, right? Nuh-uh–especially since many of her albums contained Christian material. “People write to me and say, ‘How could you do this to my 16-year-old daughter?’ " Wynonna says. “And I think, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize I was in charge of your 16-year-old daughter’s sexuality’.”
The only thing saving her from becoming just another tabloid queen is her music. “Revelations” is confident, stirring and refreshingly unpredictable; it moves from sultry romantic pop to sassy Memphis soul to yee-hawing Southern rock, never stooping to the formulaic twang-and-dang of most country radio fare. Wynonna can sing like a dream. She’s got the most exhilarating voice in country today–not just pretty, but full of depth and dimension, with a sweet, whispery top and a bluesy bottom growl that evoke her hero, Aretha Franklin. “I don’t do a lot of things well,” she says. “But rather than fret about it or get my feelings hurt from the tabloids, I just think, you know what? I sing. I sing. That’s what I do.”
There’s a catch, though. Ask anyone who knows her: getting Wynonna to that point where she’s singing, where she’s at home and at peace with herself, can be agony. “Revelations” took nearly two years to complete, with Wynonna rejecting some 2,000 songs. She postponed her NEWS-WEEK interview four times in two days. Why? She needed rest. She had a dress fitting. She needed to preserve her voice. She had a cold. The location shifted from her 550-acre farm and menagerie in Franklin, Tenn., to her manager’s office to a restaurant to a different restaurant. Even MCA president Tony Brown, who produces her solo records and swears he loves her like family, gets worn out. “She wants me to call her directly instead of going through her management,” he says. “But you call her house and they don’t answer the phone sometimes. So you leave voice mail for three days. I got to where I would just get in my ear and drive out there. I know where she lives.”
File “professionalism” under Things She Doesn’t Do Well. Yet once Wynonna finally settles down for the interview (at Trilogy, a posh Nashville restaurant where her mom and stepdad, Larry Strickland, are co-owners) she’s funny, warm, generous. Well–not so fast. First you have to wade through an hour of fawning service by waitresses and maitre d’s, as half a dozen plates of food are laid before her, only to be sent back to the kitchen untouched. You have to wait patiently while Larry and Arch and manager John Unger circle protectively, catering to her every need. But once it’s just Wynonna, alone, stretched out on a velvet settee in front of an electric fireplace, she’s a charm. And she explains how her life as a Judd evolved into her life as Just Wynonna; how a girl who was a huge star by the age of 20 and a TV mini-series character by the age of 80 metamorphosed into a woman with a semi-private life.
Softer look: “I lived on a bus with my mother,” she says. “I did her hair every night for eight years, OK?” Her looks seem softer in the glow of the firelight; she has a lovely, fun-ny-Valentine face, faintly Lucille Ballish under all that red hair. “It’s been very painful to try to redefine our relationship. Career is a lot of things to my mother that it’s not to me. She always worked harder. She always deserved it more than I did. I just opened my mouth and it flew out. Whether it was in high school waking me up and forcing me to go to school, or getting me off the bus to do an interview, she was always the mom.”
“I don’t know if I would have had the guts to get off that bus and have a life with Arch,” she continues. “It took Elijah to bring me home. I’ve learned a great deal about grace through Elijah. When he was born, he was in danger. He was wrapped in the cord three times. It’s a miracle that he’s here. You realize how fragile life is. That’s what propelled me back into the studio.”
She smiles. “So I sing with a new heart.” She speaks from it, too.
