Jewly Hight for NPR –
On her sixth album, Grace, Lizz Wright translates with phenomenal fluency between inner awareness and outward demonstration, individual seeking and conscious communion, ecstasy and empathy. The achievement’s all the more remarkable when you consider that this 10-song set is the fruit of her will to overcome the alienation she felt from her native region in this distressingly divided political climate. Before completing the album with producer Joe Henry, she took a road trip through the rural South, reacquainting herself with the people and places she came from.
She told me that there was an urgency to the journey: “I need to remember what I know to be my home …and the way people relate and the way Southern people work, the way they cooperate, the way they’re in tune with the earth. I need to study that right now for my own well-being, because I know the truth. I know my life.”