‘The Return of Tanya Tucker, Featuring Brandi Carlile’ Review: A Reticent Country Veteran Meets a Whip-Cracking Celebrity Booster
variety.comChris Willman Music WriterCelebrity comebacks don’t often go exactly as planned, but it helps when the planner is someone with as much of a knack for military precision and as broad a sense of the big cultural picture as a Rick Rubin or a Brandi Carlile.
Rubin, of course, built Johnny Cash from a casino-playing relic back into some kind of god with the records he produced for the Man in Black in the ’90s and 2000s, and Carlile had the idea she could do something like that with her own personal heroine, Tanya Tucker, in 2019.
There was at least one critical difference, though: Carlile, unlike Rubin, thought to hire a director and camera crew the day before recording began.The end result of that foresight, “The Return of Tanya Tucker, Featuring Brandi Carlile,” documents just how well it went when Carlile and Shooter Jennings more or less coerced Tucker into letting them produce an album for her when the 60-ish singer hadn’t even been in a studio to cut new material for 17 years.
There’s not much suspense in how it will turn out, with the country music veteran — who first became a star at 13 — finally winning her first Grammys.
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