Wynonna Judd says she and her sister Ashley Judd are not currently speaking, as the country singer prepares to release an album that confronts painful family history head-on.
“We’re taking a break, which all families can relate to,” Wynonna told People. “She’s doing her thing, and I’m doing mine.”
The disclosure comes ahead of the Oct. 2 release of her new album, which pushed Wynonna to reckon publicly with her relationship with her late mother, Naomi Judd, along with long-held family secrets and years of unresolved anger and forgiveness.
“I feel like this is the most honest and vulnerable I’ve ever been,” she told People of writing the album’s title track, “The Hard Truth.” “It’s there for everyone to hear. So there are some days I think, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ And then other days I think, ‘There comes a point in your life when you are ready to tell your testimony.'”
Wynonna co-wrote the record with her husband, Cactus Moser, who pushed her toward candor in the writing process. “I knew it was going to be cathartic,” he told People.
Wynonna rose to fame alongside her mother as The Judds, a mother-daughter duo whose tight harmonies helped shape country music through the 1980s. Between 1984 and 1991 the pair landed 20 Top 10 country hits, including 14 No. 1 singles, and collected five Grammy Awards, nine CMA Awards and seven ACM Awards.
But Wynonna has described the relationship behind that success as a difficult mix of closeness and conflict. “There was a tremendous amount of love there; a lot of drama but a lot of love as well. It was definitely a paradox,” she said.
Much of that tension, Wynonna said, traced back to struggles her mother kept hidden from the public. Naomi Judd battled severe depression for years before her death by suicide in April 2022 at age 76.
“My mother had an illness, she had a disease. I kept the secret, and I was devastated by that,” Wynonna said.
Wynonna made clear that her mother’s death is not what freed her to tell this story now. “I think I would’ve been more determined,” she said. “It’s my story, and it’s my feelings.”
Even so, she acknowledged her mother would likely have struggled to hear her feelings expressed so openly. “I think it would be very painful for her. Very painful. But I also know that she knows me, that I’m so honest and so up-front.”
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